With almost every innovation in the publishing industry comes a cry to save the independent book store from impending doom. In the 1930s, the big threat was the paperback. In the 1970s, it was mall chains like Waldenbooks and B. Dalton. Then it was Amazon. And now it’s the ebook. But just as the paperback →
And the walls come tumbling down! As reported this week in Publishers Weekly, the Supreme Court handed copyright holders and publishers a global market haircut by limiting control over intellectual property to the first sale only. Turns out, an entrepreneurial student CAN import cheap textbooks from overseas and undercut the publisher’s sales of that same →
The journal Nature recently published findings of a rare genetic mutation that protects people against Alzheimer’s disease. The new evidence is the strongest yet that excessive levels of a normal brain substance, beta amyloid, are to blame for the disease and may lead to new discoveries on how it can be prevented. With the help of interRAI assessment →
The proliferation of e-content has opened up a world unlike anything seen in traditional publishing. One company, Total BooX, has created a truly innovative business model, allowing you access to ebooks for free, and only charging you for the content you actually read. It’s an app for tablets and mobile devices, allowing you to browse books, →
There’s no question that the publishing industry is evolving rapidly. New technology companies spring up daily providing the latest technologies – tablets, e-readers, smartphones – as well as publishing services like file conversion and optimization. But in the frenzy to ensure their content is as widely available as possible without incurring prohibitive setup and/or conversion →
Google recently announced their new “Augmented Reality” glasses, codenamed “Project Glass,” featuring a Heads-Up-Display (HUD) that can do everything from providing GPS-enabled navigation, telling you the weather forecast, giving you internet-based information about what you’re looking at in real time, and letting you take pictures and share videos. Take a look at their concept video which is, admittedly, →
Just in time for London Book Fair, OBS is celebrating the launch of our new e-distribution portal, ProtoBooks: Your one-stop shop for both print and ebooks. For publishers, ProtoBooks is a fast and secure way to get your books to the global market in a variety of formats: Subscription-based online access; Cloud-stored Flash-based ebooks; Downloads for offline →
On February 13, 2012, Ali Tweel, a blogger from Libya, covered TEDxTripoli: the first global conference held in Libya since the Revolution. TED (Technology, Entertain and Design) has hosted annual conferences around the world since 1990 featuring speakers such as Vice President Al Gore and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos. These independent conferences share TED’s mission of “ideas →
Global Industry Analysts, Inc. (GIA) released a global outlook report on the publishing industry last month, predicting that it will reach $322.7 billion by 2015. This news comes following an unstable point brought on by the global economic recession, but shows that the industry should recover in the coming years. Dropping book sales, fewer new titles, →
Apple held an educational publishing event at the Guggenheim in New York City yesterday, outlining three new apps for students, teachers, and publishers. The first announcement was for iBooks 2, Apple’s reinvention of textbooks. The free app is available today and features color-coded highlighting and note-taking, with a click-for-definition glossary; the notes and highlights transfer →