March 2001
March 1
BusinessWeek runs a cover
story on Gemstar-TV Guide International CEO Henry Yuen
in its March 12 issue. The issue is available online now at the magazine's site. The cover
package looks at Yuen's interactive TV enterprises and main business partnerships, and
includes a sidebar on e-books and the REB 1200, which will be featured at the TV Guide
Awards. The devices were used to read the names of the winners of the awards, which will
be broadcast on Fox on March 7. 
Of interest in an Inside.com report on
a conference on bookselling: Michael Fragnito, the vice president of
e-books for Barnes & Noble.com, talks about adding a link in the forthcoming Dean
Koontz e-book, The Book of Counted Sorrows, to the writer's other books on the
retailer's site. Koontz's e-book will inaugurate the bookseller's new publishing imprint,
Barnes & Noble Digital.
"E Ink: Your Hands Will
Thank You," Kendra Mayfield of Wired.com reports on the electronic ink
technology being developed for handheld devices by E Ink, a startup in Cambridge,
Massachusetts.
"The World in Your
Hands," an article by the BBC News on e-publishing in Britain.
March 2
In "A Report from the
Brussels Foire du Livre," Eric Hanuise, an information technology specialist
who lives in Belgium, writes about his impressions of the e-book devices on display at the
book fair, including the newly released Cybook, the first European-made e-book reader. He
also relates some unofficial news about Gemstar: according to a Gemstar product
demonstrator at the fair, Gemstar will release its e-book devices in Europe this fall,
setting up a call center in Ireland to provide customer support; Gemstar is also working
on an operating system revision that will allow both the REB 1100 and the REB 1200 to use
the same e-book format.
March 4
In a final newsletter from Bookface.com,
which shut down its site in January, the site's executive editor, Lou Anders, announces
the release of Outside of the Box: The Best Short Fiction from Bookface.com, a
print edition of eighteen short stories that appeared on the site. Published by Wildside
Press, the stories are in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, and suspense genres. The
site for the anthology:
March 5
Time.com releases the first of three
free excerpts from Stephen King's Dreamcatcher in multiple
formats: Flash, HTML, downloadable PDF, and audio. Time.com's presentation of the excerpt
also includes a biography and magazine stories about the author. The next excerpts will be
on March 12 and 19, leading up to the book's print publication on March 20. Excerpt:
"BookTech Looks at
E-Publishing," Publishers Weekly reports on the recent BookTech
East conference. The article is accompanied by other stories on e-publishing: a piece on
Fictionwise.com; a sidebar on the University of Virginia press, which has received a grant
to create a new digital imprint; and an article on Reciprocal, a digital rights management
company.
PW on Random House's
suit against RosettaBooks; the article concludes with information on
Random House's e-book plans, disclosed through the publisher's legal brief:
"Preparing for
Tomorrow," small presses discuss their print and e-publishing
programs.
"Beyond Hypertext: Novels
with Interactive Animation," the New York Times looks at electronic
literature.
Audible.com announces
that it has begun a digital audiobook lending program for libraries, initiating the
program on March 1 with the Kalamazoo Public Library.
MightyWords.com
enters into an agreement with Digital Goods, which will provide targeted marketing and
viral distribution services for MightyWords' top 200 titles, mainly electronic texts on
business and technology.
Fnac.com, the online
retail site for the Fnac, a major bookseller in France, launches DigiFnac, a downloadable
service for books, music, and software.
French publishing group Havas, part of
the newly created media conglomerate Vivendi Universal, relaunches its site under its new
name, Vivendi Universal Publishing (vivendiuniversalpublishing.com). The
English-language version of the site will go online on March 19.
March 6
Slate.com announces
the launch of an e-book club, which will feature a column on e-books and a monthly email
newsletter on the online magazine's book and e-book coverage. In the inaugural column of
the Slate eBook Club, Justin Driver, an assistant literary editor at the New Republic,
proposes the establishment of a reliable e-book bestseller list.
Slate.com also
releases a free e-book excerpt, in the Microsoft Reader format, of Slate
columnist Jacob Weisberg's George W. Bushisms: The Slate Book of the Accidental Wit
and Wisdom of Our 43rd President.
Verizon Wireless launches
the United States' first wireless service for "smart phones," a wireless phone
with PDA functions and Web access. Users will be able to read e-books on the device.
Product image:
"DataPlay Disks Poised to
Become Industry Format," Reuters on DataPlay's miniature optical discs: article and
DataPlay's site
for the discs' use for e-books.
"E-Authors Fight for
Their Writes," Wired.com columnist M.J. Rose gives an audio-interview
version of her e-publishing column. News in her column that is not included in the audio
interview: People and Yahoo Internet Life are planning to start
reviewing e-books. Rose: audio
and column.
March 7
"Random House Rejects
E-Fiction," the publisher's digital imprint, AtRandom.com, will focus on
nonfiction for its fall e-book list, reports Hillel Italie of the Associated Press.
March 8
Signaling its intent to expand its
downloading program, Amazon.com announces the creation of the Amazon Worldwide
Digital Group. Amazon's press release notes that the group's general manager,
Jeff Blackburn, would join executives from Microsoft and Random House for a special event
planned today for the launch of Random House's digital imprint, AtRandom.com.
USA Today reviews
AtRandom.com's e-book anthology Men Seeking Women, short stories
by male writers on finding romance online.
Item noted in the news section of the
Seybold Reports' newly launched E-Book Zone
(seyboldreports.com/ebooks): a brief item dated February 20 reports that Microsoft has
released versions of its free Microsoft Reader in several European languages: French,
Italian, Spanish, and German.
"Multitasking eBookMan
Packs Power in Palm-Size Box," a review of Franklin's e-reader in the Boston
Globe.
March 9
PerfectBound, HarperCollins' digital
imprint, announces the e-book release of Joyce Carol Oates' Faithless:
Tales of Transgression, posting one of the short stories in the collection online for
free: "The High School Sweetheart: A Mystery." The link to the story:
In a test to investigate the illegal
distribution of e-books without copy protection, Jerry S. Justianto, the Djakarta,
Indonesia-based publisher of the Web log Pocket PC eBooks Watch,
discovers no instances of pirated copies of the two books he tracked, The Seven Habits
of Highly Effective People and Pay It Forward. His discussion of the test is
in the March 9 entry of the log.
"Putting the Franklin
eBookMan through Its Paces," a very thorough review, with scanned images of
the device, by Eric Hanuise, an information technology specialist from Belgium.
BOL.fr, the
Bertelsmann-owned French online bookseller, has launched an e-book store. The e-books are
in the Mobipocket Reader format for PDA devices.
March 12
Barnes & Noble (bn.com)
creates an e-book partnership with CPI, a European manufacturer of books headquartered in
France. CPI's data conversion facility in the Philippines will provide e-book preparation
services for the bookseller's electronic imprint, Barnes & Noble Digital.
In the "News Shorts" section
of its site, Publishers Weekly reports that the Frankfurt Book Fair
is adding a daylong conference on digital publishing to its program; PW also has
a short piece on Contentville.com, which is seeking to expand its
partnerships with independent booksellers.
March 13
Slate releases Bill
Hill's The Magic of Reading as a free e-book in the Microsoft Reader
format. The 1999 white paper by the researcher in Microsoft's e-book group details the
principles of comfortable reading that were considered when Microsoft developed the
Microsoft Reader.
"eBook Software
Capabilities: Pushing the Envelope," new eBookNet.com columnist Tim Cooper,
the former chief technology officer for LiveREADS, lists the capabilities of the leading
e-book formats in eight categories, including multimedia and interactivity. News item:
Cooper writes that a company in Italy, IPM-NET, will release an e-reader, Myfriend,
this summer. The device, the first e-book reader from an Italian manufacturer, will
display e-books in the Microsoft Reader format. Links: Cooper's article; image and product features of Myfriend.
In the second half of her weekly audio
interview at Wired.com, e-publishing columnist M.J. Rose discusses the e-book
market; in her Web column, she also writes about science fiction publisher Baen
Books, which is releasing some of its titles as free e-books: audio and column.
Knopf has launched a
sign-up page for readers who would like to receive a poem a day by email from the
publisher during April, National Poetry Month.
