February 2001
February 1
"E-Books Are the Next
Chapter in Reading Trends," an overview of e-publishing by
Accessmagazine.com, accompanied by a guide to e-book retail and content sites. 
Launched on January 29, a massive,
searchable database of French libraries, the Catalogue Collectif de France.
The launch was reported in the CyLibris newsletter on French publishing trends. After
releasing the news bulletins by email, CyLibris, a French print-on-demand publisher,
archives them as PDF files in the "Infos" section of its site (cylibris.com).
The site for the online catalog:
"Microsoft Wins New
Yorker eBook Titles, Looks to Future Devices," an eBookNet.com article
on two stories about Microsoft: its exclusive content agreement with the New Yorker,
and its recent acquisition of a company whose software makes text adjust to a variety of
screen sizes.
A report on the conference "What
Can the Publishing Industry Learn from the Music Industry?" Held in New York
on January 31, the conference explored some issues, such as piracy,
facing both industries as they go online.
USA Today reports on
made-to-order paperbacks, "Write Your True Love into a Romance Novel."
The link appeared at e-book portal eBookAd.com, which is highlighting its extensive
catalog of romance novels, in e-book format, for Valentine's Day. The link for the USA
Today article:
February 2
MediaTechnics Corporation, a
publishing service for the educational market, announces the creation of BookOnWeb.com.
The new division will work with publishers to add interactivity to their print documents.
iCulture, part of the Canadian
Broadcasting Corporation, posts the first of a four-part series on e-publishing, "Brave
New e-World." The series begins with a piece on Random House's new digital
imprint, At Random. Next in the series: an interview with Canadian e-novelist Douglas
Cooper, a review of e-book readers, and a look at the REB 1100 reading device.
An interview with In Fidelity
author M.J. Rose, whose writing career took off after she self-published
a novel and marketed it online.
February 3
eBookAd.com adds two new interviews in
its eBookRadio series of audio interviews with people in e-publishing: Kevin
Nathanson, the group product manager of Adobe's e-book division, speaks about the
release of Adobe's new reader, Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader 2.0; Kathy Newbern
discusses her print-on-demand company, yournovel.com, which publishes personalized romance
novels. eBookRadio: Nathanson
and Newbern.
February 5
In its earnings report for the third
quarter, Franklin Electronic Publishers (franklin.com) notes that the eBookMan
will go on sale later this month.
Versaware
(versaware.com) receives a $2 million investment from ITX, a subsidiary of the Nissho Iwai
Corporation, a Japanese trading company, to develop e-publishing services in Japan.
Announced at French book portal
Zazieweb.com: the launch of mozambook (mozambook.net), which will publish
French classics as free downloads formatted for the Microsoft Reader.
"E-Book Dilemma:
Potboiler for the Digital Age," TechWeb News on the problem of
competing e-book standards.
"The Quest for
E-Knowledge," Wired.com looks at the e-library market.
Peter H. Lewis reviews e-book devices
in Fortune, "Read 'Em and Weep."
Also in Fortune: textbook
publishers become comfortable with the Web, "Who's Afraid of
E-Books?"
Publishers Weekly reporter
Calvin Reid writes about the forthcoming launch of a new e-publisher, RosettaBooks.
Headed by literary agent Arthur Klebanoff, RosettaBooks is acquiring the electronic rights
to classic backlist titles from the twentieth century, signing up authors such as Styron
and Vonnegut.
Two more items from PW:
self-help legal publisher Nolo.com has entered into a partnership with a
British company, Epoch Software, which has developed a program that customizes legal
documents online; MemoWare has launched a retail site for e-books formatted for handheld
devices, the PDA Bookstore (pdabookstore.com).
February 6
"Amazon Wants to Sell
Your Stuff," Amazon introduces a voluntary-payment collection service for
Web site owners. The article by M.J. Rose also includes information on e-book selling
trends among independent e-publishers.
