April 2001
April 2
LiveREADS, the
publisher of Jack Kerouac's Orpheus Emerged, releases its second e-book, Opening
Day, a novella by Les Standiford based on the history of the Negro Leagues. The
e-book will be available for free this week, April 2-9, the opening week for major league
baseball. Opening Day, formatted for the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader, includes
hyperlinks, streaming audio and video, and rare photographs; it is also available as a
paperback in a print-on-demand format. Salon.com is presenting an audio excerpt from the
book. Links: book site and audio excerpt.
"Science Friction,"
an Industry Standard article on science fiction writer Harlan Ellison's campaign
against e-book piracy. 
Publishers Weekly reports on Audible.com's
audiobook version of Edwin Black's IBM and the Holocaust. The digital download
went online the same day as the print version was published, February 12, a week before
the cassette and CD editions were available. The article is followed by a piece on the
annual Audio Publishers Association Conference, which will be held in
Chicago on May 31. One discussion at the conference will be about combining audio with
e-books, "The New New Thing?: The E-Book/Audiobook Connection."
An article on the arrival of e-book
devices in the libraries of Dakota County, the first in the state of
Minnesota to have them, notes that users who damage the devices are liable for up to $450
in replacement costs.
Steven Brill's Brill Media Holdings
acquires Inside.com, which covers the media industry, including
publishing.
McGraw-Hill Higher Education
(mcgraw-hill.com) announces that netLibrary's MetaText division will prepare digital
versions of about thirty of McGraw-Hill's textbooks. The textbooks will be integrated into
McGraw-Hill's e-learning software, PageOut, and will become available to students in the
fall semester.
April 3
Gemstar shuts down eBookNet.com,
a pioneering e-book Web site founded by Glenn Sanders in 1998. The site was acquired by
NuvoMedia, and later by Gemstar, when it bought NuvoMedia in January 2000. In an email to
subscribers of eBookNet Insider, Glenn Sanders explains that Gemstar closed down
the site to focus on its e-book strategy: e-book content and technology, not industry news
and a community site. The leading e-book portal in the United States, eBookNet.com was an
important resource for the e-book community worldwide. For the past year and a half, under
the guidance of managing editor Wade Roush, the site has published extensive articles on
e-books and the e-book industry, many of them written by Roush, a science and technology
writer. In a special report on the site's closing, Dustin Revin, the executive vice
president of Toronto-based e-book portal eBookAd.com, writes that it is not clear whether
the site has shut down permanently, but that its existence as a source for e-book coverage
is over. Links: Dustin Revin's report;
the personal sites of Glenn Sanders, MiaMedia.com,
and of Wade Roush, ScienceScribe.com.
Author's note: at the
bottom of this Web page are links to two articles I wrote for eBookNet.com. They are now
linked to archival PDF files I made of the Web pages. If you are publishing online as a
contributor to a site, I would urge you to protect your own writing by archiving your
stories. —D.F.
Publishers Weekly Radio
has two brief e-publishing segments at the end of the radio program: a discussion by PW
business editor Jim Milliott of the electronic-rights case argued before the Supreme Court
last week and the second part of PW nonfiction editor Charlotte Abbott's overview
of e-publishing.
Link noted on Michael Cader's Publisher's
Lunch email newsletter: a story in USA Today on electronic developments in U.S.
libraries. More than fifty libraries in fifteen states have an e-books program,
according to the article.
"The E-Book as
Print-Edition Ad," among the items in her weekly Wired.com column, M.J. Rose
writes about the ads LiveREADS placed in its Opening Day e-book for the paperback
version.
"Will E-Books Ever Get
Reviews? Can They Sell without Them?" Inside.com reports.
Booksurge.com, a new
online bookstore for e-books and print-on-demand titles, launches its site.
April 4
eBookAd.com forms
partnerships with three online bookstores, Fictionwise.com, CyberRead, and Booksurge.com,
to offer books for the hiebook. In February, eBookAd announced an alliance with ebook
Inc., the Korean manufacturer of the reading device, which the e-book portal will help
launch in North America later this year.
