ePublishing Week in Brief – September 16th to 20th, 2013
ePublishing Week in Brief – September 16th to 20th, 2013
Polish startup PressPad freshens up iPad publishing with an innovative business model that no publisher has said “no” to so far
The new model proposed by PressPad on the company’s blog has aroused great interest among the customers. Instead of committing resources into building one’s application, the publishers can publish their own magazines on the iPad for free
http://www.journalism.co.uk/press-releases/polish-startup-presspad-freshens-up-ipad-publishing-with-an-innovative-business-model-that-no-publisher-has-said-no-to-so-far/s66/a554119/
A New Children’s Publishing Group Gathers in Boston
Spearheaded by Yolanda Scott, editorial director of Charlesbridge; Betsy Groban, senior v-p and publisher of HMH Books for Young Readers; Cathryn Mercier, director for the Center for the Study of Children’s Literature and professor of English at Simmons College; Jennifer Roberts, executive director of marketing, publicity, and events at Candlewick; and Roger Sutton, editor-in-chief of theHorn Book, CBB drew more than 150 children’s book people, including a carpool from Maine and a contingent of children’s authors from Cape Cod.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/childrens/childrens-industry-news/article/59131-a-new-children-s-publishing-group-gathers-in-boston.html
StickyDocs launches mobile publishing platform for corporate communications industry
Today, StickyDocs announced the launch of its new mobile publishing platform for the corporate communications industry that brings data to life as content for mobile devices via digital ePubs. Bringing together UI Developers, UX Designers, Content Creators and Curators, and third partyanalytics partners, StickyDocs leverages an innovative business model to offer a scalable, turnkey digital publishing alternative that is currently unavailable in today’s market.
Unlike traditional eBooks and PDF flipbooks, StickyDocs ePubs are specifically designed for tablets and smartphones to deliver engaging, consumer driven user experiences of corporate content that drive employee performance and organizational productivity.
The company sites the following industry facts as key reasons for the platforms creation:
53% of corporate executives rank improving employee effectiveness as a top priority. (Fierce: IDC, June 2008, $37B: Counting the Cost of Employee Misunderstanding)
Companies are losing an estimated $37 billion annually to employee miscommunication and misinformation of company policies, processes & job functions. (Fierce: IDC, June 2008, $37B: Counting the Cost of Employee Misunderstanding)
THE WAYWARD PRESS FROM MARS: A young man’s adventures in women’s publishing.
This spring, Jenny Hollander, a twenty-three-year-old Columbia Journalism School student, sent out her résumé for summer internships. “Where didn’t I apply?” Hollander, who is from the U.K., said recently. “BuzzFeed, Mashable, the Fiscal Times, a lot of very small county papers all over the U.S.; California Watch, which is an investigative thing in California; the L.A. Times; the Huffington Post—twice.” She was either rejected or ignored by all of them. Then she came across a notice, on a Columbia Listserv, for a “writing internship” at an unnamed startup. The job paid fifty dollars a day. “It was all a little bit cloak-and-dagger,” Hollander said. She knew nothing about the company, but she applied anyway, and was delighted when she was hired.
On her first day of work, instead of going to an office, Hollander arrived at a newly renovated four-story town house in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. It had two kitchens, two living rooms, and a roof deck—all decorated in a funky flea-market style. The house was the headquarters of Bustle, a new online publication for women. There were four editors in their mid-twenties, and a gaggle of interns—college students or recent graduates, all women—sat around, typing on MacBooks. Many students have summer jobs that involve little more than fetching coffee and maintaining Twitter feeds, so Hollander was surprised when she was told to take out her laptop and start writing blog posts. “I called my housemate and was, like, ‘So I’m doing this job, and all I’m doing is sitting on sofas in this gorgeous house with a bunch of other girls, and we’re all writing together!’ ”
http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/09/23/130923fa_fact_widdicombe
Self-Publishing A Legal Casebook: An Ebook Success Story
About the Book
The casebook supports Advertising & Marketing Law courses in U.S. law schools. In 2011, about a dozen of these courses were offered around the country. Before our book, no published casebooks was designed for those courses; instead, each professor individually compiled his/her own materials. (Note: some published textbooks supported advertising law courses in business schools, communications departments, journalism schools and related disciplines, but none of those textbooks were well-suited for the law school market).
Recognizing this opportunity, Rebecca and I wrote a casebook over several years. It is a hefty piece of work by any standards: 870 pages, almost 400,000 words, nearly 40 megabytes. See more details, including the table of contents. Rebecca’s law school has an on-staff book manuscript editor who cleaned up the book’s formatting and typos and helped convert the book into the ePub format. Without her help, we might have paid a freelancer a few hundred bucks to provide those services.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/ericgoldman/2013/09/18/self-publishing-a-legal-casebook-an-ebook-success-story/
Crowd-funded publishing should be the first resort of any new writer – but they’ll need to learn how to be sociable first
There’s a conveyor belt of ‘content’ industries moving slowly towards a large crunching machine. The machine has ‘digital technology’ crudely stencilled on it, and as each industry goes through it, it comes out the other side almost unrecognisable: it started with music, then media, then retail… It’s been hitting book publishing for some time now.
The ubiquity of information, the flood of content, the possibilities of new hardware have, along with a myriad of other factors, smacked the book publishing industry hard in the face, so that an economic model which was shaky in the first place now looks almost impossible.
In a world where everyone is looking for ‘unique content’, book publishers daren’t take a punt on a new writer, unless they know there’s a market for it. Understandably, in an industry where formats are changing but margins are shrinking, publishers take few risks and tend to return to the same pastures, containing familiar figures – kinky billionaires, wizards, footballers and models. Or any combination of the same. A new writer barely stands a chance.