Seybold Seminars
(seyboldseminars.com) announces that its Boston 2001 conference, April 8-13, will include
a daylong session on e-books, April 10.
TechBooks (techbooks.com)
announces a new service for publishers, XMLpublish, that prepares text for rapid
reformatting for print and e-publishing.
February 7
Stephen King nets a
profit of $463,832.27 on The Plant, according to an income report posted at his
site (stephenking.com).
Amazon plans to
charge publishers placement fees for being recommended in the promotional emails it sends
out to its customers. CBS.MarketWatch.com conducts an interview on the ethics of the new
policy:
PW Daily reports that
self-publishers M.J. Rose and Doug Clegg have launched an online service, The
Intercom (the-intercom.net), that will help writers and publishers use the Web to
build their readership.
netLibrary
(netlibrary.com) adds short-run digital printing to the services it offers its publishers.
Inside and Publishers Weekly
announce that they will hold a conference for the publishing and media industry on March
19 in New York, 2001 Book Publishing Industry Summit; conference details
available at inside.com.
Noted at Zazieweb.com: a link to a
detailed report in Le Monde on the arrival of major French publishing
houses to the Web. Sidebars: an article on the British publisher Bloomsbury, and
a piece on Italian booksellers and publishers that mentions that the Italian publisher
Mondadori is getting ready to put its first e-books online. Article in French:
"Banned Vietnam Book on
Internet," reported by the BBC News.
February 8
The Open eBook Forum
(openebook.org) will hold its annual meeting in France this year, March 18-21, during the
Salon du Livre, the Paris Book Fair. Prior to the fair, the Salon du Livre is hosting the
first European summit on e-publishing, eBook Europe 2001, March 16-18.
Reported in Bloomberg News:
speaking at a conference of the Association of American Publishers, Henry Yuen, chairman
of Gemstar-TV Guide International, says that by early 2003, Gemstar
(gemstar-ebook.com) will offer an e-book device that will weigh less than 8 ounces and
cost under $100.
Digital fulfillment service Lightning
Source (lightningsource.com) expands into the electronic audiobook market,
forming an alliance with Didio Communications, a British provider of digital audio
services.
Kendra Mayfield of Wired.com reports
on publishers who are testing lower prices for e-books, "What if E-Books Cost
Less?"
In USA Today: "E-Books
Attract Literary Superstars," bestselling writers experiment with e-books,
using them as a marketing tool.
February 9
The e-book writers' group EPIC,
the Electronically Published Internet Connection, announces the finalists for its 2001
Eppie Awards. The awards will be presented in Las Vegas on March 17.
"An ePublisher's Creative
Querying Tips," advice for writers who are sending out submissions to
electronic publishers.
February 12
Audible.com releases
the digital audio edition of IBM and the Holocaust: The Strategic Alliance between
Nazi Germany and America's Most Powerful Corporation, read by the author, Edwin
Black. The cassette and CD versions of the audiobook will go on sale on February 20. Publishers
Weekly reports that the print edition was published in the United States today by
Crown, with eight foreign editions also being released today. The site for the audio
release:
Michael Cader of Publisher's Lunch,
an email newsletter on publishing, reports that Time Warner Trade Publishing has acquired
a controlling interest in ipicturebooks.com, a children's e-book
publisher that launched on February 8.
On the Dow Jones newswire: according
to the Jerusalem Post, Harry Fox, the president, CEO, and
cofounder of the e-publishing service Versaware (versaware.com) has abruptly left the
company; the company had no comment on his departure.
Digital Paperbacks
(digitalpaperbacks.net) launches. The site offers e-book distribution and formatting
services to writers and independent e-publishers.
February 13
Franklin ships the eBookMan.
The handheld device, which comes in three models, is an e-book reader, and also has MP3,
digital audiobook, and PDA functions. Image of the device and product description:
The New Yorker has launched
its site: NewYorker.com. The magazine's e-books are available through the
Barnes & Noble.com link in the site's "New Yorker Store."
