By Tony Long and Dan Bloom Back in 2004, [Tony Long] told his readers at Wired News that "effective with this sentence, [our website] will no longer capitalize the first letter 'I' in internet." In that very same note, he also informed them that "at the same time, Web becomes web and Net becomes net." Why did Long go out on a limb in 2004 to lowercase ''internet''? The simple answer is because then—same as now, in 2013—there was no earthly reason to capitalize the word any longer. True believers, of course, are fond of capitalizing words, whether they be marketers or political junkies...

Futurebook is reporting that Pottermore, JK Rowling's portal for all things Harry Potter, was a big winner at The Bookseller Industry Awards. As author Philip Jones explains, the thrust of the message they are hearing now is that there is no longer such a thing as 'digital strategy.' It's all just strategy now. So, what do they think Pottermore is doing right? They identify four things Pottermore did incredibly well "for which the words 'game changer'" apply: 1. They created a commercial e-book platform that was at least as good as Amazon's 2. They set their own prices, and sustained them in the face...

Today marks an important day in Internet history. April 30, 1993, was the day the World Wide Web entered the public domain, which allowed the rest of us to use it on a royalty-free basis. Want to see the first ever web page? Not much to look at by today's standards, but still very cool. Apart from providing us all with animated cat gifs from now until the end of time, this is also an important milestone for e-books and e-reading. Without the Internet, we wouldn't have had Project Gutenberg in its easy to search and access format. (Project Gutenberg began in 1971,...

The general public now has a rather unusual chance to see how F. Scott Fitzgerald’s mind worked when it came to some of the not-quite-literary aspects of his life. His handwritten financial ledger has been digitized and put on the University of South Carolina’s website, where anyone can access it. "This is a record of everything Fitzgerald wrote, and what he did with it, in his own hand," Elizabeth Sudduth, director of the Ernest F. Hollings Library and Rare Books Collection, told the Associated Press. The ledger comes at a time when many people will be talking about Fitzgerald and his most famous...

Initially, Reddit didn’t seem to want to take responsibility for the user-generated content on its website—even as users acted as Internet sleuths, trying to find clues in the Boston Marathon bombing. When Reddit’s Erik Martin (pictured at left) was asked at the paidContent Live event last week if the point of the site was to “bless the chaos” and take responsibility for what people post, Martin said: “Yeah, we are sort of groundkeepers. We are facilitating the platform. We facilitate an action there to let people create spaces … I think in this case a lot of people just want to do...

Blogger Hollee Actman Becker is making headlines for her blog post on a disturbing Instagram trend: the 'beauty pageant', wherein tweenaged girls post collages of their friends and ask readers to vote on which is the prettiest. The girl with the least votes gets Xed out of the picture, and the game repeats until only one girl is left. Her reaction to the discovery that her own daughters were playing these games was swift and surprisingly heart-felt: she posted an image about beauty being only skin deep (which has since gone viral), and used her daughter's account to publicly ask girls...

We've watched with interest as a few new digital publishing-related startups have launched seemingly out of the blue over the past few weeks. Thin Reads, a fantastic new website that runs reviews of e-singles, is definitely one of our favorites, and we're clearly not alone; the site has been enjoying a ton of mostly glowing press. (Click to see what Mashable, Paid Content, and MediaBistro's GalleyCat have to say about the new site.) But there's another interesting and brand-new startup known as Blackstrap that hasn't been getting quite as much love lately. In fact, we hadn't even heard of it until we...

We all love stories. For many of us, it's why we read, whether on paper or in electrons. But what are the most meaningful stories? For many of us, we love stories about our past, our families, and where we came from. StoryWorth is a start-up that aims to make telling, reading and keeping those stories easier. I really like the idea behind it. It's all done via email. You can send questions to your loved ones, or StoryWorth will create and send questions. The recipient answers the question, and StoryWorth stores it and turns it into an online book. It's private. Only...

When Amazon announced the purchase of Goodreads, many readers were skeptical about the future of the social reading site. Goodreads allowed users to add reviews and keep track of the books they read and interact with others on the site. Some readers are concerned with how the site might change and are looking for an alternative. Here are a couple of sites that you might consider: Library Thing – The site claims to have 1.6 million users and calls itself “the world’s largest book club.” Books are catalogued from Amazon, The Library of Congress and other sites. It should be noted that Amazon is...

It’s probably safe to say that we’ve all dealt with our fair share of ridiculousness, bestowed complimentary-style from our local Internet service providers. Hidden fees, promotions that are too good to be true, bad or weak Internet connections, frustrating customer service reps, forced up-selling, etc., etc., and the list goes on… A comedy troupe that makes short YouTube videos and refers to itself as Extremely Decent Films published the following video earlier in the week. Although it’s an obvious exaggeration of the truth, at the same time it really isn’t. What’s alarming, in fact, is just how much of the content in this video is real...

We've finally tipped the balance, according to a recent Bowkers study. In the U.S., through November, in 2012, almost 44 percent of books were sold online, versus almost 32 percent sold in large retail chains, independent bookstores, other mass merchandisers and supermarkets. No, they weren't all e-books, but a goodly percentage of them were. Twenty-eight percent of all book purchases in the U.S. were e-books. According to the study, supermarkets, mass merchandisers and indie bookstores held their market share while big-chain bookstores lost share. DBW speculates the demise of Borders might be a significant part of that, and it sounds reasonable to...

While it’s odd to think of an organization backed by the  Penguin, Hachette and Simon & Schuster as a startup, Bookish, the new book-recommendation and -discovery site is essentially that. After two years in development under three CEOs, Bookish is now a reality, a place where users can get recommendations—based on titles or groups of titles they know they already like—and then, importantly, purchase them. Like the Random House project BookScout, the idea, on one level, is to facilitate discovery across the industry, for the good of the industry. And while users can discover just about any book, the books they can purchase...