At the recent Comic-Con convention, one theme that came up on virtually every panel was how much things are changing in the publishing industry. Three authors took the time to speak with me and share their views on the changing face of publishing. Read more »
Amazon’s new browser-based version of its Kindle e-book app is designed to get around Apple’s restrictions on in-app purchasing, but it is also a great example of how media companies should be looking beyond the world of apps to the future of the browser-based web. Read more »
Two months after it launched, British book crowdfunding website Unbound has only managed to push one project to the finishing line. So what’s wrong? Is donation-based publishing a dead end, or did the service misunderstand the reasons behind Kickstarter’s success? Read more »
Kindle now supports viewing of over 100 of its newspaper and magazine titles, and Nook for iPad will soon offer access to over 175 digital periodicals. This adds yet another vector through which iOS users can access magazine and newspaper content. So which will you use? Read more »
Flipboard has taken the next step in its move to become a one-stop digital magazine by launching a partnership with traditional publishers like Conde Nast to push their ads into its app. Can the company succeed at digital advertising when so many other players have failed? Read more »
As the disruption of the book industry continues, media companies are showing an increasing interest in “format shifting” by publishing their own e-books using content that they have already created, moves that are taking them into the growing market between full-length books and magazine articles. Read more »
John Green, whose book for young adults hit the number one spot this week before he was even finished writing it, is the latest example of an author whose use of social media and the web has given him tremendous power within the publishing industry. Read more »
Tumblr, the combination blogging platform and social network, continues to grow at a phenomenal rate — racking up more than 8.4 billion pageviews a month, which puts it in the top 25 sites in the world. But will it ever figure out how to make money? Read more »
With the launch of e-book versions of her Harry Potter series, J.K. Rowling has cut both publishers and booksellers such as Amazon out of the picture. Not everyone has that kind of power, but Rowling’s move shows how the world of publishing continues to be disrupted. Read more »
OnSwipe is launching the full version of its web-publishing service today, which allows media companies to create tablet-friendly views of their content that look and act like apps. But will that be enough to drag publishers out of the arms of Apple and its walled garden? Read more »
The Guardian newspaper in Britain has made its clearest declaration yet that the future of the organization is online by saying it is going “digital first.” Now all it has to do is prove that this strategy can be a success financially as well as philosophically. Read more »
The Financial Times has struck out on its own against Apple, urging subscribers to switch away from iTunes in favor of a dedicated HTML5 app. It helps the venerable newspaper break free of Steve Jobs’s iron grip — but will others follow suit? Read more »
New publishing startup Unbound is aiming to help authors raise money for new work directly from their fans. It’s a neat idea, but wil it really be enough to help it stand out in a crowdfunding market dominated by Kickstarter? Read more »
Social activity around books used to be limited to Oprah-style book clubs, but Jeff Howe — the author and journalism professor who coined the term “crowdsourcing” — wants to take that concept into the future by using Twitter to create the world’s largest virtual book-reading club. Read more »
Apple continues to sign up more publishers for its in-app subscription plans, the appeal of which is fairly obvious, but there also seems to be a growing wave of interest in doing an end-run around Apple and using the open web to offer a magazine experience. Read more »
In just the past few weeks, Amazon has launched two new book imprints, hired the former CEO of Time Warner books to launch more, making clear their intentions to grow publishing’s Big Six by one. Can the publishing industry withstand the Amazon onslaught? Read more »
The publishing world continues to expand, with high-end group shopping service Gilt Groupe launching its own cooking magazine and the New York Times Library releasing a magazine-style iPad app. As the tools to publish become cheaper and cheaper, brands are becoming publishers in their own right. Read more »
The story of how a children’s book with an unusual title made it to number one on the Amazon bestsellers’ list before it was even published reinforces a lesson for content publishers of all kinds: sometimes what looks like piracy is actually marketing for your content. Read more »
Author and media consultant Jeff Jarvis has come up with a breakdown of what he calls some “hard economic lessons for news,” and it makes for somewhat gloomy reading indeed. That said, however, there are some glimmers of hope amid the murk and despair. Read more »
At the London Book Fair, publishers are getting their heads around how digital content is changing their business, but it still feels like a clash of civilizations: publishers talking about what the next big thing is, while Amazon and Google simply make the next big thing. Read more »
The evidence continues to accumulate that e-books are not just something established authors can use, but that they are becoming a real alternative to traditional publishing contracts for emerging authors as well — and that should serve as a big wake-up call for the book-publishing industry. Read more »
At the opening panel session of BookExpo America in New York last week, Authors Guild president Scott Turow got right to the point. “Why,” he demanded of the publishing company executives on the panel with him, “did publishers allow e-books to be available at the ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Instead of the stark choice between putting up a paywall and suffering a loss of traffic on the one hand, or making content freely available in pursuit of traffic and suffering low CPMs on the other, Apple may finally offer publishers a realistic chance of generating ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Amazon delivered today a beta of its free Kindle for BlackBerry e-book app, which provides access to more than 420,000 books. It marks the latest example of how the publishing industry is facing seminal changes. Are we on the verge of the death of quality content? Read more »
A growing number of authors are signing exclusive e-book deals with Amazon for the Kindle, attracted in part by the higher royalty rates the electronic retailer is offering. In the latest deal, author Gavin de Becker gave Amazon rights to two e-books for a year. Read more »
The Wall Street Journal has reported that major textbook publishers have made deals with ScrollMotion Inc, in an effort to bring their textbooks to digital devices — including Apple’s upcoming iPad. McGraw-Hill, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt K-12, Pearson Education and Kaplan Inc are all named as ScrollMotions’s […] Read more »
Newspapers and magazines — the entire news print industry to be honest — have been suffering a long and torturous decline for much of the last decade as more of us turn to the Internet and electronic devices to get (increasingly personalized) news and other content. […] Read more »
Even in the best of times, a freelance web worker’s income can be spotty and irregular at times. Unlike salaried employees, contractors are subject to sudden and frequent variations in the amount of revenue they can generate at any given time. Those variances can be mitigated, […] Read more »
Tech specialist publisher O’Reilly is reporting encouraging growth in iPhone and Mac programming book sales, despite an overall drop in computer book sales. On the O’Reilly Radar blog, Mike Hendrickson analyzed figures from Nielsen Bookscan retail sales data. This is data collected in the U.S. from […] Read more »
HP’s MagCloud is pretty cool, as services go. (Even the New York Times seems to like it.) For only 20 cents per page, it lets small-scale magazine publishers with no use for traditional, large-scale printing services create their own high-quality magazines. The MagCloud site also serves […] Read more »
