January 2001
January 1
Publishers Weekly publishes
its first New Century Roundtable, a series of discussions by publishing
professionals on the book industry. The topic for the first roundtable: Jason
Epstein's Book Business: Publishing, Past, Present, and Future. 
In "Beyond E-Books:
Glimpses of the Future," PW reporter Roxane Farmanfarmaian reports
on upcoming reading technologies.
January 3
British self-publishing service NoSpine.com
releases a survey on e-publishing and consumers' e-book buying and formatting preferences.
In a survey conducted by Versaware
(versaware.com), 62% of college students say that they would prefer an electronic edition
of a textbook to a print edition.
Scorpius Digital Publishing
(scorpiusdigital.com), an e-book publishing house founded by a mother-and-daughter team in
Seattle, announces the publication of its first title, Ariel, an out-of-print
science fiction work by Steven R. Boyett. Scorpius will publish exclusively in the
Microsoft Reader format.
Bertelsmann opens
online bookstores in Italy and China.
According to a newswire story from
SABI (South American Business Information) posted on northernlight.com, six new Internet
publishing companies were launched in Brazil in 2000, in preparation for
the arrival of e-books in the Brazilian market.
January 4
Barnes & Noble.com expands its
role as a digital publisher, creating a new imprint, Barnes & Noble Digital,
that will offer writers a higher royalty rate than any current major publisher: New York Times and CNET News.
Media conglomerate Primedia
(primedia.com) and Brill Media Holdings, which runs the Contentville.com site, announce a
joint venture, Media Central, to be headed by Steve Brill.
An article by Ian Austen in the New
York Times rates e-book devices and software.
netLibrary
(netlibrary.com) announces an agreement to provide its e-books to the member libraries of
SOLINET, a library consortium for the Southeastern United States and the Caribbean.
John Wiley & Sons
(wiley.com) and McGraw-Hill Education (mheducation.com) each announce
plans to produce digital textbooks; the West Group (westgroup.com)
announces that it will launch a pilot e-textbook program, using the goReader, at the
University of Chicago and Wake Forest law schools.
January 5
eBookNet.com managing editor Wade
Roush covers the publishing industry's reaction to the creation of Barnes &
Noble Digital.
January 6
At the 2001 Consumer Electronics Show
(CES) in Las Vegas, Samsung and DataPlay unveil product designs for
portable consumer electronic devices using DataPlay's miniature optical discs that can
store up to 500 MB of data. Image of the technology's application for e-books:
Qubit introduces its
Orbit Wireless Web Tablet at CES. Product image:
January 8
The American Council of Learned
Societies and seven university presses launch the History E-Book Project.
Successful self-published author M.J.
Rose posts an essay at eBookNet.com encouraging writers to consider self-publishing, "Writers:
Give up on Giving up." The article originally appeared at Themestream.com.
January 9
Xlibris (xlibris.com)
adds e-books, in the Glassbook format, to its services for authors.
In her Wired.com e-publishing column,
M.J. Rose reports on Barnes & Noble Digital; BookVirtual,
a company that designs e-books that look like traditional books; and Fictionopolis,
which is publishing a free e-book poetry anthology that will be released in March with
live readings held around the world.
Kaplan (kaplan.com)
and Simon & Schuster publish M.B.A Part-Time in a print and electronic
format. The guide is the first e-book published by Kaplan.
BookTech East
(http://east.booktechexpo.com) announces that it will feature a new pavilion dedicated to
e-books at its upcoming trade show in New York, February 12-13; the London Book
Fair (libf.com) will hold a two-day conference on e-publishing prior to the fair:
ePubLondon, March 22-23.
January 10
TrustData
(trustdatasolutions.com) introduces RightsShare P2P, a software application that combines
digital rights management with peer-to-peer file sharing.
iUniverse.com
receives $21 million in investment funding from Warburg Pincus.
January 11
A report by Kendra Mayfield of
Wired.com on the prognosis for e-books and digital textbooks: "E-Book
Forecast: Cloudy."
Elmore Leonard
announces that he will publish his first e-book, Fire in the Hole, on
Contentville.com. The novella will go online January 17.
Bookface.com shuts
down, citing an inability to raise financing.
