ePublishing Week in Brief – August 26th to 30th,2013
ePublishing Week in Brief – August 26th to 30th,2013
BookMachine Kicks Off Launch with Global Publishing Event
BookMachine, a U.K.-based social media-driven publishing skills exchange, is kicking off the launch of its online platform, BookMachine.me, with a Global Publishing Event that will bring together six professionals in six different cities speaking about and celebrating the culture of collaboration. The event will be held simultaneously in six cities, New York, London, Toronto, Barcelona, Oxford and Brighton on September 25.
Founded by Laura Austin and Gavin Summers in the U.K., BookMachine is a social media platform—the venture hosts a regular schedule of real world meetups in the U.S. and Europe—grafted onto a professional skills exchange that allows anyone to find publishing veterans with a range of skills from editorial to production. In a Skype call with Austin, she said that BookMachine.me is currently in beta and has signed up about 2,500 professionals whose skills can be searched for in the BookMachine database.
http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/industry-news/promotionalss/article/58868-book-machine-kicks-off-launch-with-global-publishing-event.html
EarthPeople Announces New Publishing Division for Books and Media on Sustainability and Social Innovation
EarthPeople Media to Support Leaders, Readers, Authors and Causes through Digital Publishing, Public Relations and Reputation Management
EarthPeople, a specialized communications firm founded in 2005, announced plans to launch a new publishing division for books and media related to culture, learning, sustainability, social innovation and healthy living. EarthPeople Media will also offer marketing and promotion services to help pioneering organizations and authors boost their influence and expand their reach.
“Instability and massive transition in the publishing industry are forcing traditional publishers to reexamine a centuries-old model,” said Anna Clark, president of EarthPeople, LLC. “At the same time, authors and thought leaders continue to wrestle with positioning themselves in a crowded marketplace. EarthPeople Media supports leaders, readers, authors and causes in spreading ideas through digital publishing, public relations and reputation management.”
http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/8/prweb11077572.htm
How Scholars Hack the World of Academic Publishing Now
Every year, the company Thomson Reuters assigns every academic journal an “impact factor.” Impact factors measure, roughly, how often papers published in one journal are cited by other journals. It is an ecological measurement, in other words. You’d recognize the names of journals with the highest impact factors — Nature, Science, etc. — but the world of scholarly journals is enormous, and there’s crowding at the bottom.
Two stories today illustrate the problems with impact factors, and the difficulty of measuring knowledge through any metric.
First, Nature News revealed that a Brazilian citation cartel had been outed by Thomson Reuters. That’s right: a citation cartel.
The Brazilian government measures graduate schools based on the impact factor of the journals that those schools’ students publish in. Brazilian journals, many of which are newer, have low impact factors, so Brazilian graduate students often publish in journals abroad. This makes them and their graduate program look better, but it means the commercial benefit of Brazilian scholarship flows, in part, to non-Brazilian companies.
http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/08/how-scholars-hack-the-world-of-academic-publishing-now/279119/
Religious Publisher Under Fire for Dropping Gay Author
The dispute between the publisher and the author, who grew up in the Mormon church, underscores tension within the Mormon community over homosexuality and public acknowledgement of same-sex relationships.
The book, Woven, is conceived as the first installment of a young-adult fantasy series. In it, a princess embarks on a quest with the ghost of a young man to bring him back to life.
There are no references to homosexuality in the novel, Jensen said. The 34-year-old author said he was “mortified” by the publisher’s decision to drop the book.
“I couldn’t believe this was happening over the word partner,” he said in a telephone interview.
http://www.charismanews.com/us/40791-religious-publisher-under-fire-for-dropping-gay-author
Amazon publishing giant ‘sexually assaulted his former girlfriend in public on two separate occasions’
A publishing giant is accused of sexually assaulting his ex-girlfriend in the middle of New York restaurants on two different occasions.
Amazon publishing head Laurence Kirshbaum, 69, is being sued by Teresa McCoy, 55, for unspecified damages after she claims he assaulted her when she came to him about a job.
He denies all allegations against him.
In papers filed on Monday in Manhattan Supreme Court, McCoy said she’d had a personal relationship with the married Kirshbaum in the early 2000s when he was the head of the Time Warner Book Group.
They parted ways in 2005 but reconnected again in 2010.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2404814/Amazon-publishing-giant-Laurence-Kirshbaum-sexually-assaulted-girlfriend-Teresa-McCoy-public.html#ixzz2dR7wGpZj
Kindle e-bookstore and self-publishing platform now available in Mexico
Both readers and writers in Mexico have a reason to rejoice today, as Amazon has just launched the Kindle Store and Kindle Direct Publishing in their country. The e-bookstore will feature over 70,000 Spanish-language titles, as well as e-books in indigenous tongues like Nahuatl. To help fill up those new e-readers, Amazon will also be offering upwards of 1,500 free books among the store’s 2 million titles. The availability of KDP is especially significant, as it offers both unknown authors and big name writers like Paulo Coelho (who’s using it to release his books El Alquimistaand Once Minutos) an alternative path to publishing. Additionally, Gandhi, one of the largest bookstore chains in Mexico, will now sell the basic Kindle and Kindle Paperwhite in its brick and mortar shops for MXN$1,399 (USD$105) and MXN$2,399 (USD$180) respectively. For more info, check out the source links below or the press releases after the break.
http://www.engadget.com/2013/08/29/dnp-kindle-e-bookstore-and-self-publishing-platform-now-availabl/
How Lizzie Skurnick Went From Young Adult Authority to Publisher
Writer and book critic Lizzie Skurnick has spent years poring over the young adult classics of her youth. She’s scoured eBay for them, studied them like a talmudic scholar, praised them in (hilarious) writing. And now, at long last, she’s putting the books back out in the world for the rest of us to enjoy. Starting in September, Lizzie Skurnick Books, an imprint of Ig Publishing, will begin rereleasing the classic Y.A. literature that Skurnick has already made a career of celebrating.
Skurnick emerged as the go-to authority on gone-but-not-forgotten Y.A. books six years ago, when she started writing the wildly popular Fine Lines column for the feminist website Jezebel. Each week, she wrote about a beloved novel from her youth. A book deal followed, and in 2009 Skurnick published an expanded compendium of the columns in “Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.”
The new imprint seemed a logical extension of the work Skurnick had already been doing to revive her favorite books and authors. “Because I’ve been writing about these books for over five years,” Skurnick said in a telephone interview from her home in Jersey City, N.J., “I’m already in touch with the readership and already the person people look to.”