Category Publishing
Pearson Launches Digital-First Textbook Strategy
Pearson, the world’s largest educational publisher, announced on Tuesday that it is transitioning to a digital-first model for textbook publishing, moving away from the print-edition-based model that has been the foundation of higher education publishing for centuries. In its press release, the company announced that it will move almost all of its 1500 U.S. textbook […]
Cengage Learning Brings Subscriptions to Higher Ed Publishing
Cengage Learning, one of the major textbook publishers, announced last month that it has accumulated a million subscribers to the subscription college text content service, Cengage Unlimited, that it launched for the Fall 2018 semester. Students can subscribe for $120 per semester or $180 per year, with print textbook rentals available for a flat $7.99 […]
Blockchain Comes to E-Books, DRM Included
Blockchain technology has reached e-books. The CEOs of two startups with e-book distribution platforms based on blockchains, Scenarex and Publica, are going to appear with me on a panel at the Digital Book World conference in Nashville in early October. The similarities of their technologies indicate a direction for blockchains in the e-book world. The […]
New White Paper on E-book Watermarking
There’s been lots and lots of talk about DRM for e-books over the years. Lots of controversy, debates, diatribes, conference panels, etc. Watermarking? Not so much. That’s despite the fact that e-book watermarking has been in use for much longer than most people realize, and that it has recently become very popular in certain geographies, […]
Announcing Publishing Technology Partners
I’m thrilled to announce the formation of Publishing Technology Partners, a new partnership related to my consulting activities in book publishing. We’re launching today at the Book Industry Study Group’s annual meeting in NYC, though we have already gotten press coverage. Publishing Technology Partners consists of myself and four guys whom I have known for […]
The Search for Leverage Against Sci-Hub (Updated)
I’m finally getting around to writing about Sci-Hub, the enormous and still-growing repository of scientific journal articles and academic papers that is often called “The Pirate Bay of Science.” The latest development in one of the lawsuits brought against the site in the United States finally brings a measure of technological interest to the legal […]
The Next Level in E-Book Watermarking
Last week’s announcement of a partnership between Digimarc and Erudition Digital represents an interesting next step in the evolution of watermarking as a copyright protection technology, in this case for e-books. Erudition Digital is an e-book distributor based in the UK that has incorporated watermarking technology from Custos Technologies of South Africa. According to last […]
Could Lawsuit Settlements Be the Best Way to Solve Rights Data Problems?
Copyright owners have long been at odds with tech companies and service providers over copyright-related issues. We’ve seen various different attempts to solve these problems across industries since the start of the “copyright wars” in the late 1990s, enough to have some idea of what works and what doesn’t. In rough terms, there are four types […]
Libraries: Be Careful What You Wish For
Last week we discussed the new “cost-per-circulation” (CPC) model for public libraries — in which they can make e-books available to patrons and pay the publisher per “loan” instead of paying fixed fees to “acquire” titles as if they were print books (the “pretend it’s print” or PIP model). HarperCollins has just become the first […]
Hoopla Digital and HarperCollins Disrupt Library E-Lending
An announcement this week by hoopla digital and HarperCollins augurs big changes in the ways that public libraries make e-books available. It sets the stage for realignment of the relationships between publishers and libraries, and it could have longer-term ripple effects on the entire e-book market. For more than a decade, public libraries have been […]
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