Xlibris
(xlibris.com), a provider of publishing services for writers, upgrades its site, adding an
automated online submission procedure for manuscripts, faster bookstore searches, and more
sales reporting features.
ContentGuard
(contentguard.com) announces that the global management and technology consulting company
Accenture, formerly Andersen Consulting, will include ContentGuard's RightsEdge technology
in the company's suite of services for its clients. The technology provides rights
management for e-books and other digital products.
April 5
The Open eBook Forum
(openebook.org) announces that EBX, the Electronic Book Exchange, has merged with the
OeBF. The members of the two groups are now part of a single, unified e-book standards
organization.
"Stock Focus: E-Book
Companies," Forbes.com evaluates the stock of seven companies that have
invested in e-book technologies: Gemstar, Palm, Adobe, Microsoft, AvantGo, Franklin, and
Handspring.
Starting with the May issue, Yahoo
Internet Life will begin reviewing e-books. Former New York Times book
reviewer Christopher Lehmann-Haupt will start his new column by reviewing
e-books by Elmore Leonard and James Ellroy, both published by Contentville Press. The
story from Inside.com:
The PEN American Center, a membership
association of literary writers and editors, has launched a new literary journal, PEN
America, which is available in print and online. Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag,
Joyce Carol Oates, and other contributors discuss classic modern writers. A tribute to
Virginia Woolf includes a talk by Mary Gordon on Woolf's masterwork The Waves.
Other honored writers in the collection: Italo Calvino and Borges.
Bibliofind
(bibliofind.com), a portal for rare and out-of-print books that Amazon acquired in 1999,
will become integrated into Amazon's Marketplace and zShops programs as of May 7.
April 9
OverDrive launches Content
Reserve, a free distribution service for publishers and online book retailers.
Content Reserve handles e-books and print-on-demand titles. Steve Potash, the CEO of
OverDrive, has published an e-book with advice for booksellers and commercial publishers, The
eBook Industry Survival Guide. The e-book is available for free at the new site and
is offered in three formats: PDF, Microsoft Reader, and Word 2000.
Sales at Booklocker.com jump
by 20% in March. An article published by marketingsherpa.com outlines the e-book seller's
pricing and marketing recommendations.
Wired.com posts two articles on the
problem of creating and preserving archives in the digital age. Links:
electronic archiving at libraries
and by the U.S. government.
Franklin Electronic Publishers
(franklin.com) receives a patent on the microprocessor in its eBookMan reader and
announces that it has begun a licensing program for the processor and the company's other
eBookMan technology.
Ansyr (ansyr.com)
introduces new software lines at Seybold Seminars in Boston: Ansyr Mobile Office, Ansyr
PageSharing, and Ansyr Components and Tools. The new software groups include new products
and expanded versions of earlier programs. Ansyr's software allows users to read PDF files
on handheld devices.
Liquent (liquent.com)
releases Liquent Xtent, a software that converts documents into XML for repurposing.
DocuRights
(docurights.com), a PDF digital rights management program from Aries Systems, now supports
the Linux operating system. The DocuRights technology serves scientific, technical, and
medical publishers.
Digital content marketer Digital
Goods (digitalgoods.com) enters into a partnership with Groove Networks, the
creator of a peer-to-peer computing platform, to develop a peer distribution system for
Digital Goods' content.
Beginning this fall, goReader
(goreader.com), the maker of an e-book device for students, and The Douglas Stewart
Company, a distributor of products for the education market, will provide electronic
textbooks to campus bookstores. The Douglas Stewart Company distributes and markets
computer products and student supplies to a network of more than 3,000 college bookstores.