January 12
A review of e-publishing guides by
Michael Pastore, publisher of BookLovers Review: "Books about
eBooks: Sizing up the How-To Guides."
January 15
ebrary.com announces
that Dutch publisher Amsterdam University Press will make all of its titles, published in
English and Dutch, available at the site.
Everybook
(everybook.net) releases DocAble, a document management tool for PDF files.
New Straits Times of Malaysia
reports that e-book devices, storing digital textbooks, have been introduced in 100
primary and secondary schools in Malaysia, according to the country's
education ministry. The item appeared on the Asia Pulse newswire, featured on
northernlight.com.
January 16
"From Rejection to
E-Lation": two self-published authors find success online.
A poet multiplies his readership by
going online, noted in an article by Chicago Tribune cultural critic Julia Keller
on author sites, "Ether, Ether!"
January 17
On Demand 2001
(ondemandexpo.com), a conference for marketing professionals and graphic designers that
will take place February 28-March 2 in New York City, announces that it will include a new
forum on digital publishing. Among the presentations: "The Impact of e-Books and
Digital Content on the Printing and Publishing Industry."
Lightning Source
(lightningsource.com), which offers print-on-demand and e-book fulfillment services,
enters into a partnership with Digital River, an e-commerce service provider. The
partnership will allow Lightning to provide publishers with a complete, end-to-end suite
of fulfillment and sales services.
Contentville Press
launches Elmore Leonard's first book in an e-book-only format, Fire in the Hole.
The book's promotional page includes interviews with Leonard and sound clips from his
books.
Fictionwise.com signs
up seven new authors, acquiring nearly 100 more works. Several of the authors are
critically acclaimed science fiction writers, winners of the Hugo and Nebula awards.
January 18
Sharp releases the Copernicus
tablet computer; LG Electronics announces that it will ship its tablet PC, Digital
iPad, later this year. Wade Roush of eBookNet.com reports on the significance of
this technology for e-books.
January 19
Wired News reports that the
Library of Congress has completed its American Memory Project
(memory.loc.gov), putting more than 90 historical collections online.
EPIC, the
Electronically Published Internet Connection (eclectics.com/epic), an e-book writers'
group, announces that it will hold a national conference in Seattle next year, EPIC-Con
2002, March 14-16, 2002.
"eBook Competitions: The
'e' Stands for 'Exclusive'": new eBookNet.com columnist Roger Sperberg
argues that the submission requirements for the two main independent e-book awards may
have ultimately prevented the major New York houses from participating.
eBookNet.com reports on two new
product releases: Royalty Tracker from e-reads.com and Mobipocket
Publisher from Mobipocket, a French startup.
January 22
The French startup Cytale
(cytale.com) releases the Cybook, the first European e-book reader. The device will go on
sale in bookstores and large department stores throughout France.
Questia Media
(questia.com) launches its site, an online research library for college students.
Publishers Weekly takes a
look at four small, independent e-publishers, Wordbeams, Fictionopolis, Rattapallax, and
UndergroundE.com, in "2001: A Digital Book Odyssey."
In an interview about his upcoming
novel, A Painted House, John Grisham mentions that he is
considering writing a short work that would be available online for downloading and
printing.
January 23
In partnership with Adobe, Firstandsecond.com,
an online book retailer based in New Delhi, launches the sale of e-books in India. To
promote the venture, the retailer is sponsoring The Motive, a free, interactive
novel by Tara Deshpande, an Indian actress and writer. Contributing writers can win a trip
for two to Goa.
In her Wired News column,
M.J. Rose writes about a software program that can turn text into an audio file, TextAloud
MP3.
netLibrary
(netlibrary.com) announces that it will integrate its MetaText digital textbooks with
Blackboard 5, a software platform from Blackboard, a provider of online education
services. The integration will make the textbooks available for sale to the users of
Blackboard's software.
January 24
The National Post of Canada
runs a lengthy excerpt from Jason Epstein's Book Business.
Xlibris (xlibris.com)
announces that cookbook author Marcia Adams will publish Marcia Adams: Heart to Heart,
her journal about living with heart disease, next month to coincide with a PBS documentary
on women and heart disease that will feature her. Adams chose to self-publish with Xlibris
to produce the book rapidly so that it would appear in time for the broadcast.
