Ron Martinez

Ellen Harvey is a freelance writer and editor who covers the latest technologies and strategies reshaping the publishing landscape. She previously served as the Senior Editor at Publishing Executive and Book Business.

Last week Aerbooks picked up a huge amount of traffic from Neil Gaiman when he tweeted out to his 2 million followers that he books were now available directly from the HarperCollins website. As it happens, HarperCollins is using the Aerbook Flyer service "to broadly integrate HarperCollins books into the fabric of the mobile and social web - delivering a mobile and tablet-optimized extended reading experience on any website and within any social stream." The service "includes a buy button that allows customers to directly purchase titles from www.hc.com or other e-book retailers,"

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.

More Blogs