Friday, February 26, 2010

News

Scribd Launches Mobile Document Sharing App
Non-copyrighted documents can be sent from a PC to smartphones, Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and the Sony Reader.
Also in March, Scribd plans to release mobile applications for Apple's iPhone, Resarch In Motion's BlackBerry, and smartphones runnning Google's Android operating system. The company also plans to make PDF documents on the site available in the EPUB format, an open document standard that gaining traction in the industry.
Source: InformationWeek


Publishing: The Revolutionary Future
The transition within the book publishing industry from physical inventory stored in a warehouse and trucked to retailers to digital files stored in cyberspace and delivered almost anywhere on earth as quickly and cheaply as e-mail is now underway and irreversible. This historic shift will radically transform worldwide book publishing, the cultures it affects and on which it depends. Meanwhile, for quite different reasons, the genteel book business that I joined more than a half-century ago is already on edge, suffering from a gambler's unbreakable addiction to risky, seasonal best sellers, many of which don't recoup their costs, and the simultaneous deterioration of backlist, the vital annuity on which book publishers had in better days relied for year-to-year stability through bad times and good.
Source: The New York Review of Books


IPad Apps Could Put Apple in Charge of the News
Publishers should think twice before worshipping the iPad as the future platform for magazines and newspapers. That is, if they value their independence from an often-capricious corporate gatekeeper.


The past week’s controversy swirling around Apple’s retroactive ban of sexy apps in the App Store seems trivial, but the implications of Apple’s arbitrariness should be disconcerting to members of the press and those who rely on the media for unbiased information.
Source: Wired


An expert view of unicorns and digital rights management
A video interview with Kirk Biglione, Oxford Media Works.
My impression of the iPad is that it's a magical unicorn that is going to save the world, all of the print industry's problems will be solved.
Source: O'Reilly Tools of Change Publishing


Leaked file might be the first promo list of iPad books
The authors include Stephen King, Timothy Ferris, Malcolm Gladwell, Dubner & Leavitt, Kennedy, Agassi, Palin and Beck. There's bestselling fiction (The Lovely Bones), fact (A History Of Modern Britain) and autobiography (Wishful Drinking). The prices range from $14.99 (for Too Big To Fail) all the way down to the magic of free (Heat Wave). It's an eclectic list... and it might be the first round of books to be highlighted on the iBooks app in a few weeks.
Source: The Unofficial Apple Weblog



No comments:

Post a Comment