ContentGuard (contentguard.com)
announces a new, customized digital rights management service, RightsEdge. IndyPublish, an
online publishing service, and Libronauta, a forthcoming site for e-books in Spanish and
Portuguese, sign up for the service.
ESPS founds a new division, Liquent
(liquent.com). Liquent will introduce a new technology this spring that will convert
documents to XML for easy repurposing.
GiantChair.com, a
digital distributor for trade publishers, announces that it will use Texterity's TextCafe
service to convert its clients' PDF files into e-book formats.
On its site, eBooksFrance
(ebooksfrance.com) reports that it has made nearly the entirety of its collection
available in two formats, a Rocket edition and XDoc, a format for Palm devices. The
collection includes more than 600 titles, all free.
Qvadis (qvadis.com)
announces that it has released a new version of its Express Reader Pro software for Palm
devices, adding new features such as the ability to convert Word files.
January 26
"A Guide to 2001 eBook
Events & Conferences," a detailed guide by eBookNet's Wade Roush,
listing the dates, descriptions, and panelists for e-book conferences in the United States
and Europe.
Former White House press secretary Marlin
Fitzwater reissues his 1995 memoir on his years at the White House, Call the
Briefing, self-publishing the updated edition through Xlibris (xlibris.com).
January 27
Holland America implements NewspaperDirect's
print-on-demand newspaper service aboard one of its luxury cruises.
January 29
Adobe releases the Adobe
Acrobat eBook Reader 2.0 (ebooks.adobe.com), an upgrade of the Glassbook Reader,
which the company acquired last year. The reader is available for free at Adobe's site and
at Barnes & Noble.com. Both sites are offering several new titles in the format,
including a short story by Ray Bradbury and a companion e-book for the
"Survivor" TV show. Adobe also announced the release of Adobe Content Server
2.0, a software for preparing PDF files for online sale.
Kendra Mayfield of Wired.com reports
on Adobe's e-book marketing focus: "Adobe's Novel Approach to E-Books."
A group of periodical publishers found
the Electronic Book Newsstand Association (ebna.org) to promote the use
of e-readers as devices for news and magazine delivery.
The Virginia Festival of the
Book (vabook.org) announces that it will host the first Independent e-Book Awards
on March 24, among the festival's daylong series of events on e-publishing: "The
e-Book: Publishing and Promoting Books Online." The festival runs March 21-25.
Announced at e-book site
KnowBetter.com: RD Textos (rdtextos.com), a new e-publisher in Barcelona,
has launched a site that will offer Spanish-language e-books for the visually impaired.
Franklin Electronic Publishers
(franklin.com), the maker of the forthcoming eBookMan, releases a free content conversion
kit that will allow publishers to prepare e-books for the device.
"E-Book Readers: Easier
on the Eyes," a review of RCA's e-book devices by Stephen H. Wildstrom in BusinessWeek.
Publishers Weekly interviews Ted
Nardin of the McGraw-Hill Companies. Nardin discusses McGraw-Hill's electronic
publishing program and his views of the e-book market.
"Mapping the
Internet," a PW roundup of travel publishers' Web sites. The
article includes details of the sites' online partnerships and content licenses.
"A 'Revolution' Waiting
to Happen?": children's book publishers discuss their e-book
strategies.
January 30
"New York Stories Go
Electronic": the New Yorker launches its first set of e-books. In
her Wired News column, M.J. Rose also reports on the new criteria for the
Frankfurt eBook Awards.
An analysis of the Adobe-Barnes &
Noble.com partnership: "B&N.com's E-Book Strategy Clarifies."
January 31
In its January/February issue, Poets
& Writers (pw.org) explores electronic literature in a special series, "In
the Realm of Possibilities: Literature and Cyberspace." Two of the articles
are available online at the site.
Noted at French book portal
Zazieweb.com: the complete text of a work on Australian hackers, Underground: Tales of
Hacking, Madness, and Obsession on the Electronic Frontier (underground-book.com), is
now available online for free. The book by Suelette Dreyfus was published
by Random House Australia in 1997.
—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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