Group items tagged

More people are turning to the Internet for their arts consumption...seems to me that this might have implications for 1) people working in the arts (they have to market themselves too), and 2) people who want to do e-projects of various sorts (there is an audience for more complex online projects).

Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg died yesterday.

Michael Hart of Project Gutenberg died yesterday.

I thought that this was worth reading because it is a back-up plan for the Google scanning project.

In 2007 the JISC national e-books observatory project was set up to undertake market research to help e-book publishers, aggregators, libraries and funding bodies understand the behaviours of e-book users and to assess the impact of free at-the-point of use course text e-books on traditional print sales to students

Editors don't just sit at a desk and make notes on a manuscript; they are the captain of the ship of the next great book.

This article is about the editors of graphic novels, but it applies to any editor and all that the job entails.

As we're unlikely to be actually designing many of the UI for publishing apps ourselves, it's never a bad idea to have this in the back of your mind when speaking with your design firm/vendor/department at the start of a project. Especially, with the growth of smartphones, mid-sized and larger sized tablet devices.

Victory for a fair use claim in the Google book scanning project.

Projections from PWC

Crowdfunded ebook operation that is just releasing it's first "unglued" edition, that is, not proprietary to any device and free to all who want to download it.  What's cool about Unglue.it is that they're attempting to raise money for specific publishing projects to compensate authors, and get their work out to anyone who can download it.  It's early and success is not guaranteed, but it's a cool idea!

With Wave, Google is integrating email, instant messaging, media sharing, social networking, document creation, project management, and entertainment.

Financing a publishing project by crowdsourcing. 

Google will include magazine content in its Book Search--but what will magazine publishers get out of it?

A group of writers and editors created a magazine in two days, in an experimental project that aimed to use the Internet to shake up the way a print magazine is made.

This article discusses how some major news organizations are participating in the "Digital Newsbook Publishing Project" which hopes to sell in-depth articles as digital books. This sounds very promising and reminds me a conversation we had in class about this very topic.

Interesting project for Internet archiving...wonder about some of the (eventual) privacy issues that might be involved, though. As the article quotes the archivist: "'Whoever is going to be president in 2048, she's in high school now, and she may have a Web site, and we probably have it.'" How many political opponents would love to seize on this hypothetical person if her teenage rants (e.g., "OMG my mom is so horrible, she won't let me go to Kasey's party on Saturday! Isn't there some kind of law against child abuse?") came to light when she's 53 and in a position of power? Is/Will it be considered fair game to judge a middle-aged woman by what the adolescent says now?

Several universities have recently tried a new model for delivering textbooks in hopes of saving students money: requiring purchase of e-textbooks and charging students a materials fee to cover the costs. A recent report on some of those pilot projects, however, shows that many students find the e-textbooks "clumsy" and prefer print.