Your Source for Publishing Intelligence
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.
Everyone has said that for subscription services to succeed, they have to have more books everyone has heard of. The subtext of that statement is that they need to have more books by traditional publishing. Scribd has done a pretty good job until now, signing deals with HarperCollins, Wiley, Kensington, Simon & Schuster, Open Road Media […]
The post Scribd signs new Big 5 publisher: Macmillan appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.
Ebook subscription service Scribd, which charges users $8.99 per month for unlimited access to a library of about 300,000 ebooks, plans to announce Tuesday that it's added about 1,000 books from reference publisher Wiley - including the well-known "For Dummies" series - to its offerings.
That 1,000 figure encompasses most of the under-$40 books in Wiley's catalog. More expensive titles, like $100-plus textbooks, aren't included.
Scribd has just announced a partnership with Wiley to bring reference works, including the popular “For Dummies” series to the subscription service. According to the release, this adds 1,000 of Wiley’s books to the service. I think this adds quite a bit of value to Scribd and their readership. I’m a big fan of the […]
The post Scribd adds publisher Wiley and the “For Dummies” books to the service appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.
Following the current controversy over open access research and scientific publishing, a couple more items have surfaced to lend color to the debate. For one, scientific publisher Wiley is trialing a system of “transferable peer review” to speed and systematize the assessment of new research before publication. “On average, peer review takes 80 days. That’s [...]
The post More developments in the scientific publishing controversy appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.
The Supreme Court clarified early in April in Kirtsaeng v Wiley that the “first use” doctrine in copyright law applied to any work lawfully manufactured anywhere in the world and purchased anywhere in the world. This ruling upset many in the publisher world, and relieved many in the library and bookseller world.
First use means that after purchase of a legally manufactured copyrighted work, the user can resell, rent or loan the work without permission of, or royalty payments to, the copyright holder. The used book and library markets, for example, are built on this foundation. Kirtsaeng was purchasing textbooks printed abroad more cheaply and reselling them in the U.S. Wiley lost on its claim that first use should also apply to the first U.S. sale of books manufactured and purchased abroad.
As Scott Turow, President of the Author’s Guild (of which I am a member), saw it in a New York Times op ed on April 7, “The Slow Death of the American Author,” the Kirtsaeng case was only the latest nail in the coffin awaiting authors. It cut off an additional revenue stream, since secondary sales do not pay royalties.
US publishers are poised to take their battle to stop books bought abroad being resold in the US to Congress, after the Supreme Court ruled against them in a case that will have broad implications for global commerce.
In the case of Kirtsaeng v Wiley, the court ruled in favour of Supap Kirtsaeng, a California student who asked his family in Thailand to buy textbooks for him at low international prices so he could resell them at a profit on eBay.
