Hamburg

eBooks in Motion (www.ebooksinmotion.com) releases its online platform to produce multilingual, multimedia-enhanced e-Publications across multiple devices. The United States Distance Learning Association (USDLA) will be among the first customers in collaboration with the New York chapter of USDLA (NYDLA.org).

A German publisher is being accused of excessive political correctness for removing controversial language from a classic children's book, sparking debate about how to handle outdated and offensive words in the genre.

Last month German Family Minister Kristina Schröder incited the ire of her fellow conservative politicians when she took aim at politically incorrect content in classic children's literature. In addition to suggesting that God should be gender neutral, she criticized sexist and racist messages in some of these tales too.

Six global publishers—Bedford, Freeman and Worth Publishing Group, a subsidiary of Macmillan; Cengage Learning; Elsevier; John Wiley & Sons; The McGraw-Hill Companies; and Pearson Education—have obtained an injunction against Swiss-based file-sharing site Rapidshare.com. The judgment, handed down by a German court in Hamburg, ordered Rapidshare to implement measures to prevent illegal file-sharing of 148 copyright-protected works cited in a lawsuit filed Feb. 4 by the publishers.

Maybe we have an answer to all our prepress problems. It's called PDF. That's short for Portable Document Format. It's Adobe's file format. It's not difficult to grasp the basic principles of what PDF is all about. But it takes more than the page I have here, so please go read our related stories, then come back. All done? Good. (OK, for those of you who hate to flip pages, you should at least know that a PDF file can be made from a PostScript file. PostScript is the final format of a file made with Adobe's PageMaker or Illustrator programs and Quark's QuarkXPress, among others.) So, you