YouTube

A long time ago, in Elizabethan England, a playwright named William Shakespeare wrote an epic space opera about a fierce...

Victor Chu is trying to turn the page on how certain types of comic books are read and distributed.

As co-founder of MangaMagazine.net, the Boston resident is introducing a new way to digest and share a niche type of comic that has a rapidly growing audience in both the city, and on a national level.

After recently securing a $1 million round of seed financing from what he describes as “high net wealth individuals,” Chu, a Harvard alum, plans on augmenting how the entire business is handled.

BEA officials have today announced that BEA's annual Global Market Forum will focus on Mexico. The Global Market Forum, which honors countries from around the world by providing educational panels and cultural exchange opportunities, has become a cornerstone of BEA’s international outreach.

Today, it appears that Google, despite selling the Frommer's name, has retained the brand's social data and is integrating it with what is now called Zagat Travel. “Google is keeping all of the followers that Frommer’s accrued on Twitter, Facebook, FourSquare, Google+, YouTube and Pinterest.” PaidContent writes. “These thousands—or more likely millions—of accounts are valuable because they represent a huge collection of serious travel enthusiasts.”

The move became known when Google changed the name of the Twitter handle @FrommersTravel to @ZagatTravel today…

NOOK Media LLC, a subsidiary of Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today announced the launch of NOOK Press, a new and innovative self-publishing platform offering authors a fast, easy and free way to write, edit, collaborate and publish the highest quality eBooks and directly distribute them to millions of avid readers. By removing the technology barrier from self-publishing and offering easy-to-use tools for writing, editing and publishing eBooks, NOOK Press makes it even easier for authors to focus on writing and reaching new readers. To get started today, visit www.nookpress.com.

EL James's Fifty Shades trilogy sold more than 70m copies in 2012, driving Random House to record annual revenues and profits.

The publisher's operating profit leapt 75% year on year to €325m (£275.7m) in 2012. Revenues at the Bertelsmann-owned company, which is awaiting final clearance on a merger with Pearson's Penguin, grew 22.5% year-on-year to €2.1bn.

James' Fifty Shades of Grey and sequels Fifty Shades Darker and Fifty Shades Freed became the book publishing phenomenon of 2012, shifting more than 70m copies between March and December.

You may be familiar with the saga of the Amazon Kindle Bikini Girl, a character who has been appearing in commercials for Amazon’s popular e-reader for the last several years, most of which have included subtle or overt shots at Apple’s rival iPad.

The first ad, according to a CBS News blog post at the time, “plunged the nation into civil war,” over whether or not Bikini Girl was likable. Adfreak described her at the time as “a snooty ice queen who brags about her frugality and flaunts her wasteful consumerism,” although the commercial got millions of views on YouTube:

 Reviews on Amazon are becoming attack weapons, intended to sink new books as soon as they are published.

In the biggest, most overt and most successful of these campaigns, a group of Michael Jackson fans used Facebook and Twitter to solicit negative reviews of a new biography of the singer. They bombarded Amazon with dozens of one-star takedowns, succeeded in getting several favorable notices erased and even took credit for Amazon’s briefly removing the book from sale.

Amazon recently announced a new  feature called AutoRip that provides CD buyers with free digital copies of those tracks.

As the name suggests, it just offers as a convenience what CD owners can do to copy songs from a physical disc to their computers and MP3 players already.

What if Amazon took that a step further and offered e-book versions of every book you've bought?

When writers first exchanged pen and paper for word processing systems we didn't realize how firmly it put us on the path toward self-production and self-publishing. The jury's still out on whether the creative process was altered for better or worse. Marshall McLuhan, an early media pundit, recognized back in 1962 how "the divorce of poetry and music was first reflected by the printed page."

In contrast, today's tools marry writing and publishing, bringing artists ever closer to the end product with click-of-a-button e-book creation capabilities built into the writing tools.