Alibris (alibris.com)
increases its presence in Europe, acquiring the assets of classicforum.com, an online,
European retailer of rare and used books. Alibris will provide rare and out-of-print books
to the users of Ingram's Web-based ipage service, launching in April. A comprehensive new
database for booksellers and librarians, ipage will include Ingram's inventory, as well as
the print-on-demand titles in Lightning Source's digital library.
Among the items in M.J. Rose's
"E-Publishing Ink" column: a piece about a free online service from OverDrive, eBookExpress,
that can convert documents into e-books for the Microsoft Reader, and a story on the
success of the e-book release of Underground, a 1997 book on
hackers by Suelette Dreyfus. The book's researcher, Julian Assange, had the idea of
releasing it as a free e-book on the Web. Reissued in multiple formats, the book has been
downloaded more than 200,000 times in the past few weeks.
"Consumers Balk at Price
of E-Books," a Newsbytes.com report on a study by Arthur Andersen.
February 14
A federal appeals court lifts the
injunction that had prevented Barnes & Noble.com from offering
one-click shopping. The decision overturns a lower-court ruling in a lawsuit brought by
Amazon claiming patent infringement. The case goes to trial in September.
As part of its budget cuts, Xlibris
shuts down Inkspot, its community portal for writers. Xlibris will keep
the site up until March 14. The site's editor in chief and founder, Debbie Ridpath Ohi,
discusses the closing and explains what will happen to the content on the site:
February 15
Powell's Books
(powells.com) announces a partnership with the digital fulfillment service Lightning
Source, which will begin providing it with e-books in the Adobe and Microsoft Reader
formats. The online bookseller already carries titles in the Gemstar format.
Bookmice.com
relaunches under a new CEO, Don McGraw. Founded by Aliske Webb, the e-publishing house had
closed down its site at the end of December.
Lycos Asia launches a
portal for Chinese speakers in Southeast Asia. The site includes search features, Wired
News in Chinese, and a large online library of Chinese books. A three-page press
release about the new portal:
"Thus Spake, with
Prescience, Arthur C. Clarke," a New York Times article on sites
devoted to the writer.
"Grove Music Reference
Available on the Web," a review of the online, searchable version of The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd Edition, which takes up 29 volumes
in print.
February 16
AP reports that Xlibris
(xlibris.com) will discontinue its free publishing service as of March 1. The minimum fee
for the company's file preparation services will now start at $200.
According to eBookNet.com, e-book
portal KnowBetter.com is launching a free service, eBook Informer, that
will search online retail sites for new e-books in six different genres. The service will
report the results in weekly email updates.
February 17
New e-book site spotted on the Web:
Vivendi Universal Publishing, a division of French media giant Vivendi Universal, has
launched ePocket (epocket.fr), a retail site for e-books published by the
members of Vivendi's publishing group, formerly known as Havas. The titles, in French, are
available for the Microsoft Reader and for the Mobipocket Reader, e-book reading software
created by the French startup Mobipocket for PDA devices.
February 18
"E-Book Roundup: The
Latest News," recent e-book news from the perspective of the PDF community.
The article appears at PDFzone.com, a news and information site about Adobe Acrobat and
the PDF format.
February 19
CyberRead
(cyberread.com), an online retailer of e-books, announces that it will begin offering
titles from iPublish.com, the digital imprint of Time Warner Trade Publishing.
February 20
HarperCollins
(harpercollins.com) launches its first e-book imprint, PerfectBound. The new imprint will
release 15 e-books by the end of March, publishing them in three formats: Microsoft
Reader, Gemstar, and Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader. Some of the e-books will include
supplementary features, such as author interviews, not available in the print editions.
Calling it the world's "first global e-book publishing program," Harper will
distribute the titles through online retailers throughout the English-speaking world.
