Today marks the anniversary of the deaths of Cervantes, Shakespeare and Garcilaso de la Vega and the birthdays of Vladimir Nabokov, Maurice Druon, and Josep Pla. This date, as chosen by the UN, celebrates the book and all it has wrought and, perhaps more important, the place of the book as artifact and sextant in our lives. → Read More
Today, Ev Williams’ latest startup, Medium, added some tools to bring people together while they’re writing. The collaboration tools are similar to what you’d find in Google Docs, but the key is to work on something to share publicly, together. The service isn’t open to the public yet, but it’s a beautiful set of tools to help you write about the things that interest… → Read More
Flipboard this week announced a new version of its app that allows anyone to make a “Magazine,” which is a curated collection of stories based on any topic that you can think of. The company has shared that over 100,000 magazines have been created since the feature launched. We’ve decided to put together our own magazine called “TechCrunch Weekly,” which will be full… → Read More
At the Launch Conference in San Francisco today, Twitter co-founder Ev Williams took the stage to talk to conference founder Jason Calacanis about everything from his experience at Twitter and the rise of Vine to sharing his take on Google and Facebook as well as the latest from Medium, his latest effort to shape the future of digital publishing.
For those unfamiliar, a serial entrepreneur… → Read More
As a middle-aged author of middling talent, I find myself often working on amazing book projects and finding no way to share them with the world. Formatting issues abound in many writing programs and it’s totes hard for me to grok the difference between PDFs, mobis, and ePubs. That’s why PressBooks is so important. → Read More
This won’t come as a surprise, but the publishing industry is in trouble. Digital technologies have transformed the publishing landscape — just as they did for music — from the way companies distribute content to how we consume it, and our reading habits are fundamentally changing as a result. Book publishers and traditional booksellers are struggling to stay afloat amidst the rising digital… → Read More
Tactilize, a self-publishing service and content network for the iPad, launched last September. At the time, the only way to get content into the app was through a browser-based tool, which always felt like a little bit of a disconnect. With the app’s latest update, users can also create content right on the iPad, too. Tactilize now features an easy-to-use editor that lets you add photos, videos… → Read More
With the closing of Spin Magazine’s print edition alongside the failure of the print edition of Newsweek (not to mention the shuttering of countless newspapers and magazines around the world) you’d be hard-pressed to say that publishing – particularly in the news space – is doing well. → Read More
We’ve told you a bit about the latest writing and blogging platform from Ev Williams’ new product, Medium, and the team has been incrementally adding things, and talent, to the service to make it a full-featured interactive service. It’s been fun watching it evolve, albeit in private, read-only beta, and you can start to see a fuller picture of what it can be. In an email to… → Read More
Good news for Amazon, and for consumers on the lookout for bargain prices for e-books in Europe. Apple, along with the publishers Simon & Schuster, Harper Collins, Hachette and Holtzbrinck (Macmillan), have reached a settlement over e-book pricing in Europe. That deal had become the subject of an antitrust probe initiated in December 2011: the European Commission believed it gave Apple and… → Read More
Parse.ly, the content optimization platform for publishers which emerged from stealth in January has been flying under the radar when it comes to press, but has growing the size of its customer base over the past year. The company recently signed one of its largest deals to date, having now added Thomson Reuters to its list of publishing customers, and says that it’s now on track to profitability… → Read More
We told you a bit about Ev Williams and his vision for the future of publishing with his new company, Medium, the other day. I mentioned in that piece that the company was hiring a variety of interesting positions. Today, Williams announced a new addition, a Director of Content.
The new hire, Kate Lee, is a former literary agent at International Creative Management (ICM). → Read More
Some consolidation afoot in the world of local online publishing: American City Business Journals, the Advance Publications-owned publishers of the Bizjournals network of local business sites, has bought Streetwise Media, which runs two websites based on crowdsourced local news, Bostinno in Boston and In the Capital in Washington, DC. Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. → Read More
Necessity, they say, is the mother of invention, and a stalemate between Amazon and big retailers, including Barnes & Noble, over the sale of books from the online giant’s publishing imprint is giving a fillip to BitTorrent — once a hotbed of piracy, and now a straight-laced and legal content distribution network — as a platform for marketing books. Tim Ferriss, one of the authors signed to… → Read More
You might have heard a few things about Ev Williams and crew’s new product, Medium. To some, it seems like “just another blogging platform,” but if you think about where Ev and Biz Stone come from, these folks are pretty hip to next-level publishing.
I don’t have to remind you that Williams’ company Pyra Labs sold a little product called Blogger to Google, which basically helped revolutionize… → Read More
Tumblr, the micro-blogging service that allows everyone to be a creative publisher, has updated its iOS app to become faster and more engaging. Tumblr says it’s “completely native.”
