Self-publishing website Inkitt raised another $37 million in Series C financing, led by Khosla Ventures. valuing the company at about $400 million post-money. (That’s only slightly above where they stood after raising $57 million in 2021.) Unfortunately, the capital will help fund “AI to write stories based on your original ideas, and to produce versions of its fiction personalized for specific readers” among other purposes. The facile tech media repeats CEO and founder Ali Albazaz’s claim that “Inkitt, in aggregate, ranks as the number 11 best-selling publisher globally” — to which TechCrunch amusingly adds “above household names like Penguin Random […]
eNews
NYPL Tries New “Orphan” Works Workaround
The New York Public Library has developed a novel, permission-based approach to try to bring potentially in-copyright “orphan works” of scholarship back into general availability. The problem, as they have identified through a variety of efforts, is that often neither the author not the publisher is certain whose permission is needed to digitize and make available out-of-print or otherwise commercially dormant books that may still be covered by copyright. And the expense — and potential liability — of doing the research or granting permission without certainty about the rights makes the risks outweigh the potential benefits of agreeing to republication. […]
Book Stats: Almost Half of Americans Haven’t Tried eBooks
You.gov recently published the results of an online poll of 29,000 Americans about their book ownership. Over 90 percent of respondents own at least some printed books. Yet 45 percent of survey participants do not own any ebooks, suggesting they have never even tried the format. But the results suggest that will continue to change over time as well. Among people 18 to 44, the portion of people who don’t own ebooks drops to 33 percent. The share is highest among those 65 and over, at 60 percent.
Firebrand Launches Two New Products
Firebrand Technologies announced the coming launch of two new products for publishers. Firebrand Flywheel uses a recommendation engine to “strategically select” and then execute titles for timely metadata enhancement. They will start onboarding clients in January. Title Management Lite, also available in January, is a simplified version of their core enterprise service, focused on smaller publishers “with fewer needs.” It still “includes the most important features your team needs to track workflows, manage schedules, and collect and distribute your data,” and is upgradeable to their Enterprise version.
Scribd Will Move eBooks and Audiobooks To New App
Scribd announced that it will now separate its content across three products, with ebooks and audiobooks moving to a new app called Everand. Everand will also host magazines, podcasts, news articles, and sheet music. Meanwhile, Scribd.com and a new Scribd app will continue to host documents and other community-uploaded content, while they continue to operate SlideShare as a separate entity. Trip Adler, co-founder and CEO of Scribd, said in a release, “Over the last 16 years, we’ve offered a wide variety of content to everyone, but we recognized that readers either gravitated toward ebooks and audiobooks, or documents and research. […]
Partners Endorse BISG’s Campaign Against Metadata Pollution
The Book Industry Study Group has been working to combat metadata pollution, in which simple fields like “subtitle” are turned into marketing crud such as, “A Thrilling Suspense Novel from the Bestselling Author of X.” The problem resides on both sides of the Onix feed: “BISG understands that some metadata senders claim they are placing promotional copy in title and subtitle fields explicitly because some retailers do not display the data provided in fields such as ‘Promotional Headline.’ Retailers could be more transparent about how they categorize and display metadata. Without transparency, publishers have chosen ‘known-to-be-indexed’ data elements like subtitle […]