Lightning Source and Reciprocal will handle the digital fulfillment. Harper's site for Faithless:
Tales of Transgression, a collection of short stories by Joyce Carol Oates, coming
from PerfectBound on March 8:
Random House Children's Books
(randomhouse.com/kids) releases its first picture e-books, a trilogy about Elmo from
"Sesame Street." The e-books, Elmo Loves You, Elmo's Tricky Tongue
Twisters, and Elmo's New Puppy, are formatted for the Microsoft Reader.
OverDrive (overdrive.com)
opens an office in Amsterdam. The e-publishing service provider's European customers
include Vivendi Universal Publishing in France, Planeta in Spain, and Mondadori in Italy.
OverDrive also has a partnership with Autotext, a Danish company that distributes
OverDrive's e-book and digital management products to publishers in Scandinavia.
Noted at the site for Mondadori
(mondadori.com): the Italian publisher will release its first e-books on February 24.
According to the site, it is the first e-book store in Italy. All of the retailer's
e-books will be offered for the Microsoft Reader. To celebrate the launch, the site will
make 100 titles in Italian, including The Divine Comedy, available for free this
weekend.
"Henry Yuen's Master Plan
to Rule the Publishing World," an in-depth article from Inside.com on the
Gemstar CEO.
Peanutpress.com
releases a list of the top-selling e-books at its retail site last year. Stephen King's Riding
the Bullet leads the list.
Audible.com announces
a partnership with Britannica.com. Starting next month, Audible's downloadable audio
titles will appear as results on Britannica.com's search engine.
February 21
Two eBookNet.com columnists offer
practical advice: Roger Sperberg writes about using colored type for the
Microsoft Reader, listing the font colors he found the best looking; Rusty Fischer
starts his new column at eBookNet, "eBook Marketing Made Easy," with tips on how
to use effective signature lines. Articles: Sperberg and Fischer.
In her Wired.com e-publishing column,
M.J. Rose reports on wordtheque.com, a portal that lists thousands of
texts, in languages from around the world, that can be read online for free. Other items
in her column include a piece on Jason K. Chapman, who posted a thriller,
The Heretic, on the Web for free, earning royalties from the ad revenue generated
from the pageviews; he has earned enough to pay for a paperback edition of the book.
February 22
Google has begun to
index PDF documents and has already added nearly 13 million PDF files to its search
engine, reports the New York Times.
Ian Austen of the New York Times
writes a short piece about the Adobe Acrobat eBook Reader.
The Boston Globe reviews the REB
1200.
BookSite
(booksite.com), a Web site designer and host for independent bookstores, announces a pilot
program with the digital fulfillment service Lightning Source. During the pilot program,
four BookSite member bookstores will be able to sell e-books from Lightning Source's
digital library. The stores will stage e-book events to educate their customers about the
titles, which will be in the Microsoft Reader format.
"Adobe Trips through a
Legal Looking Glass with its Restrictions on Alice E-Book," an Inside.com
article on the controversy over the permissions settings in the Adobe version of Alice
in Wonderland.
February 23
Fictionwise.com
announces that it has become an independent corporation, spun off from Mindwise Media, an
Internet consulting company and incubator. The New Jersey-based e-publisher reissues short
fiction in the science fiction, horror, and fantasy categories. Fictionwise has recently
begun to offer novel-length e-books in other genres, and is also starting to publish
original stories. Fictionwise has grown rapidly since its launch last June and the
creation of the new corporation, Fictionwise Inc., will ensure the e-publishing house's
continued expansion, says co-publisher Scott Pendergrast.
With the digital release of Gao
Xingjian's Soul Mountain, HarperCollins UK becomes the first
major publisher in Britain to issue an e-book.
"Bringing eBooks to
Bricks-and-Mortar Bookstores," eBookNet.com's managing editor, Wade Roush,
interviews Ed Marino, the president and CEO of Lightning Source, and Dick Harte, the
president of BookSite, on their pilot program to sell e-books through independent
bookstores.
