Holy Grail

Eugene G. Schwartz is editor at large for ForeWord Reviews, an industry observer and an occasional columnist for Book Business magazine. In an earlier career, he was in the printing business and held production management positions at Random House, Prentice-Hall/Goodyear and CRM Books/Psychology Today. A former PMA (IBPA) board member, he has headed his own publishing consultancy, Consortium House. He is also Co-Founder of Worthy Shorts Inc., a development stage online private press and publication service for professionals as well as an online back office publication service for publishers and associations. He is on the Publishing Business Conference and Expo Advisory Board.

Kobo Launches Their Digital Magazine Shop (GoodeReader) At a product launch event in New York City Canadian based Kobo announced their intention of launching a digital magazine store. *** Goodreads Choice Award Winners Revealed (GalleyCat) With 24,686 votes, And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini has won the Best Fiction award at the Goodreads Choice [...]

The post Morning Roundup: Kobo Launches Digital Magazine Shop, Is Viral the Holy Grail of Content? and more appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

From Inside Higher Ed comes this article by Caroline Vanderlip: If textbook affordability is the Holy Grail, then those of us who work in higher education are careening Monty Python-like as we search for it, stirring up unnecessary obstacles for ourselves all along the way. Consider the dual paths we are taking. First, there’s the [...]

An energized Publishing Business Conference and Expo, Book Business and Publishing Executive magazines’ annual event at the Times Square Marriott Marquis, March 19-21, was grounded in optimism and realism, and primed for a promising future in the digital age for book manufacturing and print-based book production.

Addressing the overflow audience at the Marriott's Astor Ballroom, our very own Joan of Arc at the ramparts, Editorial Director Noelle Skodzinski—fully armed with the arguments of comon sense and history to support her—sounded a much-needed balancing and defiant keynote to prevailing “stiff upper lip” scenarios about the decline of the publishing industry. She reminded us, paraphrasing from both Monty Python and the Holy Grail and the Encyclopedia Britannica blog’s notice that it had discontinued its venerable print edition, that publishing is not dead, change is okay, and that the future is alive with new opportunities in our pursuit of continued success and excellence in the publishing business.

In the months following the Sept. 11 attacks, museum admissions declined sharply, exhibitions were cancelled, and in the turbulence, administrators began examining whether they could continue to publish books as a result. Today, “there is generally a very optimistic feeling, which is not to say it’s easy. It’s still very difficult, but it’s an exciting time, and I feel really good about our future,” says Yale University Press Publisher Patricia Fidler. “No one was saying that a few years ago.” Currently, her art and architecture division publishes 120 books annually, of which roughly 60 percent stem from Yale’s museum partners. Stephanie Medlock,

The 11th edition of Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary introduces a significant innovation in dictionary publishing. For the first time, the popularly priced standard edition of the dictionary is not a print product alone. Each copy is bundled with a CD-ROM edition and a one-year subscription to Merriam-Webster Online, a premium Web site offering exclusive access to the online edition and other reference sources, all built atop the same database. Nothing like this has been done before in dictionary publishing, and for good reasons, known as "the three C's": cost, cannibalization, and cross-platform development. Cost for a dictionary is usually thought of

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