From their website (blockquotes omitted).  This is really, really, really exciting: The Royal Society has today announced that its world-famous historical journal archive – which includes thefirst ever peer-reviewed scientific journal – has been made permanently free to access online. Around 60,000 historical scientific papers are accessible via a fully searchable online archive, with papers published more than 70 years ago now becoming freely available. The Royal Society is the world’s oldest scientific publisher, with the first edition of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society appearing in 1665.  Henry Oldenburg – Secretary of the Royal Society and first Editor of the publication – ensured that it was “licensed...

I already touched on Amazon’s low revenue projections in another piece, but to come back and take another look, Peter Kafka has an interesting analysis on AllThingsD. He points out that, while Amazon is taking a revenue hit, it’s not another Netflix (which squandered the goodwill it had built up with its customers with a series of unpopular decisions, and at last count had lost 800,000 customers)—it’s burning money the old-fashioned way, by pouring it into solid, physical plant improvements and manufacturing products that should help it make more money in the future. A lot of...

For the next couple of days, Groupon is offering a "67% off" deal on a "Hip Street" 7" multimedia e-reader. The retail price is ostensibly $180, but it is on sale for $60, shipping included. It appears to be a color device, with 4 gigabytes of internal storage, no web-browsing capability, and compatibility with the Kobo store. I've never heard of this particular reader, though a little research indicates it can apparently be had for $78 at Wal-Mart so perhaps $60 isn't such a great deal after all. In appearance, it actually kind of reminds me of the Sharper Image Literati...

I’m not sure whether you can really call this “ironic”, as misused as that word often is, but it’s certainly amusing. Apple has notified some purchasers of the Steve Jobs biography e-book on iBooks that they should delete the current version and download a new version at no charge, Macworld UK reports. Apple confirmed to Macworld that the emails were genuine and the instructions were to fix formatting problems suffered by a small number of customers who had downloaded the iBook. No changes have been made to the content. Of course, this sort of...

Perspectives on e-book piracy from outside the industry can be interesting. On “Tobold’s MMORPG Blog,” blogger Tobold posits that Amazon doesn’t seem to be too worried about e-book piracy if it’s selling its Kindles at a loss. He writes: Thus I wonder whether people reading eBooks are inherently more honest than people consuming other forms of electronic content. Maybe it is only people of a certain age and social class that are interested in books at all. This summer, during the London riots, the only shops that weren't looted were book stores. The underprivileged young people...

From The Jewish Week (New York): The Journal of Jewish Communal Service (JJCS) is now available in digital form on the Web thanks to the work of the Berman Jewish Policy Archive at NYU’s Robert F. Wagner Graduate School of Public Service. The BJPA was established through generous support from the philanthropist Mandell (“Bill”) Berman of Detroit and the Charles H. Revson Foundation. [Clip] The JJCS collection spans from 1902 to the most recent issues of the Journal, providing a window into American Jewish organizational life with unprecedented breadth and depth. The Journal of Jewish Communal Service was established by the National Conference...

So says an article in the always-excellent Publishing Perspectives.  Here's a snippet: Crowdsourcing the funding to self-publish books isn’t a new idea. Kickstarter got the trend going more than a year ago, Unbound took it a step further (just to name two examples). But how about using a service like Kickstarter to sell print, translation and film rights — as well as to secure bricks-and-mortar retail distribution? Author Alex de Campi and illustrator Jimmy Broxton are doing just that. Using Kickstarter as a platform, the duo seeks to raise $27,000 over the next two months to fund...

My previous post discussed the problem publishers are facing with Amazon’s stepping into the role of book publisher rather than just bookseller. On October 17, 2011, one New York Times front page headline read “Amazon Signing Up Authors, Writing Publishers Out of Deal.” Read a bit further into the article and one discovers that Amazon isn’t talking about the number of editors it is employing (if any). One also discovers that Russell Grandinetti, a top Amazon executive, says, “The only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and reader. Everyone who stands between those two has both risk...

From Goodereader: On Friday the company is set to release The Professional Chef, the official textbook of the Culinary Institute of America. You might have heard about the institute via many late night ads addressing you to get a higher education. Anna normally lays it down at the end trying to get you to signup for information. The book they are releasing also goes by the name Pro Chef. It is assigned to all students when they sign up in the program and a fair number of other culinary schools. On Inkling, people can buy individual...

From the press release: Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. announced today its trusted encyclopedia is now available as an iPad App through the Apple App Store.  The Encyclopaedia Britannica App gives mobile users the ability to find information and explore subjects without compromise – users can feel confident that what they are searching for is accurate and provided by professional editors and expert contributors. Users have two choices to access the app.  The first choice is available for free and gives users complimentary high-resolution images, maps, access to 100 free articles plus the first 100 words...

From The Bookseller: The Office of Fair Trading has cleared Amazon to take over The Book Depository, ruling the merger would not lead to a lessening of competition within the UK book industry. The OFT decided there was limited pre-merger competition between the two companies and found that competition within Amazon Marketplace would continue to be strong after the takeover. It said The Book Depository only accounted for between 2-4% of the online market for physical books, and that TBD had most of its growth in overseas markets rather than the UK. During its investigation, the...

Here’s another new media magnate warning old media that the time is nigh to ditch the old print and jump into the new electronic world. Harvey Levin, founder of entertainment news site TMZ.com, spoke at the National Press Club on Monday where he told newspaper and magazine publishers to get out of the print business and get on the web. As the Washington Post points out, it does take some chutzpah for Levin to issue prescriptions to traditional news media, given that most celebrity gossip isn’t exactly Pulitzer-quality journalism. But on the other hand, in the six years since...