Students at the Quaker Valley school
district of Pennsylvania will receive e-book readers, stocked with digital textbooks, as
part of the state's Digital School District program. The school district
was one of three winners in a statewide competition for the program's e-learning grants.
Two area papers report: the Pittsburgh
Post-Gazette and the Pittsburgh
Tribune-Review.
February 25
Reuters reports that e-book devices
were used to read the names of the winners at the TV Guide Awards, to be broadcast on Fox
on March 7. Gemstar-TV Guide International owns both TV Guide
and the technology for the e-book devices. Reuters on the awards:
February 26
The site for Time magazine
will run three free excerpts from Stephen King's new novel Dreamcatcher
in weekly installments starting on March 5. Scribner will publish the print edition of the
book on March 20. Time.com's site for the excerpts:
Greg Lindsay of Inside.com reports on
the AOL Time Warner promotions planned for the online release of the
Stephen King excerpts.
February 27
Random House files
suit against RosettaBooks, an e-publisher that has just launched its site and is reissuing
classic backlist titles published before 1985. Random House contends that RosettaBooks
does not have the electronic rights to books by William Styron, Kurt Vonnegut, and Robert
B. Parker originally published by Random House, and is seeking an injunction to prevent
the company from selling its e-book versions of the authors' works. News stories: Dow
Jones and Reuters.
More RosettaBooks
news: the e-publisher announces a partnership with Microsoft, which will feature
RosettaBooks' Microsoft Reader reissue of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World
exclusively for two weeks when Microsoft relaunches its Microsoft Reader site next month.
RosettaBooks has more than 80 titles already available for sale on its site and will soon
have them listed at Amazon, Barnes & Noble.com, and other e-book retailers as well.
Reciprocal will manage the e-commerce services for the e-publisher. The site for
RosettaBooks:
Toronto-based e-book portal
eBookAd.com and ebook Inc., an e-book manufacturer in Korea, announce that they will
launch a new e-book device, hiebook, in Canada and the United States
later this year. The OEB-compliant e-book reader will have an MP3 player, a built-in
microphone, and PDA functions. Features and product image for the hiebook:
eBookNet.com's Wade Roush reports on
the new hiebook device.
Wired.com e-publishing columnist M.J.
Rose discusses BookSite's pilot program to sell e-books through
independent bookstores, reporting on it in her column and in a six-minute audio interview
on Wired News Radio: article
and audio.
Fictionwise.com
announces that all of its e-books are now available for the Franklin eBookMan, adding
nearly 500 more titles to the number of works that can be read on the e-book device,
released by Franklin earlier this month.
Readerville
(readerville.com), a community site about books run by Karen Templer, a former art
director at Salon.com, opens an online bookstore on its site.
E Ink (eink.com), a
company that makes electronic ink for digital displays, receives a $7.5 million investment
from Philips Components to develop electronic ink for handheld devices. In return, Philips
Components will have the global rights to manufacture and sell handheld displays using the
technology, which is supposed to make reading on-screen easier. The companies plan to have
a prototype ready by June.
February 28
AP reports that the suit brought
yesterday by Random House against the e-publisher RosettaBooks
will have a preliminary hearing on April 20. RosettaBooks has hired the law firm of David
Boeis, who represented the Justice Department in its antitrust suit against Microsoft. Two
articles on the legal issues involved in the Random House case: the New York Times and eBookNet.com.
Steve Outing, a columnist for Editor
& Publisher Online, suggests that e-book manufacturers are pursuing the wrong
strategy by concentrating on books: "Can News Content Save e-Books?"
"EBook Publishers Face
High Costs": speaking at a conference, Laurence J. Kirshbaum, the chairman
of Time Warner Trade Publishing, says that while e-publishers are saving on printing
costs, they are incurring unexpected expenses because of format conversion errors and
other infrastructure problems.
"Gemstar: The HBO of
eBooks," eBookNet.com columnist David Palmer analyzes the e-book strategy of
Gemstar's CEO, Henry Yuen.
—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):
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