Digital Books News & Articles

As we wrap up Read an E-book Week, e-books continue to make headlines. As it turns out, while technology has made it possible to read many books from one device, publishers and other traditional venues of book distribution have yet to catch up.

The last time we covered the Frankfurt Book Fair, 70 percent of active readers were ready to go digital. Two years later, they will get a first look at Impelsys’ new iPad module for its publishing platform, iPublishCentral.

Are e-Readers changing the way we read? According to new research, it seems that it is. A study of 1,200 e-reader owners found that 40% read more than they did with print books.

There's nary a moment of quiet in the world of web publishing. The broadcasting industry confers about digital strategies, while newspapers work to increase revenue through mobile apps, and Google plays in the book publishing space. And that's not all...

How do you say print-on-demand in French? It might sound something like Lightning Source. The leading print-on-demand (POD) provider has partnered with the second largest publisher of trade books, Hachette Livre, to offer POD services to the French book market. C'est bon!

The partnership will operate out of Hachette Livre’s distribution facility in Maurepas, near Paris, and is expected to be operational by 2010. In its two-part plan Hachette has agreed to extend its range of services so that publishing houses it operates as well as other third-party customers will benefit.

Next, Lightning Source will begin providing independent publishers the option to participate in the POD program, regardless of ownership or distribution contracts.

Are you POD Worthy?

Not all books are inherently POD worthy, of course, so both companies have identified titles from their catalogs that would make good candidates for print-on-demand, selected for both their look and profitability. However, should the partnership meet expectations, there is hope that more older titles, that may have been lost to the market for years, could make their way to print-on-demand.

In a country whose books reach back thousands of years, that's a lot of books.

The partnership is both strategic and familial. Lightning Source will help Hachette become more of a digital force in the industry as well as improving the financial and cultural benefits of the French book market.

Move over Kindle, Sony is throwing its hat into the ePublishing ring. Sony Electronics, which sells e-book devices under the Reader brand, has announced that it will start selling digital books only in the ePub format by the end of the year.

By adopting open standards for ePublishing developed by the International Digital Publishing Form, which are already supported by a growing number of major publishers and a growing number of reading devices, Sony will end its proprietary DRM software (that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied) in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe.