Press release follows. Good luck to Don and to Quartet, the new digital publishing house. – D.R. Quartet Press has announced that Don Linn, Senior Vice President and Publisher at The Taunton Press, will be leaving Taunton to launch a digital publishing house, Quartet Press. Linn—who prior to his tenure at Taunton was owner and CEO of Consortium Book Sales and Distribution—will have principal responsibility for Quartet Press’ Finance, Administration and General Management. “It’s been a great experience for me to work with an incredibly talented and generous group of people at Taunton and we’ve been fortunate enough to produce New...

Co-editor Paul Biba notes that Publishers Weekly and sister publications are for sale. With e-books taking off, maybe TeleRead can buy PW someday. That would be fun. Under our management, PW and the others wouldn’t run book reviews without information about e-formats---or lack thereof---and DRM limitations. More seriously, best of luck to the PW crew at this difficult time. Related: DRM, Orwellian book zaps and eBabel: When will the press TRULY grasp the importance of e-book ownership?...

From the Publishers Weekly daily email: Reed Business Information is putting Publishers Weekly and its affiliated publications, Library Journal and School Library Journal, up for sale. The sale of the group is part of RBI’s strategy to divest most of its trade magazines in the U.S. Last year, Reed Elsevier, parent company of RBI, tried to sell all of RBI but dropped the sale when it couldn’t get the price it wanted in a depressed market for media properties. In a related announcement, Tad Smith, CEO of RBI US, has resigned. John Poulin has been named acting CEO and he will...

From Digital Koans: The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded $362,000 to the Open Annotation Collaboration to "build new digital annotation tools and define and demonstrate a framework for sharing annotations of digital content across the World Wide Web." Here's an excerpt from the press release on JESSE: The OAC includes humanities scholars, librarians, and information scientists from four universities—George Mason University, the University of Illinois, the University of Maryland, and the University of Queensland (Australia)—from the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library, and from the Office of Advanced Technology Research at JSTOR, an integrated online archive of over five million items digitized...

Clément Monjou, Rédacteur en chef de Ebouquin.fr, sent me an email to alert me to the news that details and pictures of the new Sony readers have leaked. Evidently their operating manuals were somehow released. The manuals, however, don't have much technical information so we still don't know if they have WiFi or wireless. Here's what seems to be available: PRS-300: 5" screen, no touch screen, no audio output, no card slots, ~440MB user partition, 220g. PRS-600: 6" screen, touch screen, audio output, SD/MS slots, ~380MB user partition, 286g. At both the IDPF conference, and the press conference introducing the...

NPR did a poll and received 136,000 votes from 16,000 responders. Here are the first 20. To see the rest go over to NPRs redesigned website here. What are your best ebook beach books? 1. The Harry Potter series, by J.K. Rowling 2. To Kill a Mockingbird, by Harper Lee 3. The Kite Runner, by Khaled Hosseini 4. Bridget Jones's Diary, by Helen Fielding 5. Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen 6. Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood, by Rebecca Wells 7. The Great Gatsby, by F. Scott Fitzgerald 8. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams 9. Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle...

That’s the headline in an InfoWorld item, which tells how "the open standard for reflowable text is driving e-book sales. Why the standard could become as important as PDF.” Of course, in terms of the IDPF, the main e-book standards group, ePub already could be more important. It isn’t as if the IDPF is setting PDF standards. “Reflowable,” for most books, should be the future. Among those quoted, besides Michael Smith, IDPF exec director, is open source advocate Evan Leibovitch, who’ll start contributing to TeleRead in the near future. An interesting stat in the piece:...

This article goes into great detail regarding etextbooks - reading methods, ereaders, laaptop reading, implementation, etc. Anyone who is interested in this area should take a look. Here's the abstract and thanks to Resource Shelf, which is always a great font of information, for the link: * A typical college student spends up to $1,000 per year on textbooks, and many students don’t buy textbooks at all because they’re too expensive. * E-textbooks can cost up to 50 percent less than standard textbooks while providing the foundation for integration of multiple...

What’s better---an old-fashioned book or a Kindle? Over at the Green Apple Core bookstore in San Francisco, they’re having a “smackdown” with a series of videos. The first is here. Yep, Green Apple obviously intends to play up Amazon’s 1984ish episode to the hilt, and I don’t blame ‘em. Any thoughts from Kindle-lovers and others, in regard to Part I?...

A lawyer representing the RIAA and MPAA has already made his position clear---your DRMed purchases shouldn’t have to work forever. Luckily not everyone feels that way, and in fact an engineer active in the IEEE has just forwarded to me a call for participation for a “Digital Personal Property Study Group.” Ahead I’ll reproduce the notice from Paul Sweazey---which, yes, mentions DRM. What do you think, gang? And might you yourself participate? You can email Paul at the address in the notice. Keep in mind that IEEE activities may reflect corporate influences, both open and...

Ars Technica provides yet another great example of the fundamental disconnect between the mindsets of media producers and consumers when it comes to the issue of Digital Rights Management (DRM). The DMCA exemption hearings (which Ars earlier quoted a copyright attorney calling a “theater of the absurd”) have moved into their next stage, and Steven Metalitz—an attorney representing a number of rightsholder groups including the RIAA and MPAA—has responded to copyright office questions as part of the process. The responses concern the way consumers can lose access to DRM’d media they purchased if the company that...

Got this press release from Knowledge Genie: “For most knowledge experts, the traditional approach to sharing your smarts is to write a book, consult and go on the speaking circuit,” said Milo Sindell. “With Knowledge Genie, we help experts move beyond the book by publishing their knowledge as a Genie, a shareable, sellable online application. A customer interacts with a Genie like a virtual coach, allowing authors to clone themselves and share their expertise with a worldwide audience.” “Knowledge Genie is a breakthrough in digital publishing,” said Marshal Goldsmith, a well-known author and leadership consultant to Fortune 500 CEOs. “The Knowledge Genie...