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While U.S. publishers continue their cautious march into the digitization of American titles, the rest of the world is looking to take advantage of other burgeoning markets in Europe, Japan, and beyond.
Recently released amplified editions of classics such as Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land indicate that the hybrid format may finally be coming into its own.
Librarians revolt against HarperCollins after its decision to limit the number of times a digital copy of an e-book can be checked out and returned.
The launch of Google’s eBookstore, which offers a unique compatibility across more than eighty-five devices, could prove to be a game-changing challenge to the closed systems of Amazon, Apple, and Barnes & Noble.
In June the San Francisco–based nonprofit Internet Archive partnered with several libraries across the country to allow e-book lending, taking the next step toward creating a one-stop online portal for digital reading and offering a hint of the new role libraries may play as the screen displaces the printed page.
Apple’s entry into the e-book market has given publishers the leverage they needed to force a marketwide shift from a wholesale to an “agency” model of e-book retailing, but the long-term impact of the move—for both publishers and authors—remains unclear.
Advancements in print-on-demand technology, such as the Espresso Book Machine, are offering publishers and authors alike new opportunities to bridge the still-pronounced divide between electronic and "tangible" publishing.
It may not have been The Year Print Died, but 2009 will undoubtedly go down as the year digital literature became impossible to ignore. From celebrity authors' crowdsourcing stories through Twitter, to the proliferation of online publishing platforms, to the bruiting discord over the Google Book Search settlement, something new is plainly afoot in the publishing world, even if the ramifications for writers are still more a matter of conjecture than measurement.
In the first major overseas legal challenge to its massive book-scanning project, Google’s French division was hit last week with a copyright infringement lawsuit. Publishing group La Martinière, backed by the editors association Syndicat national de l’édition (SNE) and the writers union Société des gens de lettres (SGDL), is asking a Paris court to force the Internet giant to halt its digitization of protected works and to levy a fine of eighteen million euros (about $26 million) as well as a per diem fine of one hundred thousand euros ($146,000).
A month after signing a distribution deal with the Barnes & Noble eBookstore, online publishing platform Smashwords announced on Tuesday that it has reached a similar arrangement with Sony. Authors who upload their work to Smashwords through Sony’s new “Publisher Portal” can expect to see it added to the Sony e-book catalogue in as little as ten days, the company said.