Texterity
(texterity.com) announces that Publishing Dimensions, a new data conversion house for
publishers, will integrate Texterity's TextCafe into its production process. Texterity's
service will convert PDF files into the Open eBook format, which Publishing Dimensions
will use to create e-books in multiple formats. Publishing Dimensions is the first
conversion house to include TextCafe's automated service in its conversion process,
eliminating the cost and time of manually converting the PDF files. The automation will
cut the production cycle from weeks to hours, according to Kenneth Brooks, the president
of Publishing Dimensions. Before founding the company, Brooks was the vice president of
digital content at Barnes & Noble.com.
Publishers Weekly leads its
"Epublishing" collection of e-book news with a story on Australian-based e-book
retailer eBooks.com. In a report on the London Book Fair,
PW writes about the e-book discussions at the fair, noting that Microsoft,
according to Michael Fragnito, the vice president of Barnes & Noble Digital, will soon
come out with a "killer device" that will help e-publishing take off. The
article has a link to a story on ePub London, a two-day conference on
e-publishing that preceded the fair. Links: Epublishing and the London Book Fair.
PW also reports that the
Italian publishing group Longanesi has launched a Web site
(infinitestorie.it).
Forbes runs a short profile
on the founder of the online library Questia Media, Troy Williams.
April 10
Amazon.com adds
titles in the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader format, expanding its digital library by nearly
2,000 titles. Over the next year, Amazon will begin offering e-books in the Adobe format
in its online stores in France, Germany, Japan, and the United Kingdom.
Adobe releases a beta
version of Acrobat Reader for Palm devices. Adobe also announces that it has shipped Adobe
Content Server 2.0, an encryption and distribution system for PDF documents, and that an
upgrade to Adobe Acrobat, version 5.0, is now also available. Adobe's site for the Palm
beta:
Hewlett-Packard
(hp.com) licenses Adobe's PDF technology for its products and services. The first HP
products to use the technology will include scanners, multifunction devices, and digital
cameras and will become available as of next spring.
Barnes & Noble.com
opens an "Articles for Download" store, offering thousands of short texts for
purchase and printing. The articles, primarily on business and computing, are sold in
partnership with MightyWords.com.
Agfa Monotype
(agfamonotype.com) introduces a font licensing program for e-book publishers, the E-Book
Font License. The company's font library includes more than 3,200 TrueType and PostScript
fonts.
ContentGuard
(contentguard.com), a digital rights management company, and Digital Goods, a digital
content marketer, form an alliance, combining their services. ContentGuard will integrate
its RightsEdge technology into Digital Goods' e-commerce and marketing suite, Amplifi.
In an article by Kendra Mayfield of
Wired.com, bestselling erotica writer Susie Bright explains why she has
chosen to self-publish her latest book as an e-book and a print-on-demand title. Wired.com
"E-Publishing Ink" columnist M.J. Rose writes about the sudden closing of eBookNet.com,
which has caused the loss of hundreds of reference articles on e-publishing. Rose's
article also has an item about the American Revolutionary Archive, a
collection of documents from the period, now available as free e-books. Links: Mayfield and Rose.
"The eLitists vs. the
eBook," Justin Driver's second article for Slate's new e-book club,
considers the resistance among some writers and critics to e-books, which he parallels to
the snobbery shown when paperbacks appeared in the 1940s.
April 11
Borders turns over the operation of
its online store, Borders.com, to Amazon. The store will relaunch in
August. Customers will have the option of buying a book online and picking it up at a
Borders store. Borders has retail outlets in the United States, Britain, Australia, New
Zealand, and Singapore.
Le Journal du Net reports
that the French e-book software developer Mobipocket (mobipocket.com) has
raised a second round of financing, receiving 7 million francs (about $950,000) from its
initial investors. The largest investor is Viventures, the venture capital group for media
conglomerate Vivendi Universal. In the next three months, Mobipocket is planning to
license two new products: a software tool that will allow companies to transfer their
documents to a variety of handheld devices, and a service that will let employees access a
company's intranet on their PDAs. Mobipocket is also planning to license its software. In
the future, according to the article, the company hopes to start an e-publishing venture
with Vivendi subsidiary Vivendi Universal Publishing. The venture would focus on
publishing texts for the professional market.
