Los Angeles

Three announcements made by three publishing businesses over the past week show how companies that have been at the coalface of traditional publishing for sometime are looking at remodelling themselves.

First up was Canongate, the independent publisher run by the charismatic and well-connected Jamie Byng, which announced that it was to spin-off its fledging events business Letters Live into a separate company, jointly owned by Canongate and Benedict Cumberbatch's production business SunnyMarch.

Popular blogger Audrey Watters says she is "furious and curious" about the state of ed tech. That energy is on full display in The Monsters of Education Technology, a self-published collection of talks and addresses the Hack Education founder gave during 2014.

I caught up with Watters this week via phone to talk about the often-biting views encapsulated in Monsters. Our discussion focused on six quotes from the book, which are in bold type below. The transcript of our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

From Aaron Sorkin at his two HBO series hits “The West Wing” and the just-concluded “The Newsroom”  to poet and literary critic Wayne Koestenbaum, the seldom-used (but now increasingly spoken and printed) word “ensorcelled” has been making the rounds. Danielle Berrin at the Jewish Journal in Los Angeles likes the word, too, and has used […]

The post Ensorcelled by ‘ensorcelled’ appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

A massive expansion of classroom technology has come to a grinding halt in Los Angeles.

The LA Unified School District had planned to buy some 700,000 iPads for its students and teachers. The Apple tablets would include learning software built by publishing giant Pearson. But Superintendent John Deasy announced earlier this week he is canceling the contract and restarting the bidding process.

The decision comes on the heels of an investigation by NPR member station KPCC, which obtained emails between Deasy and tech executives

Can a book "go viral" in the same way a cat video on YouTube can? Unless it's Harry Potter or Fifty Shades of Grey, probably not. So rather than simply trying to reach mass audiences, some authors and publishers are trying to reach smart subsets of audiences with hashtagged book titles. It's a gimmick that works - for now.

Sophia Amoruso's #Girlboss hit the shelves in May, featuring the Nasty Gal CEO sporting plenty of cleavage in a black dress, fists defiantly planted on her hips. Another new release, Sarah Ockler's young adult novel #Scandal

Which airline will be the first to take United's TV/movie model and extend it into books, newspapers and magazines?

What if those onboard servers United plans to use for video also had all of today's newspapers, the latest editions of magazines and maybe a million or so ebooks? I'm not talking about samples, btw; I mean the entire ebook, newspaper and magazine. This content would be streamed to the traveler's tablet or laptop, just like the video, so it would only be accessible in the air.