As more sites focus on longform content, Fast Company disclosed some statistics on how its longer pieces have been doing — but the data shows that the real secret isn’t length but ongoing engagement with readers. Read more at paidContent »
Apple has won one of its many lawsuits involving “i” products — a federal judge threw out a case in which a New York publisher claimed that it, not Apple, has the rights to use “iBooks.” Read more »
Want to know what happened last week at paidContent Live 2013? Here are links to transcripts of the sessions from New York. Read more at paidContent »
The rumored takeover is now reality, at a reported price of $69 million. But, given Elsevier’s reputation and Mendeley’s open access ethos, will this deal turn out to be a harmonious success? Read more at paidContent »
Flipboard has become a leading player in the digital news-consumption field, and now it wants to hand the same filtering and curation tools employed by its editors over to users of the app, to create their own magazines. Read more »
Time Warner will put its magazine titles, including People and Sports Illustrated, into a separate company later this year. The move is a surprise as the publishing world had expected the company to sell most its publications to Iowa-based Meredith. Read more at paidContent »
While Google may see its payments to French publishers as a smart move for its own short-term purposes, the deal is still being seen by many as a payment for links, and that could set a dangerous precedent. Read more »
Gravity, a startup that personalizes reader content for web publishers, is opening up its recommendation engine to anyone that wants to use it. Considering the increasing importance of personalization online, this could be a good deal. Read more »
The Atlantic caused a furore this week with a piece of sponsored content about the Church of Scientology, which raised a host of questions about the risks of “native advertising” — which many see as the future of online media. Read more at paidContent »
At the Consumer Electronics Show on Tuesday, McGraw-Hill Education unveiled its SmartBook, an adaptive e-book that tailors the reading experience to each students’ pace and mastery level. It guides students through the material, frequently assessing their retention, and highlights content on which they should focus. Read more »
A New York newspaper has come under fire for publishing a map with the addresses of registered gun owners — data that is legally public, but not often published. The incident raises a number of thorny questions about what personal information should be made public and when. Read more »
News Corp has finally announced details about how it will split off its publishing operations from its richer entertainment divisions. A look at the numbers show the reborn company will be fine, at least for awhile, in part thanks to keeping an Australian sports business. Read more at paidContent »
What does next year have in store for the digital content business? Our media team offers some predictions, from cord cutting and apps to self publishing and paywalls. Read more »
Media companies are looking for new revenues through selling things. Meanwhile, more commerce sites are starting to publish. Is it easier for content to transform into commerce — or vice versa? Read more »
As Pearson – along with the entire textbook publishing industry – rethinks its role in education, one of the company’s executives says it could look to build the core competencies of digital content creators like video game giant Electronic Arts. Read more »
Publishing giant McGraw-Hill has announced that it will sell its education division to private equity firm Apollo Global Management for $2.5 billion. The news comes months after the publishing company said it would split its education and financial services units. Read more »
Evan Williams, the founder of Twitter and, more recently, The Obvious Corporation, said that since launching Blogger a dozen years ago, he and his cofounder Biz Stone have wanted to democratize the distribution of content. But now, he said, they’re focused on quality. Read more »
Media companies and publishers of all kinds spend a lot of time measuring their online traffic patterns using analytics that track where readers come from — but Alexis Madrigal of The Atlantic argues that they are overlooking a huge contributing factor that he calls “Dark Social” traffic. Read more »
BenchPrep, a Chicago-based startup that offers interactive online courses for test preparation, is moving to a subscription-based business model, which could help it better access institutional customers, such as universities, community colleges and public libraries. Read more »
Evan Williams and Biz Stone have launched a new web-publishing platform called Medium that they hope will be part of a reinvention of digital content. But apart from founders with a great pedigree, it’s not immediately clear what Medium offers that other services don’t. Read more »
