Hachette Book Group announced Wednesday that it will make its entire catalog of ebooks available to libraries, beginning May 8, including new and recent releases. HBG had stopped the sale of new ebooks to libraries as of April 2010, so the policy change will open up both brand-new releases as well as titles from the past 3 years to library ebook lending. HBG has formalized new terms of sale that expand on the backlist ebook price increases they introduced in February 2012 as “part of an experimental pilot to find out more about the digital library marketplace.” eBook versions of newly-released titles […]
New Business Models
Pearson and Kaplan Both Launch Incubators for Hot Ed-Tech Startups
Two companies in publishing and education announced incubator programs this week to help vet and mentor ed-tech startups. Pearson’s program is called Catalyst and is designed to “identify the most promising education startup companies that share Pearson’s commitment to improving people’s lives through learning, and help enable them to break through on a global scale.” The will “match startups with Pearson brands to deliver pilot programmes and offer access to Pearson resources and product experts, including the opportunity to work closely with a Pearson brand over the course of the program.” Pearson release Separately, Kaplan has announced a three-month incubation […]
eNews: Random Joins MyiLibrary, Book Scout (Officially), and Total Boox
Ingram will add over 36,000 titles to their MyiLibrary ebook platform in February from Random House, Inc. as well as the publisher’s distribution clients. As we were first to report last Friday, Random House formally announced their new Facebook app Book Scout, which launched last week. Random’s svp digital marketplace development Amanda Close says in the press release, “By creating BookScout, Random House is helping to encourage conversations about books on Facebook, and broaden the social discovery of books in the digital space.” Mashable covers the early beta of Total Boox, which lets users download entire books for free, and then […]
More eNews: Inkling’s Searchable Books, and More
In concert with today’s Digital Book World event, Inkling formally announced a program they have had running for some time now, what they call their Content Discovery Platform. A “way for publishers to make digital books more discoverable and profitable,” Inkling is making any books within their format to be fully indexed and searchable via Google, like any other web content. Search engine discovery leads to free samples and a system to purchase small slices of book content at modest prices. The next phase, “the big how-to-get-it-into-our-platform question,” will be addressed in a second announcement next month at TOC. CEO […]
Boys Are Showing More Interest In Reading, But Girls Report Less Love for Books
Scholastic releases the fourth edition of their bi-annual survey, looking at views on reading of kids ages 6 to 17 and their parents. (The full survey comes out at 11, so much as we don’t like to write up press releases only when looking at data, that’s what we had to work with this morning.) Perhaps the best news in the survey is that among boys, they found an increase in “reading enjoyment”–26 percent say they love reading and 47 percent attest to the importance of reading for fun, up from 20 percent and 39 percent respectively in 2010. The […]
eNews: Smashwords Hits $15 Million and Adds EPUB, GoodReads Eyes Bookselling?, and iBookstore to Open In Japan
Inside of some long and boosterish year-end blog posts, Smashwords made a couple of announcements. The privately-owned ebook distributor “will do around $15 million in ebook sales in 2012.” In June 2012, founder Mark Coker had told Forbes he expected to double his 2011 gross to $12 million for the year. Since romance and erotica comprised almost 40 percent of sales in June, we infer that growth in those categories helped lift overall results. It’s also increasingly clear that Smashwords’ growth is linked to the international expansion of the iBookstore. “For the month of November 2012, sales of Smashwords-distributed titles […]