Epublishing News & Articles

Thanks to mobile devices like the iPad and the Kindle, eReading and ebooks are growing in popularity, bringing new life to the publishing industry. A recent report illustrates just how far the eBook market has come in the past year.

As we await the official announcement of the Apple tablet, the silence and unanswered questions has given us time to ponder the ways that the Apple tablet may impact the future of ePublishing.

Web publishing in 2010 is proving to be as exciting as 2009. And this year, publishers are wasting little time. Redesigns, funding and trends for what’s to come in the next millennial decade are all making headlines.

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.

This past October, we covered the launch of Impelys’s iPublish Central, a self-service e-content delivery platform for publishers. Since then, more than 60 publishers have come aboard, from India to Iceland, for the opportunity to promote their brands and titles by way of viral Web marketing.

CMSWire had an opportunity to speak with Sameer Shariff, CEO of Impelsys about the progress, future and impact of iPublish Central.