Warner Bros. announced it would sell four of the movie studio’s classic scripts — CASABLANCA, BEN-HUR, AN AMERICAN IN PARIS, and NORTH BY NORTHWEST — as enhanced ebooks for Kindle, Nook, and iPad. It’s the first part of a large-scale initiative in which they hope to turn hundreds of scripts into ebooks. The WSJ reports each title will retail for $10 and “includes the film’s actual shooting script and rare historical documents from the Warner Bros. archives.” President of Warner Bros. digital distribution Thomas Gewecke told the paper the company “had been looking at a variety of ideas to leverage […]
Apps/iOS
Scholastic Unveils Beta of Kids eReading Platform
Scholastic’s long-expected ebook reading platform for kids Storia has launched in beta today via the Scholastic web site. For now, however, the downloadable Storia app is only available on the most kid-adverse platform out there, Windows PCs. The iPad version is due next, and the company says Mac OS, iPhone and Android versions are also on the way. Storia ebooks are readable only through the Storia app itself, though many of the titles in the new store are also available through standard ebookstores in their regular versions. (Others, however, like Clifford’s Family, are available in digital form for the first […]
eNews: IDPF’s Readium Aims to Drive ePub 3 Implementation; Foyles Launches eSales with txtr
The IDPF announced the Readium Project, an open source initiative “to develop a comprehensive reference implementation of the ePUB 3 standard,” built on the WebKit rendering engine. The project is designed to “significantly accelerate EPUB 3 adoption and increase implementation consistency,” IDPF executive director Bill McCoy says. It has wide support from many organizations and etailers–though not Apple, or Amazon (which is not an IDPF member). Library City has a follow-up q&a with McCoy. Among his remarks, “given that PDF support is increasingly built-in to browsers (e.g. Chrome ships with PDF support) it’s logical to imagine built-in EPUB support in […]
eNews: Tracking Kobo; Coliloquy Launches “Active Fiction”
Kobo’s evp of business development Todd Humphrey reiterates to Publishing Perspectives that both Brazil and Japan are “likely” markets for the ebook company in 2012, among “ten plus countries” Kobo has in their sights for 2012. Indeed ceo Michael Serbinis said late last year when the Rakuten purchase was announced that, “We expect to be in Japan early into the new year; we expect to be in Brazil next year and this is all possible now. We did a handful of countries this year and we’ll do a couple dozen next year.” But Kobo said last April that they expected […]
eNews: Safari Acquires Threepress and Ibis, and More
Threepress Consulting and their Ibis Reader have been acquired by Safari Online. Threepress founder Liza Daly (who created our first BEA web app) writes: “Safari provides us with an unparalleled reserve of content, sales team, marketing savvy, and publisher relationships. We’re bringing our focus on standards, accessibility, interactivity, and emerging technology.” Daly will be vp of engineering at Safari. The company writes, “They’re joining us as part of an acquisition that brings a rich set of web-based ebook reading technology to Safari, along with a talented engineering team that includes some of the world’s foremost engineers working with EPUB, ebooks, […]
eNews
In another twist on short-form content, Potter Craft is starting to sell twenty individual patterns from five of their most popular craft books, for $4.99 each. INscribe Digital is working with L.A. Theatre Works to distribute their enhanced eBook content, which pairs audio from actors including Paul Giamatti, Edward Asner, Stacy Keach, Ed Begley Jr., Ted Danson, Richard Dreyfuss, Helen Hunt, John Lithgow, Michael York, Jacqueline Bisset, and Eric Stoltz with plays by Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde, Eugene O’Neill, George Bernard Shaw and others. The first game app from Random House Digital and their new subsidiary Smashing Ideas, Stunt Bugs, is […]