GW ePublishing

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?

FOR decades, even after it was renamed and relocated from its original home at Radcliffe, the Columbia Publishing Course seemed unchanging, a genteel summer tradition in the book business, a white-glove six-week course in which ambitious college graduates were educated in the time-honored basics of book editing, sales, cover design and publicity. Not this summer.

This isn't real, but I thought it was a strange, funny, and silly idea at any rate!

What e-books have been missing. DRM compatible.

Forget about the container - it's all about the content.

"The Sony Reader, priced from $180 to $300, will probably be offered with hardware and software improvements in August, Phil Lubell, vice president of digital reading at Sony Electronics, said yesterday in an interview in San Francisco."

The Boy Who Lived also helped breathe new life into the struggling publishing industry. Even before Harry Potter became one of the most successful movie heroes of all time, the Potter books were turning countless people into readers. But that's not all they did.

Now you can get badges for reading Google News. The company is offering a variety of 500 different emblems, each one for a particular topic. As you become more well-read, you'll get a star added to the badge for that topic. There are five different levels of the stars, starting with a bronze star, and as you read more articles you receive a silver, gold, platinum and the coveted blue ultimate star.

There's a blurb and a video at this link -- go take a look. (Also, would it be illegal if instead he was selling ebooks? Do the retailers' laws even cover that, does anyone know?)

Company makes an iPad app publishing system that allow users to build fully customizable apps with real-time update options, allegedly to make the development process as easy as starting a WordPress/WISYWIG editor.

An editorial from an Oxford philosophy professor on the problem of publishing pointless papers being unethical in academic publishing - he argues there is a little of unoriginal drivel being recycled from old papers.

Amazon's rumored tablet computer will be introduced before October, according to a report. The tablet, which would vie with Apple's iPad 2, among other products, will be one of three new hardware products from Amazon coming in the third quarter, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Barnes and Noble offers plenty of newspaper subscriptions for the Nook to fine publications such as The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times, but if you are looking for a way to turn your Nook into a news reader for free, here's how.

By Jason Boog on July 12, 2011 6:00 PM The next time you feel depressed about the future of authors, bookstores or publishing, watch the video embedded above from Half Price Books-How To Build a (New) Bookstore. The time-lapse video shows the construction of a bookstore from empty warehouse to the customer-ready store.

By Matthew Fleischer on July 12, 2011 1:14 PM Newspapers are increasingly staking their claim to the Internet and its emerging advertising bounty. According to a recent comScore study for the Newspaper Association of America, newspapers attracted an average monthly audience of 110.8 million unique visitors over the age of 18 to their websites in the second quarter-that's 64.6 percent of all adult Internet users.

Kids and teens who love to write can publish Nook Color books. On June 12, 2011, Barnes and Noble offered information about their Real Books by Real Kids. On July 12, 2011, Barnes and Noble announced a new way for kids and teen authors to create color ebooks.

Okay, does anyone besides me find it ironic that by making a kerfluffle about it, more people are going to know about this story than just the publication's original readers? Ironic that a post condemning the (lack of) ethics of a publisher are in some ways exacerbating the original problem.

By Jason Boog on July 11, 2011 4:47 PM Could Google+ end the unhappy practice of the author email blast? We hope so… The 21st Century book release always includes an email blast directed at every friend, relative, acquaintance or journalist that the author knows.

Eager to hop on the tablet trend, the publisher of The Philadelphia Inquirer and Philadelphia Daily News plans to sell discounted Android tablets with preloaded content. The announcement, first reported in Adweek, will cost the publisher - Philadelphia Media Network (PMN) - somewhere in the six figures.

Google will make inroads into the ereader market next week when the first such device using the Google eBooks platform will go on sale at Target. The iriver Story HD will retail for $139.99 - the same price as the Kindle and the Nook Simple Touch Reader - at the chain July 17, according to a blog post from Google.

Apparently in some places, the move to digital has been more pervasive than estimated.