eNews

Puffin UK has launched a WeMakeStories.com web site “for children to create, print and share a variety of innovative story forms,” calling it their “biggest digital initiative for children to date.” It’s a paid site, charging £5.99/$9.99 for access to those tools. “Members will be able to create pop-up books, customize audiobooks, design their own comics, produce exciting treasure maps and learn how to create a variety of entertaining adventures.” FiledBy has added “pre-publication” web pages to help authors build promotional awareness in advance of the release of their books.Announcement

Those in favor of the Google Books legal settlement have started airing their views in public over the last week or so. As linked via the Automat, we’re collecting a number of those pieces here for interested readers. Today Oxford US president Tim Barton has the longest and most nuanced piece of what he dubs the “Good Book Settlement”–only it’s currently behind the paywall at the Chronicle of Higher Education. (We’re told it should be available more broadly soon.)  He balances what the settlement offers while acknowledging some of its flaws: “It can and should be improved. But after long […]

The company that drives online replications of many leading magazines has extended its service model to books. With Harvard Common Press as its first client/partner, Zinio has added a digital cookbooks section to its web site. Featuring about 90 titles, the site sells them at a 20 percent discount to retail price. As with magazines, the pop-up Zinio reader flips pages with a click, and renders full-color replications of each book page in two-page spreads.AnnouncementZinio site

iPhone app maker ScrollMotion has provided the first additional details on their “in-app” bookstore that was highlighted at Apple’s worldwide developer’s conference. LibreDigital is a “key partner” in provisioning that store and “central” to ScrollMotion’s plans, now ready to deliver “the first 100,000 books, newspaper and magazine titles” out of a promised one million titles. LibreDigital spokesperson Heidi Johnson says that “we estimate we’ll be about one to two years before we hit that [one million titles] number, based on the work we’re doing with dozens of major publishers and folks like Baker & Taylor.

Google Book Search rolled out a variety of refinements and additions yesterday, including a years-late-in-the-making answer to the abundance of book widgets. Finally, anyone can grab copy-and-paste code to embed previews of publishing “partner” books and full views of public domain books on a blog or website.Google blog Also, the Copyright Clearance Center has posted both audio and a full transcript of their interview earlier this week with Michael Healy about the preparatory work he is doing in connection with the established of the Book Rights Registry. An admitted “something of a standards geek,” Healy says, “when you look at […]

Building social networks around college textbooks has already showed promising results, and now Simon & Schuster had developed a book-focused social networking site for teens aged 14 to 18 called Pulse It. Site members can read one book a month online for free. S&S says books “will be  a combination of titles that have just been released or are soon-to-be published.” Participants earn points for reviews and other posts and site actions, and can win free books and other prizes. Simon & Schuster says the site was a natural outgrowth of their Pulse It Advisory Board, which provided 3,000 teens […]