"E-Libraries Hoping to
Profit from Term Paper Blues," a Reuters article on online libraries,
including ebrary, Questia, and netLibrary.
April 12
PW Daily reports that the
author site PreviewPort (previewport.com) will create Web pages for 3,000
Random House authors, adding the authors to the site's International Author Index. In
addition to the Random House deal, PreviewPort is about to conclude an agreement with the
Society of Authors in Britain, which will add another 6,000 writers to the index.
Amazon's e-books section begins to
offer works from MightyWords.com, a publisher of eMatter, articles and
texts under 100 pages in length. Most of MightyWords' titles are on business and
computing.
Pearson Education France,
a French subsidiary of the Pearson Group, selects SealedMedia, a digital rights management
company headquartered in San Francisco, to secure and distribute the French company's
multimedia publications at its information technology learning site, InformIT.fr. The U.S.
counterpart of the site is InformIT.com.
April 16
"Sales Growth in Books
Online Is Leveling Off," according to the New York Times.
Publishers Weekly reports on
the lawsuit brought by Random House against the e-publisher RosettaBooks.
April 17
"Authors, Agents on
E-Books' Side," more on the RosettaBooks lawsuit, from Wired.com.
Seybold Reports' E-Book Zone
has a news item on two market studies by Philips Electronics on e-book
devices. In the first study, conducted last fall, consumers expressed a preference for
devices with screens between 5.5 and 8 inches, costing under $160, and including email and
PDA functions. The findings of the second study, a survey on screen sizes and types, will
become available this summer.
News noted at the French book portal
Zazieweb.com: the European Union has adopted a directive on copyright
policies. The directive, which will also apply to digital media, was the result of three
years of discussion and will be implemented by the EU's member nations within the next
year and a half. An announcement from the European Union:
The American Management
Association (amanet.org) signs agreements with Digital Goods and DigitalOwl.
Digital Goods will provide content marketing services for the organization's e-books on
business and management, and DigitalOwl will handle the digital rights management.
DigitalOwl will also make the e-books available in custom editions.
April 18
"Why Paper Is Still
Better Than Plastic," USA Today reviews the eBookMan, the REB 1100,
the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader, and the Microsoft Reader.
"I Bought the Electronic
Rights, but What Do I Own?" KnowBetter.com's columnist on copyright issues,
John Rutledge, responds to an e-publisher's questions about print and audio rights.
Fictionwise.com, an
e-book publisher, expands into distribution, signing distribution agreements with
LiveREADS, the publisher of Jack Kerouac's Orpheus Emerged, and ElectricStory, a
publisher of fantasy and science fiction e-books. Fictionwise has developed a number of
systems, including micropayments, promotional discounts, and coupons, to sell its own
works, and will use them to help sell the two publishers' titles.
Audible.com displays
its wireless audio service, AudibleWireless, at the e-Learning Conference and Expo in
Washington. The service will allow companies to send audio bulletins and reports to the
handheld devices of their customers and employees. The service's users would also have
access to Audible's audiobooks and other digital titles.
Digital Goods
(digitalgoods.com), a content marketer for e-books and other electronic texts, enters the
audio market, announcing a joint sales agreement with MediaBay, a seller of audiobooks and
recordings of classic radio programs. The two companies will add stores to their sites
featuring each other's digital catalogs.
April 19
MemoWare's PDA Bookstore
(pdabookstore.com), a retailer of e-books formatted for handheld devices, announces that
it is now offering more than 150 original e-books on business management. The titles are
from PocketManager.com, an Irish firm that publishes e-books on management.
April 21
"The Paperless Office?
Not by a Long Shot": at the end of this article, the New York Times reports
that Microsoft will release the Tablet PC next year, priced at about $3,500.
April 23
Toshiba has developed
an e-book prototype with a two-panel screen.
Publishers Weekly has a story
on the e-book portal eBookAd.com and its forthcoming North American
launch of the Korean-made hiebook. Among the other items in PW's e-publishing
column is a piece on ebrary.com. The e-library has reached an agreement
with Yale University Press to put thousands of titles from the publisher's backlist
online.
