And the walls come tumbling down! As reported this week in Publishers Weekly, the Supreme Court handed copyright holders and publishers a global market haircut by limiting control over intellectual property to the first sale only. Turns out, an entrepreneurial student CAN import cheap textbooks from overseas and undercut the publisher’s sales of that same →
In our rapidly evolving technology environment, the agile approach to proprietary software development can yield great results for publishers. As with most technology projects, the single greatest challenge to this radical approach remains the people and politics (the wetware) involved, not the software technology itself. This challenge involves not only everyone understanding, but capitalizing on the →
Earlier this month the Apple iBookstore launched Breakout Books, a new category of the online store which features self- and independently-published books. Although the iBookstore has always accepted self-published titles, Breakout Books highlights the increasing market share of the independent author and gives added support in terms of marketing and promotion. To give an idea of →
September 2012—Reaching out to the academic market in time for the new school year, the Library of Congress and Copia Interactive has announced the free eBook release of Jefferson’s Legacy: A Brief History of the Library of Congress, the Library’s hallmark publication, as well as a collection of rare lectures. Readers can now visit the Library’s page at Copia →
(Reuters) An ongoing antitrust investigation of Apple’s pricing negotiations with European publishers in December 2011 may be coming to a close, though not in Apple’s favor. The four publishers – Simon & Schuster, News Corp (HarperCollins), Hachette Livre and Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck (owner of Macmillan in Germany) – made deals that allowed Apple to →
Many publishers we have talked with this year understand the import of making their content digitally available, but don’t know how to go about it. Low ebook prices dominate the market, so costs to convert and distribute will not be immediately earned back through ebook sales. So what’s a publisher to do? With a little →
The proliferation of e-content has opened up a world unlike anything seen in traditional publishing. One company, Total BooX, has created a truly innovative business model, allowing you access to ebooks for free, and only charging you for the content you actually read. It’s an app for tablets and mobile devices, allowing you to browse books, →
Just in time for London Book Fair, OBS is celebrating the launch of our new e-distribution portal, ProtoBooks: Your one-stop shop for both print and ebooks. For publishers, ProtoBooks is a fast and secure way to get your books to the global market in a variety of formats: Subscription-based online access; Cloud-stored Flash-based ebooks; Downloads for offline →
Global Industry Analysts, Inc. (GIA) released a global outlook report on the publishing industry last month, predicting that it will reach $322.7 billion by 2015. This news comes following an unstable point brought on by the global economic recession, but shows that the industry should recover in the coming years. Dropping book sales, fewer new titles, →
Apple held an educational publishing event at the Guggenheim in New York City yesterday, outlining three new apps for students, teachers, and publishers. The first announcement was for iBooks 2, Apple’s reinvention of textbooks. The free app is available today and features color-coded highlighting and note-taking, with a click-for-definition glossary; the notes and highlights transfer →