ePublishing Week in Brief – February 11th to 14th, 2013
ePublishing Week in Brief – February 11th to 14th, 2013
Smaller tablets are the future of online publishing
According to US publisher Hearst, 7-inch tablets are driving online subscriptions to women’s magazine titles.
Speaking at the All Things D “D: Dive Into Media” conference in California on Tuesday, Hearst Magazines President David Carey claimed that tablets with a smaller screen that will fit inside a purse are leading to rapid growth in female subscribers.
In a discussion with All Things D’s Peter Kafka, Carey revealed that 40% of its total unique views on its magazine webpages are mobile but that the majority are still from smartphones. However, the company does have 900 000 US tablet subscribers.
He also explained that when the original iPad launched in 2010 the company thought it would solve the problem of digital subscriptions and selling virtual copies of its magazines, but that thinking didn’t quite work out that way.
http://www.timeslive.co.za/scitech/2013/02/14/smaller-tablets-are-the-future-of-online-publishing
U.S. Regulators Approve Random House Merger With Penguin
PARIS — The U.S. Justice Department has cleared the proposed merger of Random House and Penguin, which would create the biggest book publisher in the world, their parent companies said Thursday.
The Justice Department imposed no conditions on the German media company Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, and its British counterpart Pearson, the parent of Penguin, thereby removing a significant hurdle to the deal. Still, the proposed formation of Penguin Random House faces other regulatory reviews, most notably by the European Commission.
“This positive first decision by one of the antitrust authorities is an important milestone on the path to uniting two of the world’s leading publishing companies into a truly global publishing group,” said Thomas Rabe, chief executive of Bertelsmann, in a statement.
Bertelsmann and Pearson announced plans last year to merge the two publishers into a single concern that would have about 25 percent of the English-language consumer book market. Under the agreement, no money is changing hands, but Bertelsmann is set to control 53 percent of the combined entity.
Inkling Previews Habitat and Inkling Content Display Platform
After debuting the service in beta at last year’s Tools of Change Conference, Inkling CEO Matt MacInnis returned to New York to publicly relaunch Inkling Habitat, a free multimedia authoring platform, designed to allow publishers to create multimedia-enriched digital content and distribute it through major e-tailers. In a presentation at TimeWarnerCenter, MacInnis previewed the new software tool, coupled with the Inkling Content Discovery Platform, a new platform that indexes Inkling content to Google searches and turns search results into a web storefront for e-book sales.
Inkling is a San Francisco-based digital publishing vendor specializing in creating multimedia content for the iPad. Originally focused on converting traditional print textbooks into multimedia-enriched texts, Inkling has raised the ante with the full release of Inkling Habitat, offering publishers the ability to easily create multimedia versions of print textbooks as well as original digital-first content. Coupled with the Inkling Content Display Platform, launched last month at Digital Book World in New York, Inkling can offer an easy-to-use, free authoring tool that can produce all kinds of multimedia content–from textbooks to cookbooks to travel guides—in a manner that challenges the utility, economy and convenience of Apple’s iBooks Author software tool. Indeed Habitat is the latest in a growing number of “self-service” multimedia authoring tools released over the last year.
ToC 2013: Tim O’Reilly Tells Publishers to ‘Work on Stuff that Matters’
For the first time in three years, Tim O’Reilly stood on stage and addressed Tools of Change, the conference he started seven years ago, kicking off the show with a keynote talk that offered attendees some perspective on how far digital publishing has come, along with a healthy dose of optimism for where it’s heading. “When I started my activism around publishing it was back in the days when peer-to-peer first appeared on the scene and everybody was terrified,” he told attendees. “We’ve come a long way since then.”
No publishing conference does futurism like Tools of Change, and throughout the morning keynote session, embracing the future was a constant theme. O’Reilly’s talk was followed by Brian David Johnson, a sci-fi author and “futurist” with Intel Corporation who predicted that the by 2020, with the way chips are increasing in power and decreasing in size, technologists we will be able to turn anything into a computer. But to change the future, he posited, you have to first change “the story people tell themselves about what the future will be.”
Johnson’s futurism was followed by two presentations about current technology now changing the market: Matt MacInnis,detailed the public launch of Inkling Habitat, a free multimedia authoring platform that allows publishers to create multimedia-enriched digital content and distribute it through major e-tailers. And John Wheeler, SPi Global discussed the transition to HTML5 (EPUB), and the current complications in the e-book world due to a range of proprietary platforms. The morning keynotes ended with a chat between Johnson, author Cory Doctorow, and media scholar Henry Jenkins.
Publishers as Booksellers?
At any event in publishing, there are commonalities or themes to the discussions and panel presentations. Sometimes the themes are outright and printed in the program, but other times they are nothing more than running commentary or buzz generated by attendees throughout the event.
One of the often-discussed topics among exhibitors at this year’s TOC is the concept of publishers forgoing their relationships with the major online retailers and opting to open their own ebook marketplaces under their own brands. No less than three of the companies exhibiting at this year’s Tools of Change conference serve only to help publishers of any size distribute their digital content and sell it under their own online ebook shops.
iPublish, under the company Impelsys, is one such company that works to help publishers sell their content and gave a breakdown of the reasoning for this in an interview with GoodEReader.
“People are nervous about Amazon and Barnes and Noble, and they’re worried about putting your content out there with someone who could own 51% of your revenue,” said a spokesman for iPublish. “What we want to do is keep publishers in control of their options in respect to ebooks by creating their own branded sites and use our tools and features.”
http://goodereader.com/blog/electronic-readers/publishers-as-booksellers/
Sick-lit: a symptom of publishing’s decline?
Literary media have been abuzz about the “sick-lit” controversy: novels written for teenagers with themes of death, fatal disease and psychological disease such as anorexia. Apparently these are very popular with girls in the U.K. and North America. Detractors say they are dangerous because they romanticize these things, especially cancer; they encourage wallowing in depression and may actually encourage vulnerable children to harm themselves.
A novel called The Fault in Our Stars, by John Green, usually serves as epitome of the genre. It’s about Hazel, a 16-year-old cancer patient who meets a really cute guy in a cancer support group. He is an amputee and also dying. They fall in love, he dies, she survives. After his death she finds notes the boy had been writing for her own eulogy. The story ends with her saying to the absent lover, “I do.” The book was well-reviewed and became a bestseller. Similar sick-lit books include Never Eighteen, and Before I Die (now a movie calledNow is Good starring Dakota Fanning), both about teenage cancer sufferers.