Best of BTB: The Good, The Bad & The Monopoly

May 29, 2016 | Best of VOC

At Digital Book World 2016 in March, antitrust attorney Jonathan Kanter laid out the basic principles of anti-trust law and how it might apply to the large tech companies that dominate the paths to sales and to marketing of books. Among other issues, Kanter addressed...

Good Works Make Good Publishers

May 27, 2016 | News

There are ways to make information pay, and many of them have nothing to do with profit. It’s a generally accepted principle of business today that social responsibility enhances a company’s brand reputation. At Thursday’s annual “Making Information Pay” conference in...

Taking On the Book Pirates

May 22, 2016 | Copyright, News

Online book piracy and the weather have this much in common: People talk about them, but no one does much about one or the other. Now meet one author who has done rather a lot. When publicist and author Rhonda Rees discovered her book was available on pirate web...

More Amazon Stores Coming

May 20, 2016 | News

On Tuesday, Amazon founder and chairman Jeff Bezos confirmed that the online retailer plans to open more physical stores. Amazon opened its first physical store, Amazon Books, in Seattle in 2015; later this year, the company will open a bookstore in San Diego. “Bezos...

Amazon From The European Side

May 16, 2016 | International

Copyright around the world is in a race to keep up.  Technology has the fast track, while legislators, lobbyists, and the public are going to the inside and looking to make their move. In the digital age, this race is going to be not a sprint, but a marathon.  And...

Fresh Winds in Chicago for BookExpo

May 13, 2016 | News

The winds of change are blowing at BookExpo America. This week, the publishing industry’s top trade show arrived in Chicago for the first time since 2004. Hardly anyone considers the Javits Convention Center in Manhattan to be comfortable, though the book business may...

A Keyword Cloud Aids Book Discovery

May 11, 2016 | Events

At last month’s London Book Fair special presentation on “The Data Dilemma,” Jim Bryant, Founder and CEO of Trajectory, Inc., noted that, “book discovery is one of the biggest problems facing publishing.” An intelligent network connecting publishers to...

STM Tech Trends Are Strong Currents

May 8, 2016 | Events

As the world marks the 400th anniversary of the death of Shakespeare, lines from Julius Caesar have bearing on the world of scientific and scholarly publishing. There is a tide in the affairs of men. Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; Omitted, all the...

Shelfie, Goodreads Try To Boost E-Books

May 6, 2016 | News

In recent months, e-book sales figures have flattened or fallen. A pair of e-book sales initiatives announced this week could provide a boost to publishers’ digital fortunes. Shelfie, the book discovery app that allows readers to essentially digitize their print...

Researchers Facing “Irrelevance Crisis”

May 4, 2016 | Events

At last month’s London Book Fair special presentation on “The Data Dilemma,” Sybil Wong, Ph.D., Head of Marketing and Communications for Sparrho, called attention to the “irrelevance crisis” facing researchers in the lab and on campus. “208,000 new articles are...