PW Daily reports that ipicturebooks.com,
a publisher of e-books for children, will release three movie tie-ins for the animated
movie "Shrek." The first-ever film tie-in e-books, according to the company,
they will be released on May 18, the day the film opens, and will be featured on the sites
for the film and for its producer, DreamWorks.
April 24
MightyWords.com forms
a partnership with the digital fulfillment service Lightning Source, which will provide
MightyWords' titles in the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader format to Amazon.com. MightyWords
began to offer its titles on Amazon on April 12 and plans to have its entire catalog,
which includes more than 5,000 titles, available at the retailer's site within the next
three months. MightyWords publishes articles and short texts on business, computing, and
general-interest topics.
Fictionwise.com
enters the wireless market. The e-publisher will provide e-books, formatted for the
Microsoft Reader, to the subscribers of Versaly Games, a Seattle publisher and distributor
of interactive games and digital content for mobile phones.
In her weekly Wired.com column, M.J.
Rose has a story on the Versaly partnership and other recent developments at Fictionwise.com.
Jerry Justianto, the publisher of the
Web log Pocket PC eBooks Watch, has launched a newsgroup for Pocket PC
e-book users. He also reports that another site for Pocket PC readers, Ojster's
World, has started a Web ring on e-books that are compatible with the Pocket PC.
The information on the two lists is in the April 20 and April 21 entries of the log.
PerfectBound, the
e-book imprint of HarperCollins (harpercollins.com), which launched at the end of
February, begins the release of its April/May list with the e-book edition of Louise
Erdrich's The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, which came out in
hardcover on April 8. The e-book version of the novel includes an interview with the
author and a reading group guide.
April 25
Adobe releases Adobe Acrobat
eBook Reader 2.1. The upgrade includes several new features: CoolType, a font
rendering technology that allows users to choose the font resolution they prefer; an
interactive dictionary; and the ability to give or lend an e-book, if the publisher has
permitted it. Adobe has also released a free plug-in for Acrobat 5.0, MakeAccessible,
for converting untagged PDF files into tagged documents. Tagged PDFs can be saved in the
Rich Text Format for repurposing. Adobe's download sites: Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader 2.1
and MakeAccessible.
Salon.com launches Salon
Premium, a version of the online magazine that will offer exclusive features and
the option of turning off the ads. The subscription service will cost $30 a year. In a
message to readers, Salon's editor, David Talbot, discusses the state of online
journalism and the magazine's decision to charge for content.
"Down and Out with
E-Books," an article about the writer's misadventures during his first
encounter with e-books.
April 26
"eBooks on Your Mobile
Phone—Coming Soon," a Newsbytes.com story on the new alliance between
the e-publisher Fictionwise.com and the content distributor Versaly Games.
Adobe is restricting the number of
download sites for the Adobe Acrobat Reader to prevent older versions of
the software from being distributed, according to this news item at PDFzone.com, a site
that will be allowed to continue as an official source for the software.
"Where Are We Headed with
eBooks?": Ted Padova, the author of the Acrobat PDF Bible and an
authority on Adobe products, makes some predictions about e-publishing, giving the reasons
why he thinks print publications will become nearly extinct.
Newsweek publishes an article
on Microsoft's Tablet PC, which will be available next year; the piece
includes a sidebar on a tablet device from Sony, Air Board, coming to the
United States this fall.
April 27
"How to Crack Open an
E-Book," a hacker claims to have cracked the encryption for Gemstar's Rocket
eBook format, reports M.J. Rose in Wired News.
BusinessWeek Online
releases an e-book excerpt from the BusinessWeek Guide to the Best Business Schools.
