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“I won’t be talking much about the future, and I won’t use the word ‘publishing’ very often.” A funny way to begin a talk called “A Futuristic View of the Publishing Industry,” but Publishing Technology COO Randy Petway’s take on the topic at yesterday’s Publishing Technology Executive Exchange at the wine cellar of Del Frisco’s on the Avenue of the Americas in New York City was apt indeed, focused as he was on the way consumers discover and purchase content. That bit of semantic gymnastics on Petway’s part had to do with what he described as the difference between trends and realities. Trends are things that people think are going to happen; the "future" of publishing, however, is already happening—a reality—he explained.

Measuring the efficacy of social media marketing still isn't an exact science, regardless of what the gurus and ninjas tell you.

So how can we whittle all the thousands of social campaigns we've seen this year down to a definitive list of the '10 best of 2012'?

Do we gauge it on the number of new fans acquired, retweets, ROI, YouTube views, the number of people it reached, sentiment analysis, the amount of traffic it drove or maybe the number of new brand advocates it created?

Fast Company has an article and video today on Polish art student Waldek Węgrzyn's ebook/pbook hybrid, an El Lissitzky-inspired project for his masters degree at the Academy of Fine Arts in Katowice. Węgrzyn's project, a more or less hardwired physical book that interacts with a digital interface as it's read, is beyond mesmerizing. Plus, we give high marks to any and all El Lissitzky references. —Brian Howard

From the article: "The concept is as obvious as it is radical: instead of making readers choose between physical and digital, why not give them the best of both?"

What started with asking for a blanket on a chilly evening grew into a collection of lady-like quips about everything from hummus to doilies, as well as a web presence that boasts more than 1.8 million Twitter followers and 30 million YouTube views. And now, they can add one more notch to the bragging post: a book.

Sh*t Girls Say has used its feminine persuasions and hilarious one-liners to break from the pack of Internet memes, and elbow its way onto bookstore shelves.

Numbers show that the publishing industry is handling the rise of e-readers better than what folk knowledge might suggest.

The fall publishing season is in full swing. There can hardly have been a year with more luminaries atop both the fiction and nonfiction bestseller lists; J. K. Rowling, Michael Chabon, Ken Follett, Junot Diaz, among others, represent literary acclaim and commercial appeal. Diaz is having an especially good run. Stephen Colbert, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Young, Bob Woodward, and Salman Rushdie are just a sampling of the nonfiction bestsellers.

PORTLAND, OR--(Marketwire - Oct 18, 2012) -   Rumblefish, the leading provider of soundtracks for online social video, and Booktrack, creator of a new and engaging way to read by matching synchronized music, sound effects and ambient sound to the text of ebooks, today announced a partnership in which the Rumblefish catalog of more than one million soundtracks will be available to ebook publishers through Booktrack. This partnership gives book publishers access to a new collection of music from which to choose the perfect soundtrack to complement their books.

The rush to create large, free online classes has generated anxiety at universities around the country. With finances already tight and with a surge of movement toward online learning, universities are being forced to move quickly to change centuries-old models of learning. Terms like historic, seismic and revolutionary now pop up in descriptions of the challenges that higher education faces in the coming years.

Many institutions have been preparing for these changes for years, building infrastructure and expertise, experimenting and recruiting, and integrating online learning into long-term strategies. 

As academic and scholarly publishers increasingly migrate online, many publishers are presently exploring how this affects their business models.

Much of this exploration is happening behind closed doors, but there is one scholarly publisher out there that seems to be interested in crowdsourcing its future business strategy. The American Accounting Association is a professional society publisher which publishes 16 journals in the United States. As part of its ongoing review into its future business model, the AAA has just created this video which provides an excellent 101 guide….

Scores of our generation's most celebrated authors have famously waxed poetic about the joys of using the original 20-volume "Oxford English Dictionary." David Foster Wallace, for instance, had a well-documented obsession with the OED. Simon Winchester wrote not one, but two nonfiction books about the dictionary's history. Even J.R.R. Tolkien, who briefly worked on the OED (he was assigned to the letter "W"), spoke fondly of his time there. But the simple fact is this: When I need to know the correct spelling of, say, "onomatopoeia," or "conscientious" or "hierarchy," there's a decent chance I'll be heading straight to Dictionary.com.

It all started with John Lehman’s call-to-arms to app developers: “Those of us in app development love to talk about how ridiculous it is that people will drop $4 every other day on a cup of coffee but will not ‘waste’ 99 cents on our hot new app. I hope by now we’ve learned something: This comparison doesn’t work.”