Last week, French novelist Patrick Modiano was announced as the 2014 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. His publisher David Godine was pleasantly surprised, though he knows the feeling: another French writer and client of Godine’s, J.M.G. Le Clezio, won the coveted award in 2008. Part of Godine’s surprise is the fact that Modiano →
Social media platform Milq, created by Don MacKinnon, Jordan Jacobs, and Tomi Poutanen, was founded upon the belief that today’s feed-based social media is stifling the generation and discovery of online content. With an all-star list of investors ranging from Viacom CEO Tom Freston to Bacardi CEO Michael Dolan, and from Google to Goldman Sachs →
From October 8-12, OBS president Laura Fillmore will be attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany. A major conference in the publishing industry, last year’s Fair hosted over 7,000 exhibitors from over 100 nations; more than 9,000 journalists; and hundreds of thousands of visitors. One of the hot topics at this year’s Fair is →
Tom Kabinet, the controversial online marketplace for used ebooks, has won the first (albeit small) battle in what promises to be a long war regarding the resale of digital files. Tom Kabinet received its first legal notice from the Dutch Trade Publishers Association just 8 days after the site went live; now, only one month →
A debate is raging in the publishing industry about whether the selling of secondhand ebooks is legal. One startup isn’t waiting for the dust to settle. Tom Kabinet.nl is an online marketplace for used ebooks that essentially acts as a liaison between buyers and sellers: it processes credit cards (for a fee), and oversees the →
MIT Researchers have released a prototype for the FingerReader, a wearable device that assists the visually impaired in accessing printed text. Consisting of a ring the user wears on her/his finger, the FingerReader’s internal camera scans text off a printed page and gives immediate audio feedback – that is, it reads the text out loud. →
Last year, the roll out of the multi-state Common Core Standards in the New York state public education system ignited major controversy. Many parents were surprised to hear that the Common Core had been implemented in their children’s schools. They were frustrated at the lack of official communication on the matter, too: the schools and →
Back in 1989, when we published the first trade book about the internet, “The Internet Companion,” our publisher Addison Wesley sold the foreign rights to other trade publishers. We got a lump sum payment for these rights deals, and about a year later would receive some free copies of exotic books — in Polish! Japanese! →
Want to read a novel, but don’t have much time? Thanks to the latest technology in mobile reading, now you can – without Cliff’s Notes, and without skipping a single word. Rapid serial visual presentation is a trend among app developers to enhance and streamline the mobile reading experience. The idea is to tweak the →
Today’s rate of change is the slowest we will see in our lifetimes. In fact, now may be the first time we civilized humans live and work in an environment that is growing in size, breadth, and complexity, at an exponential rate of change. Thank you, Internet! The publishing conundrum : How to rapidly re-engineer →