Target confirmed on Wednesday the report we mentioned in Wednesday’s issue indicating that that 1,800-store chain will stop carrying Kindle devices. Company executives wrote to vendors in January to protest moves such as Amazon’s price check app: “What we aren’t willing to do is let online-only retailers use our brick-and-mortar stores as a showroom for their products and undercut our prices.” Target was first big mass merchant to start stocking Kindle products in 2010. Wal-Mart, Best Buy and Staples are among the big retail chains that still sell Kindle products in their stores. Earlier this week Paulo Coehlo announced on […]
Higher Ed
Inkling Launches New Authoring Tools With Habitat
At Tools of Change Tuesday morning e-textbook firm Inkling announced the details of its new free cloud-based authoring tool Habitat, which will allow for the creation of interactive digital content for tablet computers and for the Web when it’s widely available later this year. Habitat will allow publishers to produce and publish content that includes guided tours, 3-D exhibits, interactive quizzes, and high definition video, in addition to text. Inkling calls Habitat the “only strictly schematic publishing platform” as part of its attempt to employ a software-based (and evidently, more rapid) model of publishing. But of course it joins a […]
eNews: Open Source Textbooks from Rice University; Author Solutions Adds eBook Distribution Service; Hocking’s Market Share, and More
Rice University has launched OpenStax College, which will offer free, open-source course materials for five common introductory classes in biology, astronomy, and physiology. OpenStax is funded by grants from the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the 20 Million Minds Foundation and the Maxfield Foundation, and the program hopes to capture 10 percent of the textbook market that, in turn, would save students $90 million over the next five years. Inside Higher Ed reports that “In the past, open-source materials have failed to gain traction among some professors; their accuracy could be difficult to confirm […]
Apple Launches iBooks2, “A New Textbook Experience For The iPad”, Opens Door to Self-Published Illustrated Books
Apple svp of worldwide marketing Phil Schiller led off Apple’s much-anticipated “education announcement” at New York’s Guggenheim Museum Thursday morning, before a strictly-limited but modestly-sized audience of about 150 invitees and members of the press. (Though focused on education, guests included multiple heads of trade houses.) “This is really special for everyone at Apple, because today’s event is about education. Education is deep in our DNA and has been from the very beginning.” Schiller said that “as students are starting to be introduced to iPad in learning, some really remarkable things are beginning to happen.” That was true to an […]
Briefs: Penguin’s “Strong Holiday As Pearson Ups Earnings Guidance; Grand Central’s New Digital Romance Imprint; and More
Pearson won’t report its preliminary annual earnings until February 27 but Thursday the company provided a short trading update indicating that for the year as a whole, Pearson generated approximately £2 billion in digital revenues and approximately £600m in revenues in emerging markets. They also expect to exceed their full year earnings guidance by 10 percent (with the original forecast being 83p per share), attributing the good news to “rapid growth in digital services, our expanding position in developing economies and the continuing transformation of our business portfolio.” Penguin’s results are said to be “strong” during the holidays, with expectations […]
eNews: Another Textbook Reader (From Chegg); eBooks Are 28% of Sourcebooks’ Sales; Cemetery Dance’s Digital Subscription; and More
Taking advantage of interest around Apple’s press conference tomorrow, textbook rental company Chegg is wading into the morass of too many proprietary ereading platforms for students with yet another product. Their cloud-based eTextbook Reader is HTML5-based, developed by 3D3R, an engineering team recently acquired by Chegg. The app is currently optimized for iPads and computers, though the company says other platforms are on the way. Their product uses publisher-supplied PDFs, and the company says they have about 40,000 textbooks available from all of the major publishers. (The WSJ says Kno claims about 150,000 titles, with options to either purchase or […]