Simon & Schuster has expanded and remade the experimental GalleyGrab.com site they used earlier this year to elicit interest in pre-BEA physical galleys into their own electronic galley service for “reviewers and media, booksellers, and other key publishing trade contacts.” The service works on most non-Kindle electronic reading platforms, from Sony Reader and nook to computers–using Adobe Digital Editions and its DRM. And the electronic galleys “will expire on the book’s publication date.” Access is provided by “invitation”–S&S staff will send links to particular electronic galleys to selected contacts. The program begins with a galley of Free Press’s march release, […]
eNews
Internet Archive Experiments with Online Scan-and-Lend
The Internet Archive’s expansive ambition for their recently-introduced Bookserver continues to cause a range of excitement and confusion depending upon whom you speak to, in part because the scheme is in its very early stages. A profile of Archive founder Brewster Kahle in the new issue of Forbes magazine, titled Lend Ho!, tipped us to yet another aspect of their intentions: “Kahle hopes libraries will use the new Bookserver technology to scan and electronically lend orphans. Kahle reasons that libraries can scan and electronically lend their orphans without violating any laws, just as they lend those volumes today…. It also […]
Maker of Patented Dual-Screen Reader Sues Barnes & Noble Over Nook
Remember the confusion when a company called Spring Design announce their “Alex” dual-screen ereader the day before Barnes & Noble unveiled nook and people wondered if the two companies had worked together? Now Spring Design says they have sued BN, alleging that the retailer “misappropriated trade secrets and violated the parties’ non-disclosure agreement when it copied Alex’ features” for nook. VP of sales and marketing Eric Kmiec says, “We showed the Alex e-book design to Barnes & Noble in good faith with the intention of working together to provide a superior dual screen e-book to the market.” The company recounts […]
S&S Sells By the Slice
Simon & Schuster is making their first effort at selling individual chapters of books electronically on Dr. Mehmet Oz’s www.ask.doctoroz.com site, starting with all of the YOU books published by Free Press and co-authored with Michael Roizen. S&S chief digital officer Ellie Hirschhorn says “this opens up a new world of opportunities for where and how our digital content can be distributed and sold, and we plan to expand both the chapter selling model and use of our e-commerce widget to other content categories.” The drm-wrapped pdf files will sell for between two and three dollars “based on the number […]
Libre Has A Cloud Strategy, Too
Google aspires to control ebooks in the cloud, available on servers to read on any device, regardless of where customers make the actual purchase–but vendor LibreDigital has plans of their own, which they are unveiling at the Texas Book Festival. Called AllAccess, their new product is a content delivery platform which allows publishers, resellers and authors to give readers access to eBooks on any device”–including Kindle (if the user pays the appropriate Whispernet file transmission charge). They note that “consumers benefit by not having to worry about different formats and displays required for each device since the technology is designed […]
Vook for Less
When Atria released its first collaborations with Vook, company founder Brad Inman wouldn’t tell the AP how much it cost to shoot the videos and only indicated “the budget for an individual title was less than $100,000.” Apparently he meant a lot less. VP of marketing at Vook Jack Sallay clarifies now that “the production costs associated with creating a vook are nowhere near $100,000, but are in fact less than $15,000.”