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Apple Unveils iPhone, iBooks Upgrades; Five Million e-Books Downloaded
Although books are not necessarily the focus of Apple's annual Worldwide Developers conference in San Francisco--where the new iPhone 4 is being unveiled today--Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced several upgrades for the iBook e-book format and several impressive book related upgrades for the new iPhone 4. He also said 5 million e-books have been downloaded since the iPad launch.
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Open Road Gets $4 Million in New Financing
Kohlberg Ventures has increased its investment in Open Road Integrated Media LLC. The venture capital firm invested an additional $4 million in Series A financing, building upon its original $3 million investment last August. Jim Kohlberg, founder of Kohlberg, said: "We strongly believe that the Open Road model and its team are uniquely positioned to succeed in the marketplace."
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'PW' Inks Content Deals with Scribd, Zinio
There's an app for everything and that includes Publishers Weekly. PW will use the week of BEA to announce a series of digital partnerships that will make PW content more widely available around the Web and on devices of all kinds.
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E-Book Sales Jumped 252% in First Quarter, AAP Reports
E-book sales from the 13 publishers that report results to the Association of American Publishers' monthly sales program rose nearly 252% in the first quarter of 2010, to $91 million, the association reported this morning. Growth actually slowed somewhat in March from the earlier two months, but sales still increased 184.8% to $28.5 million. The e-book gains were easily the biggest in the industry in both the quarter and March. The AAP added a new category in the month, downloadable audio, and sales from the 10 companies that reported results rose 32.5% in the quarter, to $16.4 million.
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Mobile Phone Readers Grow on Wattpad
According to the latest quarterly report on visitors to Wattpad, an online writing community and social networking site focused on e-books on mobile phones, social networking between writers and readers is increasing; reading on mobile phones continues to grow around the world and the iPhone is the dominant mobile device used for reading in English speaking countries. Wattpad claims to attract about 2 million visitors a month and claims its members generate more than a million downloads of its content each month.
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Agents Weigh the Growth Of Alternate Publishing Options
In a week that saw Barnes & Noble announce a new self-publishing unit, one small deal that had the publishing industry paying attention was J.A. Konrath's decision to do his next book, Shaken, with Amazon's publishing arm, AmazonEncore. Reports quickly surfaced that Konrath would be making a roughly 70% return on the list price of his forthcoming e-book--$2.10 off a $2.99 Kindle edition. While a rep from Amazon confirmed that royalty does not apply to Konrath's deal with AmazonEncore, the deal still had some in the industry saying the move signaled a "game changer" for corporate publishing. Since Konrath is presumably getting a high digital royalty rate on Shaken, many wondered whether the big six should be quaking in their proverbial New York City boots.
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ECW Press Launches E-book Imprint with Online Literary Magazine
Toronto-based ECW Press is launching a new e-book imprint this fall in collaboration with Joyland, an online literary magazine. In October, Joyland eBooks will publish the first of three short fiction collections for 2010. Emily Schultz, an author who has also been a freelance editor with ECW, co-founded Joyland with author Brian Joseph Davis two years ago. Together with editors in several major North American cities, they primarily publish short fiction, although there have also been a few scripts and excerpts from novels.
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LibreDigital Gets $8.1 Million in Venture Capital Investment
Digital warehouse and distribution vendor LibreDigital announced that it has received $8.1 million in series C venture capital funding from S3 Ventures, a new LibreDigital investor and early-stage venture capital firm focused on technology. The new investment will be used by Libre Digital to expand its e-book distribution services.
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iPad Developer Sideways to Launch at BEA
Sideways is a new multimedia software development company specializing in creating new digital publications for the iPad, iPhone, iPod Touch and other mobile devices.
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Sesame Street Starts Subscription Model for E-Books
Sesame Workshop, the non-profit that produces Sesame Street, and e-content delivery provider Impelsys have launched a new online Sesame Street eBookstore. Readers can subscribe with Impelsys to get unlimited access to a library of more than 100 Sesame Street eBooks for an annual fee of $39.99, although the company is offering an introductory price of $24.99 through July 4.
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This Week in Children's Apps: May 19, 2011
This week we're featuring the first app by pop-up book designer David Carter ((How Many Bugs in a Box?); and a series of apps based on the Stella and Sam books by Marie-Louise Gay.
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Neil Gaiman Unveils Imaginary Book On The Hypothetical Library
Bestselling novelist and award-winning comics writer Neil Gaiman is the latest author to submit a conceptual book idea to the Hypothetical Library, a fanciful blogsite launched by book designer Charles Orr that creates jacket designs for imaginary books—books that don't really exist—from very real authors.
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Amazon to Drop Free Books from Kindle Bestseller List
For some in publishing it may be a curiosity, for others a point of contention--Amazon's practice of including free downloads in its list of most popular Kindle titles. It will soon no longer be an issue. A representative at the e-tailer has confirmed that the company will be splitting its Kindle bestseller list, creating one list for paid books and another list for free titles. The date for the switch is vague--the rep would only say it will happen in "a few weeks"--but the switch will certainly be noticed.
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Who's Got Pull in the Publishing Twitterverse
Nearly a year ago, PW looked at a handful of indie presses and major imprints to gauge their use of Twitter. The piece showed most imprints had a few thousand followers, and that some savvy indies were more adept at using the social networking service than the big houses. The story ran at a time when the industry was grappling with what exactly to do with—and on—the social networking service. Is it for publicizing books? Cultivating brands? A province for authors? For marketers? And, most importantly, can you actually use it to sell books?
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Borders Launches e-Book Initiative, Kobo Reader Pre-orders
Borders laid out plans for its move into offering digital content, beginning with plans to take pre-orders for the new Kobo digital reading device. Kobo's new $149 e-ink reading devices will begin shipping in June to be followed by the launch of Area-e, special in-store digital content shops, scheduled to open in Borders' stores beginning in August.
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Japanese Publishers Form e-Book Association
Thirty-one Japanese publishers, including some of the most influential, have formed the Electronic Book Publishers Association of Japan. The new group will work out new contract terms and set standards.
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Google Book Editions and a 'New World Order' in Book Publishing
The promise that the much-delayed Google Book Editions will actually be launched in June or July set off a lively discussion at this spring's last Publishers Weekly Think Future series about what the future of the book industry could be in a world where the major players include the billion-dollar companies Google, Apple and Amazon. And some publishers, too.
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Enriched E-Books: Multimedia, Mystery, and 'Cathy's Book'
Originally published in 2006 by Running Press, Sean Stewart and Jordan Weisman's Cathy's Book is a hybrid literary work, an interactive novel that manages to work both as a teen mystery and as an interactive game with enough literary chops and facsimile evidence, Web-based clues, and cleverly embedded animation to satisfy both the writing and gaming camps.
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Using E-Books to Support Print
It may seem ironic given how much erotic fantasy has migrated online, but Cecelia Tan, who founded Circlet Publishing in Cambridge, Mass., with her husband, Corwin, in 1992, is using her e-book publishing program to try to rescue print. "There's still no replacement for the ‘real' book," maintained Tan, whose own paranormal romances have been published as e-books through Ravenous Romance and who will publish several in print under Red Wheel Weiser's new Red Silk Editions, which launches this fall.
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Win a Free Download of the New How to Cook Everything iPhone App
PW's cookbooks newsletter, Cooking the Books, is giving away a free download of the How to Cook Everything On the Go iPhone app to five lucky readers--and today's the last day to enter. With 2,000 recipes and recipe variations, 400 how-to illustrations, and hundreds of menu ideas, it's the ultimate handy reference. To enter, tweet your favorite How to Cook Everything recipe and why you love it to @landriani.
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