ePublishing Week in Brief – April 15th to 19th, 2013 Amazon Studios’ first big show is no ‘House of Cards’ The first crop of fresh, original content from Amazon’s Hollywood arm is now ready-to-stream. But are the shows any good? Amazon Studios has been busy. Today, Jeff Bezos’s nascent TV and feature film studio, which lets the public evaluate and comment on scripts online, went live with eight adult comedy and six children’s pilots on Amazon Instant Video and … Read entire article »

ePublishing  Week in Brief –February 25th to March 1st, 2013 Book Keeping LOOK inside any book published since 1970 and you will find a number. But perhaps not for much longer. The International Standard Book Number (ISBN), invented in Britain in 1965, took off rapidly as an international system for classifying books, with 150 agencies (one per country, with two for bilingual Canada) now issuing the codes. Set up by retailers to ease their distribution and sales, … Read entire article »

ePublishing Week in Brief – February 18th to 22nd, 2013   Book publishing offers a variety of careers Books wouldn’t make it to libraries or our homes, if it weren’t for authors and book publishers. Book publishing is a viable career and business path, and has been successfully carried out by many men and women entrepreneurs and individuals, across the country. Fiction and non-fiction writers, and poets find their work journeying to bookstores, libraries, people’s bookshelves, and into the … Read entire article »

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 … Read entire article »

ePublishing Week inBrief – February 4th to 8th, 2013 Apple Opens Its Arms to Self-Publishing E-Book Authors Apple is going after the self-publishing crowd in an effort to loosen Amazon’s grip on the e-book market, but it has some catching up to do. For people already at home in the Apple ecosystem, Breakout Books will no doubt be a welcome addition to iTunes, but its catalog pales in comparison to Amazon’s. Apple has promised to add more emerging authors to the mix. Apple has staked out some precious ground in the e-book battle with Tuesday’s debut of Breakout Books, a new section in the iBookstore. This move is a no-brainer for Apple as it seeks to match what Amazon is doing with its Kindle platform, said Ben Bogardus, an assistant professor of journalism at QuinnipiacUniversity. “Hosting books … Read entire article »

ePublishing Week in Brief – January 28th to February 1st, 2012   Google to pay $82 million to support digital publishing inFrance Google has agreed to pay $82 million to support “digital publishing initiatives” at French newspapers and other publishers under an agreement announced Friday. The investment is part of a deal between the company and the French government that ends a dispute over whether the search engine should pay for “snippets” of articles that show up in Google … Read entire article »

ePublishing Week in Brief – January 21st to 25th, 2013     Book Publishing in the UK Industry Market Research Report Now Updated by IBISWorld Revenue in the Book Publishing industry is estimated to have decreased at a compound annual rate of 3.9% over the past five years due to weak consumer confidence and consumer spending negatively affecting consumer book sales. Improving economic conditions and the growing influence of e-books should see industry revenue return to modest growth over … Read entire article »