publishing

There's a new partnership for GetGlue, a start-up that lets users "check in" to the movies or TV shows they're watching, music they're listening to, and books they're reading. The company announced Tuesday that it's partnered with four major book publishing houses to launch "stickers," the equivalent of Foursquare's achievement badges, for the season's biggest-ticket fiction and nonfiction books as well as bestselling authors like Tom Clancy and Paulo Coehlo.

On board are Hachette Book Group, Simon and Schuster, Random House, and Penguin. The largest publishing house that isn'… Read more

Back in May, Barnes & Noble announced that it would be launching a self-publishing platform, and now its PubIt service has officially gone live. The new DIY publishing option allows independent publishers and self-publishing writers to distribute their works digitally through BN.com and Barnes & Noble's eBookstore.

The new service will compete with Amazon's pioneering Digital Text Platform (DTP), which many writers have turned to for distributing their works to the Kindle and other devices that run the Kindle Reader software. Sony, too, has a DYI option for its Reader Store, and Apple is now allowing self-publishers … Read more

Microsoft announced today it will be taking preorders for Microsoft Office 2011 for Mac. Microsoft says this major update will bring the Mac version of its office suite almost on par with the Windows version of the product. With significantly better cross-platform compatibility, several added new features, and some impressive interface elements exclusive to the Mac version, Office 2011 for Mac might be the best in its class.

Over the past couple of weeks, we had the chance to check out the entire suite--including Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Outlook--and we think there's plenty to be excited about. New and … Read more

Personal internet archiving service Evernote is taking a new approach to expanding its user base and bookmarking functionality with a tool for publishers and blog owners called Site Memory. In short, it lets users save Web content for reading later, while helping to promote some of the most heavily saved content with Evernote users at large.

Blogs that add the new Site Memory button to their posts (or any page for that matter) let users bookmark and save that content to their Evernote account. Akin to Web bookmarking services like Instapaper and Read it Later, this lets them absorb the … Read more

Apple's plan to extend the length of song samples doesn't appear to be dead.

"We are in active negotiations with Apple," about the length of song samples, said Hanna Pantle, a spokeswoman for Broadcast Music Inc., (BMI) one of the performing-rights organizations that collects royalties on behalf of songwriters and music publishers. She declined to provide any details.

At BMI's rival, the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), a spokesman declined to comment. A source close to the company, however, said Apple has a license with ASCAP that doesn't appear to put … Read more

A trade group representing music publishers and songwriters informed Apple on Tuesday that the company could not go ahead with a plan to extend the length of iTunes song samples without the publishers permission.

On Monday, CNET reported Apple had plans to boost the amount of time iTunes users would be given to sample a song from 30 seconds to 90 seconds. Sources with knowledge of the plan said Apple could announce the song samples as early as Wednesday during the company's media event in San Francisco. Apple had already reached agreements to extend song samples with the four … Read more

After entering into a landmark deal with Amazon.com last month, a well-known literary agent has backed off its agreement with the online retailer.

The Wylie Agency had inked a deal with Amazon that made digital versions of some of its clients' titles, including Norman Mailer's "The Naked and the Dead" and Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man," available exclusively to Amazon's Kindle e-reader platform for two years.

The agreement was considered a landmark because it skirted the publishers of the books' paper editions and effectively offered more revenue to the authors or their estates.… Read more

Demand Media, the publishing company that achieved both impressive revenues and industry notoriety for its business model of fast, cheap content, is planning to go public.

The company filed an S1 form with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday. The SEC filing reveals that Demand's revenues in 2009 were $114 million, with losses of $22 million. Demand hasn't yet specified a value for the IPO or the index on which it plans to trade.

The Santa Monica, Calif.-based Demand popularized the model that has become known as a "content farm" or &… Read more

We resize images all the time--to e-mail to friends, post on blogs, share on Facebook, and much more. Although we often resize images in a photo-editing program as soon as we take them off the camera, it's not uncommon for us to need a resizing tool that can be used the rest of the time. After all, who wants to launch a big photo-editing program for tasks that can be completed with a lightweight utility? That's where Fast Image Resizer comes in. This basic program lets users resize images as quickly and easily as anything we've seen.… Read more