Penguin Group will use Ingram Digital for the hosting, management and distribution of ebook and downloadable audiobook titles in the US, UK and Canada. They say that Ingram will host and distribute “approximately 11,000 titles, with many more slated to be added in 2009,” including the fulfillment of titles for Penguin’s US and UK web sites. As of next year, “many titles will also be available to retailers through Ingram Digital’s Search and Discover services.”
eNews
Google Bits
Google Book Search’s head of partnerships for Europe Santiago de la Mora, as the company says they now have 20,000 publishing partners around the world: “But let’s be clear on the record that Google’s not going to launch an ereader or something like that.” He would not update the number of books scanned and available online: “The figure has not been changed. That’s [over a million books] the official number. It’s more than the figures. Let’s not get bogged down.” It sure is. As we noted earlier this week, the newly-formed Hathi Trust, seemingly not very much on the radar […]
Libraries Join In Big Online Book Collection
The 12 US universities comprising the Committee on Institutional Cooperation have joined with the University of California’s library system to a single repository of their respective collections of digital materials in an entity called HathiTrust. Associate university librarian of the University of Michigan John Wilkin is executive director of the organization. On the one hand it provides a non-profit counterpart to the materials within Google Book Search, but on the other hand it potentially raises a new set of concerns for publishers. Currently they say they repository has almost 2 million volumes (largely the result of Google’s scanning), of which […]
Newsweek Packages Presidential Kindle Exclusives
Newsweek’s staff has prepared biographies of the four presidential and vice presidential campaigns (titled Mr. Cool, Mr. Hot, The Insider, and The Outsider) and will sell them as Kindle exclusives, available on October 15. The release says that “Newsweek is the first periodical to publish a collection of coverage as an e-book on Kindle.”
Digital News: S&S Goes Mobile; Frankfurt Survey Shows Dichotomy
Simon & Schuster is making over 500 hundred titles available for sale on Internet-enabled mobile devices through MPS’s Mobile Global Reader. The company say “the full Simon & Schuster eBook catalog will be made available in the coming months.” In advance of the show, the Frankfurt Book Fair has released the results of a survey of over 1,000 publishing professionals from more than 30 countries. The results are inadvertently perfect in capturing the industry’s digital dichotomy: 70 percent of the responds say they “feel ready for the digital challenge” while 60 percent do not use ereaders or read ebooks in […]
eNews: More Downloads; A New Widget; and Rowman Digitizes
Are Kindle and Sony Reader lifting all e-reading boats? Ingram Digital says that third quarter downloads were “more than double the same quarter last year.” The company says they currently offer over 130,000 ebook titles from more than 1,100 publishers. They cover a wide variety of formats and devices: “PCs, PDAs, dedicated e-book readers, Smartphones, and with the eReader format, directly to iPhones.” They support five major formats: Adobe e-books as PDF and EPUB files, MS Reader, eReadr, and Vitalbooks. Value Chain International‘s book preview widget has been adopted by Taylor an Francis (which will deploy the facility for over […]