March 14
"Another Dot-Com Dream
Punctured: Random House Scaling Back E-Books," writing on the retrenchment
at Random House's electronic imprint, AtRandom.com, the New York Observer notes
that e-books are starting to be seen as marketing tools for print sales.
Microsoft announces that HanDBase, a
Palm database application, and MemoWare, a content site for Palm devices, will now support
the Pocket PC (pocketpc.com), adding more than 6,000 databases, e-books,
and reference titles to the works available for the Pocket PC platform.
"Pocket PC Gains on Palm
in Europe," an article from CNET News.com.
"Vanity Publishers: Thy
Name Is Rapid Change," Inside.com reports on Xlibris, iUniverse, and
1stBooks Library.
Fictionwise.com
offers four stories that are on the final ballot for the 2001 Nebula Awards for free. The
science fiction stories are available at the site at the tab marked "Specials."
Harcourt College Publishers
(harcourtcollege.com) announces that it will provide forty of its bestselling business and
science titles for the goReader, an e-book reader designed specifically for students. The
electronic textbooks will become available to college students this summer.
March 15
PW Daily reports that the
Palm 500 series, coming in April, will be bundled with the Peanut Reader.
Peanutpress.com now sells about 500 e-books a day, according to PW, and expects
that number to rise significantly with the inclusion of its e-book software in the new
Palm devices.
eBookNet.com's managing editor Wade
Roush on the new e-book reader coming from Italy: "Myfriend: The Perfect
eBook Device?"
March 16
FlipBrowser Gold, a
software from E-Book Systems, wins the "Best of Show" award in the client
software category at the Internet World Spring 2001 show held in Los Angeles. The software
is used to create a FlipBook, a multimedia Web browser, photo album, and text reader with
pages that turn like the leaves of a book. The site for the software:
Korea holds its first
e-book standards forum.
March 19
Palm acquires
peanutpress.com from netLibrary, becoming a distributor for e-books. The Peanut Reader,
which will be bundled with the forthcoming m500 and m505 Palms, will now be known as the
Palm Reader, and peanutpress.com will be renamed Palm Digital Media. The company's
inventory of 2,000 fiction and nonfiction titles has been transferred to a new site:
palm.com/ebooks. In addition to e-books for consumers, Palm intends to expand into
electronic textbooks and business e-books. Palm has published an extensive press release
on the acquisition:
Franklin Electronic Publishers
(franklin.com) announces that it will provide reference e-books, including a combined
dictionary and thesaurus, on storage cards for the new Palm 500s.
The New York Times has two
stories on the effect of the Web on the book industry: an article on science fiction
publisher Baen Books, which has used online serialization and a free
e-book program to develop a community of readers, increasing its print sales, and a piece
on BookSense, a marketing campaign for independent booksellers whose
email recommendations list is boosting the stores' influence with publishers: Baen Books and BookSense.
Publishers Weekly reports on
Jupiter Research's "Publishing in the New Economy" seminar,
followed by a short piece on E Ink's electronic ink technology and another on the bundling
of the Peanut Reader with the new Palm 500 series; in a separate article, PW
writes about the revenue growth at Thomson spurred by electronic
publishing: seminar
and Thomson.
eBookNet.com posts the names of the
winners of the 2001 Eppie Awards, given by the Electronically Published
Internet Connection (EPIC) at a ceremony in Las Vegas on March 17.
Hungry Minds a la Carte
(alacarte.hungryminds.com) launches, letting users create custom electronic and
print-on-demand books from Hungry Minds' imprints, which include the "Dummies"
series and Frommer's travel guides.
1stBooks Library (1stbooks.com)
enters into a marketing agreement with Digital Goods, which will provide the
print-on-demand and e-book publisher with email marketing and other promotional services
for its e-books.
Texterity
(texterity.com) announces a partnership with iMakeNews, an electronic newsletter service.
iMakeNews will offer its customers Texterity's TextCafe service, which can convert the
clients' newsletters from a PDF format into XML or HTML for repurposing.
March 20
Scribner releases Stephen King's
Dreamcatcher simultaneously in hardcover and in an e-book edition. The version
for the Palm Reader, formerly the Peanut Reader, and the PDF format, offered by Digital
Goods, are available at special introductory prices for a limited time. Excerpts are
available at Time.com, which has published them in weekly installments since March 5. Dreamcatcher:
Palm Reader
for Palm devices and Pocket PCs, PDF format, excerpts at Time.com.