By “native,” the company means that the app feels faster and more integrated into your iOS experience. After a few minutes of playing with it, I can tell you that the company has backed up its claims in every sense… → Read More
When I first met Micah Baldwin about five years ago, he was working at a company called Lijit, which helped bloggers monetize their content and keep track of how their sites were doing. I could tell that Baldwin was a passionate guy at that moment, scanning the crowd around us to make sure that everyone was having a good time.
It wasn’t even his party. → Read More
Publishing giants Pearson and Bertelsmann are creating a joint venture to pool their respective consumer publishing businesses, Penguin and Random House, in a bid to go the distance in the digital age. The pair said the combined organisation will have a “stronger platform and greater resources to invest in rich content, new digital publishing models”. → Read More
We’re living in a pre-barbaric age. Gutenberg and the printed word cast out the darkness of a hundred mistakes, a thousand benighted cities hastened from the gloom, a million lights winked on in a million windows. The word, once hidden in the chests of the mind, was now scratched onto paper and carefully typeset into folios. The barbarians were cast out, fleeing ahead of the coming enlightenment. → Read More
Writer and “Media Inventor” Robin Sloan wrote an interesting book called Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore about an out-of-work web designer in San Francisco who goes to work at a bookstore. The only things fantastical about his novel, I suspect, are that the web designer, named Clay, is out of work and that he can find a book store in which to work. → Read More
Mojang, the creator of Minecraft, has signed a deal with specialist children’s publisher, Egmont Publishing, for book and magazine publishing rights for the virtual world block-building game that has amassed almost 43 million registered users. The publishing rights are for territories excluding the U.S.
There are currently no details on exactly what kind of Minecraft-related publications the… → Read More
Future, an international publisher whose titles include T3, Official Xbox Magazine and websites like GamesRadar, revealed in a new trading update today that it is building up a good incoming gross revenue stream from Apple Newsstand, which has driven over £5M (roughly $8M U.S) in total since Newsstand’s launch in October. Increases in digital revenues are offsetting the decline on the print… → Read More
Some development in the e-book price war being played out in Europe — and an indirect victory for Amazon and any other retailer not called Apple in the process: the European Commission has announced that Apple and the four big publishers Hachette, Macmillan, HarperCollins and Simon & Schuster have offered to drop their agency pricing agreement for e-books sold in Europe — although the five… → Read More
While magazines and newspapers have slowly made the transition from print to digital, they’re still coming to grips with mobile. For publications (big and small) to survive amidst the industry’s declining ad revenues, it’s imperative for publishers to be able to push their content on every available platform, particularly tablets, the device that’s really best suited to consuming digital… → Read More
In advance of the expected new iPhone launch taking place on September 12th, app analytics firm App Annie has taken a look at some of the traction Apple’s Newsstand is seeing in terms of both revenue and downloads. According to its data, the U.S. is the top country when it comes to revenue generated by Newsstand applications, but China leads in downloads. App Annie also found that iOS Newsstand… → Read More
StoryBundle is just one of a few new “pay-what-you-want” book deals blossoming from the ashes of traditional publishing like ferns after a forest fire. This service, run by former Gizmodo pop star Jason Chen, is one of the cooler offerings out there right now and they started out with the Big Bang package featuring up to seven sci-fi books for your perusal and purchase.
You can donate as much… → Read More
A milestone reached as the world of old media continues its push in a digital direction: the storied, pink-sheeted daily newspaper the Financial Times, read by 2.1 million readers daily, today said digital subscribers now outnumber those in print, and that digital revenues now account for half of all sales in the FT Group. And what’s more, sales actually grew rather than declined.
The FT says… → Read More
Look guys and gals in publishing, sit down. You can bring in your Coco Water. Totally. Yeah. We have some gluten-free sandwiches coming in and I promise this won’t affect summer hours. You can still not come in on Friday. Yeah, you can take off your loafers. Whatever.
Ok. I know you’re confused and hurting. Revenues are falling and ebooks are killing your old surefire model of shipping books in… → Read More
There’s a little-known stipulation in Amazon’s 3G browsing, available primarily on their e-ink devices. Ostensibly, downloading items over 3G is completely free but browsing the web using the device’s weird and slow experimental interface is capped at 50MB. Most users have never hit that cap and there haven’t been many reports of actual notifications.
That’s recently changed. One user of the … → Read More
If you couldn’t tell from the massive e-sales of a tale about a young lady who loves to love the wrong man, ebooks are massively popular, doubling in 2011 to completely surpass sales of hardcover adult fiction.
The Book Industry Study Group released their poll of 2,000 publishers yesterday, announcing that book sales declined 2.5 percent in 2011, down to $27.2 billion from $27.9 in 2010. Ebooks… → Read More
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