publishers

As more and more book buyers turn to e-readers, Barnes & Noble appears to be abandoning traditional publishing.

Barnes & Noble, the largest bookseller in the U.S., is looking for a buyer for Sterling Publishing unit, people familiar with the situation tell The Wall Street Journal. The bookseller acquired Sterling, a traditional publisher of nonfiction titles, for $115 million in 2003. Sterling boasts and active list of more than 5,000 owned and distributed titles, specializing on gardening, cooking, and crafts, as well as children's books.

A Barnes & Noble representative declined to comment.

"Sterling has a … Read more

The U.S. Department of Justice is investigating allegations that Apple and a group of publishers colluded on e-book pricing, the Wall Street Journal reported.

"We are also investigating the electronic book industry, along with the European Commission and the states attorneys general," Sharis Pozen, acting antitrust chief at the Justice Department, said at a congressional hearing in the agency's first public confirmation of the investigation.

Apple declined to comment on the matter.

The European Commission cited Apple, which sells iBooks, and five publishers yesterday in a probe into alleged anti-competitive practices in Europe. Apple and the … Read more

Apple has once again found itself in the middle of a major e-book pricing complaint.

The iBooks provider and five publishers, including Harper Collins, Simon & Schuster, and Penguin, have been cited in an investigation by the European Commission over concerns that the companies "engaged in anti-competitive practices affecting the sales of e-books in the European Economic Area." (Disclosure: Both Simon & Schuster and CNET News are owned by CBS.)

The Commission, which is the European Union's executive arm, "will in particular investigate whether these publishing groups and Apple have engaged in illegal agreements or practices … Read more

Amazon has retooled and renamed the format for electronic books, embracing Web technologies and adding better abilities for graphics and complex layouts.

The previous format, Mobi 7, will be replaced by Kindle Format 8, aka KF8, according to an Amazon announcement yesterday.

"As showcased on Kindle Fire, KF8 enables publishers to create great-looking books in categories that require rich formatting and design such as children's picture books, comics & graphic novels, technical and engineering books, and cookbooks," Amazon said in its announcement. "Kindle Format 8 replaces the Mobi format and adds over 150 new formatting capabilities, … Read more

A new book revealing many of Steve Jobs' most illuminating quotes is being rushed to the market following the passing of the Apple leader on Wednesday.

Initially slated to be published next March and then pushed to November 15 following Jobs' resignation as Apple CEO, "I, Steve: Steve Jobs in His Own Words," is being shipped to retail stores early next week and should be available to consumers by the end of the month.

The book has already been available for pre-order at Amazon and has naturally seen a surge in interest since Jobs' death earlier this week.… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--Some musicians are avant-garde technophiles. Plenty are stuck in the mud of tradition. But almost all of them use sheet music, to the tune of $2 billion a year. The first company today to compete in the Startup Battlefield at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference here was Tonara, which is bringing sheet music and new music technology to the iPad.

In the Disrupt Battlefield, TechCrunch-chosen startups get a chance to give a six-minute pitch to the audience and a panel of VC judges. There is a user vote for the startups and the prize is $50,000, the "Disrupt … Read more

Once upon a time, you might tell your children, there were buildings called libraries. A resident of a city or town, you would explain, could walk into one and borrow books--for free!

Libraries aren't likely to fade into history just yet, of course, but the possibility is more plausible given Amazon's discussions about offering an annual subscription plan for e-book access described in a Wall Street Journal report yesterday.

Amazon's library option would be part of Amazon Prime, the gradually broadening subscription plan, Larry Dignan at CNET sister site ZDNet expects.

As I see it, the move … Read more

This is an update of a post I wrote earlier this year.

Remember desktop publishing software? Back in the old days, you had your pick of a dozen or more programs (Publisher, PageMaker, etc.), but now the field is practically empty.

Granted, you can still buy Adobe InDesign or QuarkXPress for a small fortune (they run $699 and $799, respectively), but what if you just want a simple program for creating newsletters, brochures, flyers, and the like?

Enter Serif PagePlus X5, the latest and greatest version of what was already a terrific desktop-publishing application. It's ideal for designing print … Read more

The pitch from the Uncram PR rep was that Twitter's 140-character limit is holding it back from being truly useful. "I'll take this meeting," I replied, "since I fundamentally disagree with the premise. Twitter is great because of its limits."

But Uncram isn't a text expander like Deck.ly. Instead, it's a quick-and-dirty page publishing system that uses Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn as its social communications strata. It has potential.

The idea with the service is that if you want to share an idea, there's a better way to do it than just typing a short blurb and putting in a link. On an Uncram page, you can insert multiple links, photos, videos, and maps. More interestingly, Uncram has a strong topic extraction system. It can discern what the text in your post is about, and will offer up topic snippets from MetaWeb's Freebase, where Uncram's CEO, Arial Porath, was once director of strategy.

Uncram has a little browser extension that makes getting into the system easy. When you're writing a post on Twitter or Facebook or LinkedIn, you get an "Uncram" button alongside the usual "Post" button. It fires up the page creator for you and lets you immediately share a page--called a "diary" in Uncram lingo--as soon as it's ready.

The Uncram pages look very good and carry their own discussion threads, which is both necessary and weird. It's necessary because nothing else will drive repeat traffic to these pages than a social component, but weird because the whole idea of Uncram is that you share these pages from social networks like Facebook and Twitter, which are primarily discussion platforms themselves. Uncram is designed, Porath says, to be a "write once, broadcast anywhere" system for social networks. "You should use the social network for your headlines, not the end destination," he says. In that regard it's not that different from many other Web publishing platforms, but its integration into social networks is tighter.

Uncram pages can also be private, or unlisted.

I'm not sure Uncram works as a large-scale consumer play. Google+ and Facebook are getting better at allowing users to create rich, multipart status updates. But it does have a potential revenue angle for businesses. There will be white-label or brandable versions of the platform. Since it is so easy to create a diary page on Uncram, it could be useful for marketers who quickly want to generate nice-looking and complete landing pages for social-media campaigns. Launching a weekend promotion for your nationwide chain restaurant? Throw together a page on this platform in a second and share it on all your networks. It's not a new idea, but the Uncram publishing system and social-network integration could make this platform a solid tool for brand marketers. … Read more