You can expect the steady stream of speculation over Apple’s “education announcement” on Thursday at the Guggenheim Museum in New York to continue unabated. The WSJ cites a person “familiar with the matter” who says that McGraw-Hill “has been working with Apple on its announcement since June.” The paper notes that Cengage Learning, which has worked with Apple in the past, will attend Thursday’s event, though we imagine most educational and textbook publishers will as well. Ironically, the Journal doesn’t seem to recall that McGraw-Hill was supposed to be one of the marquee launch partners when the iPad debuted in early 2010, […]
Higher Ed
eNews: Wiley Sues 27 BitTorrent Users Over Piracy; New Funding For Educational App Publisher Mindshare; and More
Last week Wiley filed suit in Manhattan federal court against 27 John Doe defendants who illegally downloaded various FOR DUMMIES titles from Ukraine-based Torrent website demonoid.me on October 18 and 19. The John Does are identified for now only by their IP addresses, all within the state of New York. Wiley claims in the suit that these defendants “are contributing to a problem that threatens the profitability of Wiley. Although Wiley cannot determine at this time the precise amount of revenue that it has lost as a result of peer-to-peer file sharing of its copyrighted works though BitTorrent software, the […]
eNews: IndieBound Partners With BlueFire on eReading Software; Amazon Cracks Down On PLR eBooks; and More
The ABA announced last week that it is working with BlueFire to create a version of the company’s Reader app, which will be called the IndieBound Reader, for IndieCommerce stores selling Google eBooks. The app is scheduled to launch in the next 60 days. The Android version of the app will link back to indie bookstores, while the iOS version will not because of Apple’s rules about in-app purchases and links to outbound e-commerce stores. Users will be able to buy books using their Google ID instead of having to active an account with Adobe Digital Editions (as is the […]
Higher Ed: Free Food Trucks From Living Language; Nook-to-School Promotion; and More
This week Random House’s language learning program, Living Language, will launch its new Platinum Edition, a multi-platform solution that will allow users to engage with a variety of languages through course books and CDs, mobile apps, an online course, an online community, and individualized instruction from a native speaker e-tutor. The course will initially be offered for $179 in French, Spanish, Italian and German, with Chinese, Japanese, and Arabic editions to come. (The Platinum app is also available for separate purchase.) As part of the launch, coordinated by the ad agency Mullen (most recently responsible for a multi-million dollar campaign […]
Briefs: Liberty Deal For BN Reportedly “Looks Shaky”; More on McGraw-Hill; Inkling Raises Another $17M; and More
Two-and-a-half months after Liberty Media’s initial offer to purchase Barnes & Noble for $17 a share (or just over $1 billion), the NY Post claims the deal now “looks shaky.” Or it may simply be a delay in the initial timetable, as “a deal failed to materialize last week, which was a preliminary target for a final deal since talks began in May, according to sources.” Drawing on a single, unnamed source, the paper says “at least one private-equity giant this week hired a consulting firm to take a fresh look at B&N’s books in case their deal falls apart.” […]
eNews: BookLamp’s Recommendation Engine Enlists Publishers; UMich Press Serializes Novels on Facebook; and More
Book recommendation service BookLamp will reportedly launch in August after a lengthy development period, with more than 20,000 available books from Random House, Kensington and other publishers. The idea is to search through full-text books and analyze them in order to make reading recommendations. Ceo Tom Stanton told Mashable that he doesn’t anticipate selling books or advertising on the site. BookLamp’s efforts at text analysis and recommendations have been underway since 2008, focused on science fiction and fantasy books to start, and according to site postings have mostly lacked a sufficiently large database to search against and analyze. A video […]