publishing

Video: New York's magical 'Harry Potter' bash

Yeah, yeah, I know. Harry Potter this, Harry Potter that, OMG-does-Harry-die, OMG-OMG-it's-on-BitTorrent... We're so ready to move on to the next cultural obsession from across the pond. Regardless, here's some video from Friday night of some of the people who showed up at the official New York book launch event hosted by Scholastic, the publisher that handles Harry Potter in the States.

The wizardly confab was held in New York City's shopper-friendly SoHo neighborhood, on a stretch of Mercer St. between Prince St. and Spring St. Conveniently, not only is Mercer St. right around the corner … Read more

WordPress app for Facebook handy, but incomplete

I spent part of this morning having a go with the new Facebook app from the folks at WordPress.com (a Webware 100 winner). Once installed and linked up with your Wordpress.com account, you can post to any of your blogs without leaving Facebook. You can also check traffic stats and add bookmarks to your blogroll. The actual blog authoring tool is very limited in this release. There's no way to add links or pictures to posts. You're also unable to manage some of the subtleties of authoring like bold and italicized fonts, indentations, and the handy … Read more

HarperCollins, MySpace to solicit teen writing

Old-school book publishers are still trying to figure out how best to reach audiences on the Web and build online communities for their authors. That was the takeaway of a talk this week at Mashup 2007, a conference held in San Francisco that focused on teens and tech.

Diane Naughton, vice president of marketing at HarperCollins Children's Books, said that the challenge has shifted from the publishing industry holding the Internet at arm's length to worries about how to prove value from online marketing efforts.

One way HarperCollins plans to tackle this challenge is to team up with … Read more

Publishing your photos

Taking digital pictures is simple; transforming them into a constructive project is a whole 'nother story. Web services like Flickr, Picasa, Shutterfly, Webshots, Snapfish, and countless others let you create photo galleries that are hosted on their servers, but what if you want to create a gallery for your own Web site?

Personally, I'm the sort of guy who wants to start with my raw images and my trusty NoteTab Light text editor, but I seem to have lost my patience for HTML and CSS (not to mention JavaScript and XML) over the last five years.… Read more

Microsoft announces six patches coming in July

As part of its July 2007 Patch Tuesday, Microsoft will patch at least six vulnerabilities. Three of the patches are deemed "critical" by Microsoft and affect software for Excel, Windows, and .Net Framework. Two are deemed "important" and affect software for Publisher and Windows XP. One is deemed "moderate" and affects Windows Vista. Details will be released on Tuesday, July 10, 2007.

Amazon enters book digitization jungle with rare-book project

Amazon.com's BookSurge subsidiary announced Thursday that it has partnered with book digitization company Kirtas Technologies on a project to archive and distribute hard-to-find books. This new initiative involves collaboration with public and university libraries to provide their collections of "rare and inaccessible" books; the titles will be digitized through Kirtas and then reproductions will be sold through Amazon through the BookSurge print-on-demand service.

In return, the partner libraries--initially consisting of Emory University, University of Maine, and the public libraries in Toronto, Ont. and Cincinnati, Ohio--will receive a cut of the revenue to fund further book preservation … Read more

Grab pics from Flickr for a DIY book

On Monday, it becomes official. Blurb.com, which offers do-it-yourself bookmaking, and photo-sharing site Flickr are teaming up to help consumers jazz up their self-publishing efforts.

"Flickr got feedback from their members that they wanted to make books...We have already got a lot of feedback from Flickr's end users," said Eileen Gittins founder and CEO of Blurb.

Flickr community members have used the Blurb service for a couple of months now, and Flickr printed the community-contributed compilation "24 hours of Flickr" through San Francisco-based Blurb.

But starting Monday, a link to Blurb will appear … Read more

Humpty Dumpty won't get put back together

Earlier this week I ran into a colleague who had moved out of town a few months ago. After swapping the usual gossip, the conversation swung around to the recent layoffs sweeping the news business. Here in Northern California, both the San Francisco Chronicle and the San Jose Mercury News recently announced major cuts in staff. Then earlier this week, tech publisher CMP laid off some 200 employees in a bloodletting that included several of the company's best known reporters and editors.

These are rough times for the news business. The present is unsettling and the future appears grim. … Read more

Blogger launches sneak peek of new service

Yesterday Blogger launched a new service called Blogger in Draft. It's essentially the same old Blogger interface with a few new features the team is in the midst of developing. Think of it like an open beta test. The first new feature is a built-in video uploader tool. Users can add AVI, MPEG, Quicktime, Windows Media, and Real video files with sizes up to 100MB. The service will then convert it into a playable Web video with an interface identical to Google's own video player, complete with Blogger branding.

What's interesting about this new feature is that … Read more