OverDrive is just the latest company to announce plans to offers an HTML5, browser-based reading platform. Called OverDrive Read, it is built with the help of the recently-acquired Australian company Booki.sh. The company will demo the new platform at BEA and ALA. “Unlike eBook apps or devices, OverDrive Read enables readers using standard web browsers to enjoy eBooks online and offline without first installing any software or activating their device.” Start-up Inkling made a similar announcement earlier in the week. Previously available only through an iPad app, their Inkling for Web is an HTML5 web reading app works for all […]
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Publisher and longtime managing director at AP Watt Hilary Rubinstein, 86, died on May 22. He began his publishing career at Gollancz before moving over to AP Watt in 1965, rising to MD over a 27-year career at the agency. He continued to represent a select number of clients after his 1992 retirement and was also the founder and editor of the Good Hotel Guide, which produced editions between 1978 and 2000. Melanie Little is stepping down as senior editor, Canadian fiction at House of Anansi Press to focus on her writing. She will continue to edit a select number […]
Standoff Ends: IPG and Amazon Agree to Terms on eBooks and Titles Are Restored
Three months after Publishers Lunch first broke the story that independent distributor IPG and Amazon had not renewed their contract for the sale of ebooks and IPG-client titles were removed from sale on the leading ebookstore platform, we can report exclusively again that the contractual standoff is over. IPG president Mark Suchomel confirms to PL “we have come to terms” and IPG-distributed ebooks have been restored to the Kindle store on Friday, May 25. Any titles that are not restored today should be available “in the next day or two.” Suchomel declined to discuss what broke the stalemate, and said […]
Pottermore Sells More Direct; Admits Amazon “Got It” Without Any Special Negotiation
Pottermore head Charlie Redmayne offered a couple of new tidbits in an interview with Laura Hazard Owen at Wednesday’s Paid Content conference. He said that “over 50 percent of the sales” of Harry Potter ebooks so far “are coming direct” through the Pottermore site. Redmayne had originally “estimated that a high percentage of the sales would come from” the ebookstores they partnered with. (He didn’t specify whether he meant all ebook sales, or just the English-language edition.) Also, confirming the line of reasoning we have taken from the start–and in contrast to some trade accounts that have tried to depict […]
Bookselling: Kepler Aims For $1 Million in Fundraising; Easons Plans Own eReader; and More
Kepler’s 2020, the non-profit organization that is now the de facto owners of the Menlo Park bookstore after longtime owner Clark Kepler retired, has begun a fundraising drive to raise more than $1 million by the end of the summer. (Nearly $400,000 has already been promised by prominent individuals in Silicon Valley.) But first they have to finish negotiating down what had been almost $1 million in debt. The new funds are designed as “start-up capital for the new Kepler’s” rather than cash to pay off the old Kepler’s bills. “The good news is that most of the publishers were willing […]
HBG App Drives Facebook Book Sampling
For a while now Hachette Book Group has been talking at conferences about their internal work to harness Facebook as a way for readers to sample and share books. Wednesday the company formally launched their ChapterShare Facebook app, which makes good on that promise. The app lets authors themselves as well as HBG staff post chapters onto Facebook pages from forthcoming books. Facebook friends can read and share the samples, as well as pre-order the titles. The first two excerpts are opening chapters from James Patterson’s forthcoming novel NYPD Red (October 8) and Michael Connelly’s The Black Box (November 26). […]