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 anti-SOPA and PIPA demonstrations don’t stop with site-wide blackouts planned for Wednesday by a number of web giants. People also have plans to meet up in real life and take the protest to the streets in cities such as San Francisco, New York and Seattle. Read more »
Scribd has launched a new iPhone and web application called Float aimed at putting all of a user’s reading materials — from books, to blog posts, to newspaper and magazine articles — in one integrated format. But will the app be too ambitious for its own good? Read more »
Scribd just emailed us to let us know that today’s California Proposition 8 ruling is the most viral document in the history of the site. The document is currently receiving more than 1,000 reads per second, with nearly 150,000 total readsan hour after the ruling. Read more »
The online Scribd document service has added a “send to device” option, putting millions of documents right on the phone. The company is also working on Android and iPhone apps to handle content easily. Just hit a button and the doc is sent to the device. Read more »
Scribd, which calls itself the world’s largest social publishing company, has launched a series of mobile services and features for sending books and other documents to any portable device, including a set of open APIs, and will soon launch mobile apps for the iPhone and Android. Read more »
The emergence of a commercially significant electronic book (e-book) market in the past three years has been the result of two quite-recent technological developments. The first, and most critical, has been a breakthrough in the technology for manufacturing reflective electronic paper displays (EPDs), allowing for the introduction of affordable, lightweight and portable e-book readers such as Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader.
The second has been the rollout of reliable “3G” wireless broadband networks, which have made it possible to deliver digital books directly to reading devices without the intermediate steps of downloading files to a PC and then transferring them to a reader. Direct-to-device sampling and delivery, particularly with Amazon’s Kindle and Apple’s iPhone, have enabled impulse-driven e-commerce, which has been critical to early consumer adoption of e-books.
The technology for e-books, however, remains nascent. The Kindle and its ilk are very much first-generation devices that deliver the minimally acceptable experience. Further development of the business will be closely tied to future technological developments, including flexible and color displays, format standardization and rich-media applications. As the market grows, there are numerous opportunities for other technology players, from social networks to cloud service providers and more. This report examines the trends and opportunities ahead. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
