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 →
Lulu.com has announced that the first annual National Download Day will be December 26, 2011—a day that Lulu predicts will be the highest traffic shopping day for e-reader and tablet content. With Amazon selling over a million Kindles a week and Apple and Barnes & Noble selling tablets at alarming speed this holiday season, it’s hard not to believe that →
Ingeborg Lauterstein survived a tumultuous childhood in Nazi-occupied Vienna, Austria during World War II. She watched the world around her crumble, and lived to tell the tale: some 40 years later, her life and her volatile homeland formed the basis for two novels full of wonder and intrigue: The Water Castle (Houghton Mifflin, 1981) and Vienna Girl (W. W. Norton, →
With the first shipments of its e-reader tablet, the Kindle Fire, Amazon announced its new “Lending Library”—a free service available to “Prime” subscribers that allows them free access to more the 5,000 e-books. This $79.99/year membership also offers free 2-day shipping on all orders and free streaming video and music on the Kindle Fire. Sounds →
The Espresso (or Electronic) Book Machine (EBM), a creation of On Demand Books, is designed for the efficient and worldwide distribution of Print-On-Demand (POD) books. The first EBM was installed and demonstrated in June 2007 at the New York Public Library; today there are over 50 locations worldwide in 10 different countries spanning 5 continents. EBM →
Open Book Systems has been innovating from within the publishing industry since 1982. “OBS” originally stood for “Online BookStore,” the first online book store on the internet in 1992, and now, we are revisiting what it means to publish online. The new Online BookStore will provide publishers with a secure “sandbox” environment for experimenting with →
Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled three new Kindle models last week, including the much-anticipated Kindle Fire tablet. Amazon’s new 7” vibrant color multi-touch tablet sold an estimated 95,000 units in the first day of pre-orders for just $199 each. The new Android-powered tablet is compatible with Android apps sold through Amazon’s app store, with the →
Lulu, the premier self-publishing service on the internet, announced this week that they have formed a partnership with Barnes & Noble, the world’s largest bookseller. The new collaboration will allow Lulu’s members (called creators) to distribute their books through the Barnes & Noble Nook e-reader, what Lulu founder and CEO Bob Young calls: “another step →