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 […]
eNews
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.”
Royalty Revisionism: New Macmillan Contracts Looks to Change eRoyalties and More
Macmillan ceo John Sargent wrote to agents earlier this week to present for the first time a new standardized boilerplate contract across all of the trade publisher’s imprints and divisions that the company intends to introduce as of November 9, featuring a number of comprehensive changes in their basic business terms. The goal, he writes, is “to facilitate a more efficient contracting process, for ourselves as well as for our authors and their agents, and to make sure our author agreements reflect current business realities.” One notable effect, as agent Richard Curtis underscores on his blog, is a proposed new […]
Harper Launches Vaynerchuk Vook–More Features, At 60% of Hardcover Price
Vook has partnered with Harper Studio and author Gary Vaynerchuk on their latest production, a version of the recently-published CRUSH IT! that may be the most natural pairing of book material and short videos. While the price point is higher than the inaugural Vooks released by Atria recently, at $11.99 the Vaynerchuk Vook offers the complete text of the book along with 17 videos for much less than the $19.99 book. And video is Vaynerchuk’s natural medium, from the Wine Library videos that built his reputation to his obscenity-sprinkled motivational presentations of his rise to success. Harper Studio associate publisher […]