The excerpt ranks the top ten business schools in the United States. The full edition,
which rates the top fifty schools, will be published as an e-book next month and in a
print version in July. BusinessWeek's e-book store:
netLibrary
(netlibrary.com) adopts the Open eBook format for its collection of e-books. The company
had been using a proprietary format. Switching to the Open eBook format will lead to a
faster conversion process and to a greater number of frontlist titles, according to the
company. netLibrary also announced that it would start farming out the electronic
conversion of its titles, resulting in a staff cut of ninety jobs. The remaining employees
will focus on customer and publisher support. Other netLibrary news: the Council
of Federal Libraries, a consortium of federal government libraries in Canada,
announces that it has purchased 462 e-books from the e-library for the use of its members.
April 29
iPublish.com, the
e-book imprint of Time Warner Trade Publishing, has launched its site. The site includes a
store for Time Warner e-books, a community site for writers, and a section for manuscript
submissions. The submissions that receive the highest ratings from site visitors will be
reviewed by iPublish's editors for e-book publication. Works that are longer than 100
pages will also be released in a print-on-demand format. If the electronic version does
well, iPublish will then consider the text for a standard trade edition, the only
publishing house making such an offer, according to the publisher. iPublish.com's site:
April 30
AOL Time Warner officially launches iPublish.com.
Articles: CNET News.com
and Wired.com.
According to this article on the
launch of iPublish.com, the site has already received forty submissions.
PBS's "NewsHour with Jim
Lehrer" presents a special report on e-publishing. The show's Web site has a
RealAudio version of the segment and includes transcripts of the full interviews, which
were edited down for the broadcast. Featured guests: author and Wired.com columnist M.J.
Rose; Time Warner Trade Publishing chairman Larry Kirshbaum; and Wall Street Journal
technology columnist Walter Mossberg.
Wall Street Journal Books
releases an e-book on MBA programs in the United States, The Wall Street Journal Guide
to Business Schools, presenting it with a series of companion discussions at the
paper's career site, CareerJournal.com, this week. The 1,257-page guide, a ranking by
corporate recruiters of more than 150 business schools, is being published as an e-book
because the format is searchable, says the company. Wall Street Journal Books is an
imprint of Simon & Schuster. The site for the book:
"Gemstar Deal to Buy
Versaware Falls Through," Publishers Weekly confirms a report that
appeared in the Jerusalem Post on April 23: PW and Jerusalem
Post.
"The Next New Hope?"
a writer and bookstore owner, Susan Taylor Chehak, writes an article for PW on
her success with the print-on-demand format.
In a report on a conference for
computer publishers, PW writes about the custom e-book and print-on-demand
editions being produced by Hungry Minds and Microsoft Press.
Publishers Weekly also
reports that Doug Bennett, a former executive at Macmillan, has been
named president and chief operating officer of iUniverse.com, an e-publishing service for
writers and publishers. The company's founder, Richard Tam, is turning over the position
of president to Bennett but will remain CEO. According to PW, Warburg Pincus,
which invested $21 million in the company in January, had wanted an executive with more
experience than Tam, an entrepreneur, to handle the day-to-day management of the company.
"Making e-Books
Better," Alexis D. Gutzman, a writer on technology, makes the case that the
e-book industry ought to capitalize on the advantages of electronic publishing: immediate
distribution, searchable text, and the ability to publish documents that can be shorter
than print books. In the article, she also describes DigitalOwl's custom publishing
program.
Franklin Electronic Publishers
(franklin.com) announces that it will be launching a national advertising campaign for its
eBookMan line of reading devices, which are now available at Best Buy, CompUSA, J&R
Electronics, and Electronic Boutique, as well as at Staples and Amazon.com. In addition to
their expanded distribution in the United States, the devices are now also being offered
in more than eighteen countries.
Noting that it has had a record year, OverDrive
(overdrive.com), an e-publishing service provider, announces that it has expanded its
offices at its Cleveland headquarters and is recruiting 250 new employees for its home and
overseas offices.
—Donnali Fifield
Donnali Fifield
is the author of William & Wendell: A Family Remembered (Binary Books) and
the daughter and literary executor of William Fifield (The William Fifield Collection). |
 
Articles on e-publishing (archived PDFs of the Web
pages):
|