Le Livre Virtuel, the
site on e-publishing posted by the French newspaper Libération, has a number of
new articles generated by the Salon du Livre, the Paris Book Fair, which was preceded by a
conference on e-publishing, eBook Europe 2001. One article introduces an interesting new
term: "lyber," a free e-book available in its entirety on the
Web, allowing readers to sample it before buying the print edition. This word, probably
coined from "cyber" and the Latin word "liber," which means both
"free" and "book," appears in an article on the fear of e-book piracy,
"La grande peur du piratage." Olivier Pujol, the CEO of Cytale, argues that only
a dedicated reading device, such as his company's Cybook, can protect against piracy. Two
publishers from the south of France, Michel Valensi of the Editions de L'Eclat and Thierry
Discepolo of Editions Agone, have found on the contrary that publishing works online as
lybers has led to higher print sales. Libération also writes about a new French
e-publisher that launched on March 15, manuscrit.com, which will work
with traditional publishers and use the Web to discover new writers, screening the
submissions through reading committees. The site for Le Livre Virtuel:
"For Medical Journals, a
New World Online," the New York Times reports on how the Internet
is changing the medical journal industry.
netLibrary
(netlibrary.com) integrates its e-books into Blackwell's online book-ordering system for
libraries, Collection Manager. The press release notes that netLibrary has more than
34,000 titles in its digital library.
March 21
Hyperion
(hyperionbooks.com) announces that it will launch an e-book imprint, Hyperion eBooks, this
July. Hyperion plans to release about five e-books a month, distributing them through
iPublish.com, Time Warner Trade Publishing's e-book division. Hyperion also announced that
it is creating an audiobook division, Hyperion AudioBooks, which will launch in the fall.
Jerry Justianto of Pocket PC
eBooks Watch reports that pirated e-book versions of Stephen King's Dreamcatcher
are appearing on the Web, apparently created from a scanned copy of the book. His posting
is under the March 21 entry of his Web log.
The National Writers Union and
Contentville launch a licensing system that will provide writers with royalties for works
that appear on Contentville.com. The Contentville section of the Publications
Rights Clearinghouse site of the National Writers Union is at
nwu.org/prc/cv1.htm.
James Felici, a contributing editor
for the Seybold Reports' new E-Book Zone site, has two reports from eBook Europe:
a short piece on Cytale, the French e-book maker, which has had a rough
start, and an article on Echyon, an e-book company in Korea, where,
according to a company spokesman quoted in the article, every e-book development in Korea
makes the evening news. Echyon's three e-book products include an authoring program, a
reader, and a reading device, WalkBook, coming this fall. E-Book Zone: Cytale and Echyon.
The eBookMan is now
available in a French and a German edition. Franklin Electronic Publishers (franklin.com)
has also updated the device's handwriting recognition software to interpret characters
with accent markings.
News brief reported by the French
paper Libération: Mondadori.com's new e-book store had 30,000
downloads of free e-books during its opening launch on the weekend of February 24-25. The
Italian publisher gave away the e-books to promote the new site.
March 22
"Writers Fight for
E-Rights," a Wired.com article on a case going before the Supreme Court on
March 28 that will decide if publishers owe freelance writers royalties for the online
republication of their work.
Contentville.com has launched a
monthly column on e-books, "The E-Book Report," written by
Charlotte Abbott, an editor at Publishers Weekly. In the second part of her
column, she writes about some of the established writers from around the world who are
following Stephen King's lead and publishing online, and mentions a forthcoming e-book
from James Ellroy, Breakneck Pace, to be published by Contentville Press.
"The Bearable Lightness
of E-Books,"BusinessWeek on using a Palm as an e-book reader.
Henry Yuen, the CEO of Gemstar
(gemstar-ebook.com), says 50,000 of the REB e-book devices have sold so far, with
expected sales this year of 200,000, according to a report on the Paris Book Fair in Le
Monde.
PerfectBound, the e-book imprint of
HarperCollins (harpercollins.com), has released a new novel in the bestselling Sharpe
series by Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Trafalgar, as an e-book,
nearly two months before its hardcover publication.
March 24
The first Independent e-Book
Awards are handed out in Charlottesville during the Virginia
Festival of the Book. The names of the winners and finalists:
March 26
Announced at the London Book Fair: the
British bookseller W.H. Smith (whsmith.co.uk) will launch an e-book store
on its site, offering the titles in the Microsoft Reader format.
Also announced at the fair: ebrary.com,
an online library, signs a content agreement with Cambridge University Press and with
another academic publisher, Palgrave, a division of Macmillan.
Texterity
(texterity.com), a document conversion provider, and Reciprocal, a digital rights
management company, join to offer a package of combined e-book services to small and
medium-sized publishers. Texterity also announces a partnership with the content marketer
Digital Goods, which will begin offering Texterity's automated conversion service,
TextCafe, to its content partners.
March 27
Microsoft has redesigned its Microsoft
Reader site. Some of the new items at the site include featured e-books, links to
publishers who are using the Microsoft Reader format, and the addition of versions of the
site in French, Italian, and Swedish, with links to Microsoft's European e-publishing
partners: in France, ePocket, the e-book division of Vivendi Universal Publishing,
formerly Havas; in Italy, Mondadori.com; and in Sweden, AdLibris.
The editors of Seybold Publications
select their "hot picks" among the products that will be featured at the Seybold
Seminars Boston 2001 exposition, April 10-12. The editors' picks in nine
categories, which include e-books, PDF, and cross-media publishing, are listed on the left
of the screen. The hot picks for the e-book category: the Palm m500 series and the
goReader.
Publishers Weekly has a story
on Royalty Tracker, a software that tracks royalties for e-books, and a
report on the 2001 Book Publishing Industry Summit, held in New York on
March 19. The second article ends with some e-book news: Night Kitchen will release its
new TK3 e-publishing software by the end of this week. Articles: Royalty Tracker and
Book Summit.
This week's program on Publishers
Weekly Radio, PW's new half-hour radio program on books, concludes with
a brief segment on Stephen King's e-book ventures, with more to come on e-publishing from
Charlotte Abbott, the interviewed PW editor, on next week's edition of the
program.
March 28
The British trade magazine Publishing
News has posted a series of reports on the London Book Fair. Several
of the stories cover British e-book topics, among them, the launch this summer of the
bookseller W.H. Smith's e-book store, which will sell titles in the Microsoft Reader
format, and the agreement signed by a wholesaler of computer books, Computer Bookshops,
with Microsoft to provide Microsoft Reader e-book services in the United Kingdom.
Kelly Ford, the founder of e-book
portal KnowBetter.com, reviews the REB 1100, comparing it with its
predecessor, the Rocket eBook.
Follett Higher Education Group,
which runs more than 650 campus bookstores, opens an e-book store on its site
(efollett.com). The store offers students e-books formatted for the Microsoft Reader.
March 29
"Justices Consider Status
of Digital Copies of Freelance Work," the New York Times reports on
a case argued before the Supreme Court yesterday in a suit filed by freelance writers
against newspaper and magazine publishers; at issue was whether the republication of the
writers' articles in electronic databases infringed on the writers' copyrights.
A New York Times article on
the impact of email and Web chats on writing: "A Comeback for Writing, but
Not Necessarily for Eloquence."
The American Diabetes
Association launches an online store for books on diabetes
(ebookstore.diabetes.org). Versaware is hosting the store and providing the e-publishing
services.
ICON Group International
(icongrouponline.com), a publisher of industry research reports, announces that it will
make its reports available as e-books and in a print-on-demand format, using the digital
fulfillment services of Lightning Source.
March 30
"At Issue: E-Rights for
E-Writers," Kendra Mayfield of Wired.com reports on the
copyright-infringement case filed by freelance writers.
"Great Minds Think Alike:
E-Paper on the Way," an article in the Philadelphia Daily News on
electronic paper. The article has a link to a detailed piece by Charles C. Mann on
e-paper, published this month in Technology Review.
Pearson Education
(pearsoned.com) announces that netLibrary's MetaText division will create digital versions
of hundreds of Pearson's college textbooks over the next year, integrating parts of the
textbooks into Pearson's custom e-learning software platform, CourseCompass.
—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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