Viz's 'Shonen Jump' Magazine Gets Facelift Online and Off

Consistent with its new digital initiative, Viz Media will introduce a new format for its print manga anthology, Shonen Jump, and the magazine will also expand its online presence, allowing subscriber access to up to 100 pages of manga previews on the Shonen Jump website.

Tor.com: Sci-Fi and Fantasy by Other Means

Offering an array of original fiction and comics, online communities, commentary, and blogs organized—sometimes loosely—around science fiction and fantasy, Tor.com is an online experiment in transforming a corporate Web site into an all-purpose publishing platform.

FT Press Has New eContent Series

Pearson's FT Press imprint has launched a new entry in its eContent series, How to Make Money Marketing Shorts. Produced under FT's digital imprint, FT Press Delivers, the three launch titles, which average about 15 pages, are How to Make Money Marketing with foursquare, How to Make Money Marketing Your Small Business on Twitter, and How to Make Money with Mobile Media. Pricing starts at $4.99.

RoyaltyShare Adds Price Monitoring Service

RoyaltyShare, whose Digital Advantage service allows publishers to track and manage sales of e-books and other digital products, has added a new service that will allow publishers to monitor the price of e-books being offered by different e-book retailers. Called Sales Feed Price Validation, the new service provides book publishers with a tool for identifying and managing transactions in which the actual sale price reported by retail agents is not in accordance with the price set by the publisher.

Viz Media Releases Free Viz Manga App for the iPad

In a move that should delight fans of Japanese comics while stepping up the fight against manga piracy, Viz Media is releasing a free iPad app today that will allow consumers to purchase and download Viz Media manga titles. The Viz Media App will be available for download through the iTunes store and will launch offering five of Viz's bestselling manga series selling for $4.99 per volume. For a limited time Viz will also offer volume one of Tsugumi Ohba and Takeshi Obata's bestselling manga Death Note for free download.

Worldreader.org Announces Random House E-book Donation; Digitization Project

Worldreader.org, the "market-based" not-for-profit organization designed to use e-books and e-readers to put "a library of books within reach of every family on the planet," has announced that Random House has agreed to donate thousands of books for an upcoming iREAD pilot. In addition, it announced an agreement with African publishers to digitize thousands of African books, with all proceeds to be split between publishers and Worldreader's program to bring e-readers into Ghana.

Callaway Inks Martha Stewart App Deal; Gets $6M in New Funding

Callaway Digital Arts, a publisher of interactive applications for the iPad, iPod and iPhone, has entered into a venture with Martha Stewart to create a series of apps based on her lifestyle products, and the firm has also received $6 million in series A financing from Kleiner Perkins Cafield & Byers iFund, a venture capital firm focused on funding new ventures for Apple's iOS platform. Sherpalo Ventures founder Ram Shriram also participated in the funding.

Students and E-Books By the Numbers

How E-book Sales Compare To Print...So Far

Amazon's latest press release about the state of its e-book sales put forth this statistic: its customers are buying more bestsellers in e-book by a ratio of two to one over print. The release last week also stated that the e-tailer has sold more than three times as many e-books in the first nine months of 2010, compared to the same period the previous year.

Libraries Say 'No DRM'; Springer Agrees

"We're not concerned about piracy," said George Scotti, Springer Verlag's director of channel marketing, when asked about the Springer e-book program, which allows institutional customers to lend Springer e-books without DRM protection. Seventy percent of Springer's business comes from big academic and research libraries, Scotti said, and they are adamant that they don't want DRM or other such restrictions on the e-books they buy from Springer.

Niches, Backlist Books Fuel Open Road's Growing Partner Program

With three new publisher partnerships launching this fall, digital upstart Open Road is betting that good digital publishing will be built on the same foundation as good traditional publishing--niches, backlist, and great marketing.

Sourcebooks Sells Early E-Installments of 'Days of Our Lives' Books

Sourcebooks is testing a new model in which it is selling early access to books connected with the soap opera Days of Our Lives. Although CEO Dominique Raccah said "very few" people have paid $9.95 to become members of the DaysInsider Early Access program so far, it's "significantly more than we expected."

Literature, Plugged In

A parable: once upon a time, a farmer named Noah noticed a frightening change in the weather. A practical man, he began building a great ark with which to preserve his family and the creatures of the world. Until, one day, Noah’s boss saw what he was up to. “Noah, what the hell are you doing?” the boss asked.

LibreDigital Debuts SkyShelf Reader

Digital distributor LibreDigital has teamed up with Starbucks and Yahoo! to show off the LibreDigital SkyShelf HTML5 Reader, a new wireless technology that will initially supply e-book content to the Starbucks Digital Network. Much like the long-delayed Google Editions service, LibreDigital's SkyShelf HTML5 technology will allow consumers to read e-books through the web browsers of any kind of device, and LibreDigital plans to launch a broader range of SkyShelf-powered partnerships by early November.

Audiobook Publisher Iambik Launches

Another new audiobook publisher opened for business Wednesday: Iambik, which purports to be "different from traditional audiobook publishers." The Montreal company, headed by Hugh McGuire, who founded the free public domain audiobook project LibriVox, is partnering with print publishers and authors and working with audiobook makers around the world to provide online downloads.

Dreamscape, New Audiobook Publisher, Launched

The audiobook industry gained a new member yesterday when Dreamscape Media began to distribute its first 10 titles in both digital and CD formats. The Chicago-based company was founded by Brad Rose, who hopes to release over 85 titles next year with an emphasis on the library market.

Why Some E-books Just Don't Look Right

There are a couple of major issues that need to be dealt with if e-books are to approach print standards.

Borders, BookBrewer Offer New Self-Publishing Service

In a move that will make it even easier for writers to self-publish, Borders is launching Borders—Get Published Powered by BookBrewer, an online service that will allow writers with blogs, websites or any kind of written content to easily convert it into an e-book that can be sold through Borders.com or other online book retailers. The BookBrewer service will launch on October 25.

E-book Sales Jump 172% in August

While sales in the print trade segments shrank in August, e-book sales had another strong month, jumping 172.4%, to $39 million, according to the 14 publishers that report sales to the AAP's monthly sales estimates. For the year-to-date, e-book sales were up 192.9%, to $263 million. AAP said that of the approximately 19 publishers that report trade sales, revenue in the January to August period was $2.91 billion, making the $263 million e-book sales 9.0% of trade sales. At the end of 2009, e-book sales comprised 3.3% of trade sales. The mass market segment, where sales were down 14.3% in the first eight months of 2009, represented 15.1% of trade sales through August.

FastPencil Signs More Established Authors

Self-publishing start-up FastPencil is continuing to attract established authors: this week it announced it has landed some of its biggest authors to date. Mark Victor Hansen of the Chicken Soup for the Soul franchise and Legend of Bagger Vance author Steven Pressfield are some of the established authors who have signed on to self-publish their works through FastPencil Premiere.