After lining up some big backers including two Twitter founders, communications hub Branch is opening to the public. The service is trying to encourage online dialogues by drawing people into conversations that can be shared and preserved. Read more »
An incident in which an e-book lending site was shut down by a horde of angry authors with takedown notices — most of whom misunderstood the site’s purpose — is another example of how the publishing industry is fighting the same battles as the music industry. Read more »
Facing a lawsuit from major publishers, Boston-based free textbook startup Boundless Learning is now available for students at any university. Just in time for the new school year, the startup is opening to the public with an updated, more comprehensive platform. Read more »
The purchase of the sports-blogging site Bleacher Report by Turner Broadcasting unit fills a content hole for the Time Warner unit, but it is also a validation of the user-generated-content model behind the sports-blogging network, and a sign of the disruptive effects that model can have. Read more »
London startup Mendeley is already beloved by researchers around the planet for helping them manage their work. Now it’s unveiled a new product that it hopes can help universities get a better handle on what’s happening right now. Goodbye slow, stuffy academia. Read more »
Twitter’s decision to suspend the account of a British journalist raises a host of questions about the company’s behavior, but one of the important ones is to what extent Twitter’s filtering and curation features could make it legally liable for the content flowing through the network. Read more »
Class action lawyers want Steve Jobs’ biographer to hand over his source material to help them prove that Apple and publishers fixed e-book prices. But a judge has agreed that the author can refuse under a law that protects journalists and their sources. Read more at paidContent »
The traditional textbook publishing model, based on dead trees and middlemen, can force students to shell out hundreds of dollars for a stack of photocopies. Now, two law professors are offering an alternative at a fraction of the price. Read more at paidContent »
The controversial world of paywalled academic publishing has been hit by a major shift, with the British government saying it will make open access to scientific research a condition of public funding by 2014. Read more at paidContent »
Penny Arcade, a webcomic publisher and event producer, is trying to use Kickstarter to finance its web operations for a year so it can replace traditional banner advertising with a reader-centric model. Could traditional publishers learn something from this crowdfunding experiment? Read more »
Publishers may see Next Issue Media’s virtual newsstand as a solution to their digital problems, but it doesn’t fit the way growing numbers of people consume content. For them, the newsstand is already an anachronism, and recreating it in digital form isn’t going to help. Read more »
Super Bowl winners head to Disney World; moguls with a new corporate agenda go on a media tour. Following the formal announcement early Thursday morning that News Corp. will split up publishing and media/entertainment, Rupert Murdoch covered all the bases. Here’s what he had to say. Read more at paidContent »
Rafter, a course materials management platform that grew out of textbook rental site Bookrenter earlier this year, today announced that it had acquired four-month-old startup HubEdu. Read more »
Social book discovery startup was left divorced from its intended book retail partner after HMV jettisoned Waterstones. Now its future lays with a supermarket, not a traditional book store. Read more at paidContent »
Wattpad, which describes itself as the world’s largest online community of readers and writers, has raised $17 million from a group of venture funds led by Khosla Ventures. Khosla partner Andrew Chung says he thinks Wattpad can do for writing what YouTube has done for video. Read more »
A new Google report looks at trends in the display advertising business, including growth by geographic area and content vertical. Read more »
It’s all about the platform — except when it isn’t: Speakers at paidContent 2012 spoke about the opportunities, challenges and constraints of creating digital content. Read more at paidContent »
Matt Mullenweg, the founder of Wordpress and Automattic, said at paidContent 2012 that the service is preparing for a significant change of direction — by releasing a much simpler version designed to work on mobile. Read more at paidContent »
Publishers saw the iPad as a chance to turn back the clock and convince consumers to pay for content in a new form. But that dream has collided with reality, and now some content producers — including MIT’s Technology Review — say the standalone content app is dead. Read more »
Book publishers are trying hard to argue that e-books cost almost as much to produce as printed ones, and therefore prices for e-books should be higher — but the bottom line is that consumers don’t care what a publisher’s costs are, nor should they. Read more »
