Dr. Vint Cerf’s keynote at the AAUP Annual Meeting underlined the criticality of digital preservation, noting how vulnerable our civilization has become as we race to the cloud, no strategy in place to preserve the recorded thoughts, ideas, art and information that we all generate, and which we’ve inherited from generations past. Our collective preservation →
When the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) was introduced in 1990, compliance for the hearty band of e-publishing pioneers at that time meant converting desktop publishing files and HTML files into plain ASCII, to render their content machine-readable, thus offering disabled readers the “full and equal enjoyment” of their content, as well as the “effective →
A recent article in The New Yorker, “The Programmer’s Price,” described a new business model in the tech world: programmers are working with agents to find business opportunities and negotiate contracts. This demonstrates a shift in how the tech world and other industries view programmers – no longer are they hired to sit in a →
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 →
Ever stop to wonder what’s behind the current Yoga craze? It seems like the number of practitioners has been growing by some 20% a year in the USA; “Statistics Brain” tells us that $27 billion was spent on Yoga products in the USA alone in the last year. It might be interesting to correlate the →
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 →
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 →
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 →