The complete archive (browse) is free for subscribers to the publication. FA just announced two new subscription plans. From FishbowlNY: The portal contains 8,000 articles from nearly 400 issues. There are also more than 300 images and maps. To help with navigation, and well, where to begin, the editors have organized articles into nine collections. In all, digitization was a project that took nearly a year to complete. At the present time a selection of articles organized into nine curated collections are available for free to ALL visitors. Foreign Affairs is published by the Council on Foreign Relations. Direct to Online Archive/Curated Collections See Also: Reference: Iran Crisis Guide, Global...

One of the arguments that many of us have made in support of traditional publishing has been the role that traditional publishers have played as gatekeepers. Gatekeeping means more than just making sure that a manuscript is literate; it includes making sure that it is original. Increasingly, traditional publishers are failing at this aspect of gatekeeping. They are failing to detect the plagiarized book. A recent article in The New Yorker, “The Plagiarist’s Tale” by Lizzie Widdicombe, explores this problem. If you haven’t read the article, it is well worth reading. In this case, the publisher failed to recognize that the entire...

  Review of Kindle Touch on Świat Czytników - the most popular Polish blog about ebooks, with over 450,000 pageviews a month Two extremely helpful and comprehensive articles about ebook market in Brazil were just published at Futurebook. First one, written by Stella Dauer, describes in detail the state of the ebook technology. Eduardo Melo shares information about the current number of titles offered by Brazilian ebookstores, as well as predictions for 2012. So far, based on news coverage from top ebook sites (check posts in Publishing Perspectives), I was convinced Brazil is far more advanced than any other international ebook market. It makes perfect...

Should we learn to stop worrying and love the Amazon? That’s the position espoused by writer/publisher Bob Mayer in a post to his blog “Write It Forward”. Mayer co-founded independent publishing house Who Dares Wins Publishing in January 2011, and “went from selling a few hundred eBooks that month to earning seven figures.” He doesn’t see a threat in Amazon, but instead sees opportunity. Mayer has some books in the Kindle Select program, but he is also providing exclusives to Barnes & Noble and doing business with Kobo and others as well. I’m not...

From the press release: Santillana USA, the world's leader in Spanish language publishing, announced a 78% increase in e-book sales for the November 2011-January 2012 period. This increase, which corresponds to the United Sates and Puerto Rico alone, has been the biggest recorded by the company since it started offering titles in a digital format. Record breaking sales of e-readers and tables for the last holiday season is credited with propelling e-book purchases. Hispanic readers purchased titles in various categories, with literature, romance, and biographies being the most popular ones. This reflects a broad interest of a community in search of digital books in...

Booktype is a free, open source platform that produces beautiful, engaging books formatted for print, Kindle Store, iBookstore and almost any ereader - and it all can be done within minutes. This slick video is the introduction to Booktype. You can create books on your own or with others via an easy-to-use web interface. You can also build a community around your content with social tools and use the reach of mobile, tablet and ebook technology to engage new audiences. [Via EbookFriendly]...

From the Daily Iowan: Authors want electronic publishing, and the University of Iowa Press is following with the trend. UI Press Director Jim McCoy said the press has approximately 800 books in print, with around 75 percent of those books digitized. Around 5 percent of total book sales is from e-books, he said, whereas two years ago, the sales from e-books were practically nothing. "I would say that's a substantial jump," he said. The press currently offers or publishes an electronic version of almost every book it has, because it is expected in the marketplace, McCoy said. "We distribute almost to anyone who's in the...

That's the title of a most interesting article in ReadWriteWeb.  Written by someone in the trenches.  Here's an excerpt: If you were to visit the library on the campus where I teach, you would see students waiting to use outdated desktops in the computer labs and library, particularly around midterms and finals week. It seems odd at first, considering the school has a laptop requirement for all undergraduates. That means you have to have a laptop computer when you enroll, and presumably, as an instructor, I can require my students to bring them to any class. But here's the reality: laptops break,...

On FutureBook, Shane Rae wonders if the education publishing industry is failing to innovate as it should. He describes the legacy model of education publishing, which involves prototyping, trial, feedback, and development to make sure that what gets published is completely finished before it sees print or CD-ROM, forms of media with a long shelf-life. The problem Rae sees is that this often leads to trying to match competitors’ products rather than better them—creating the thing that users want now, rather than what they might want down the road. Now, in the age of online applications...

The simple list of quick links to most popular sections of Kindle Store is one of the most visited pages on our site. Here is a new directory, intended to make the life of ebook lovers a bit easier. This time it’s for Barnes & Noble’s Nook Store. When it comes to navigation, Nook Store is essentially different from Kindle. In Amazon’s site it’s hard to find content, as it’s overloaded with departments, pages, and special sections. In Nook Store, which isn’t that content-rich, it’s on the other hand, very easy to get lost. The reason is that the left sidebar displays links dynamically....

That's the title of an article in the New York Review of Books by Tim Parks.  Responding to ebook-hating authors like Jonathan Franzen, he says, in part: Only the sequence of the words must remain inviolate. We can change everything about a text but the words themselves and the order they appear in. The literary experience does not lie in any one moment of perception, or any physical contact with a material object (even less in the “possession” of handsome masterpieces lined up on our bookshelves), but in the movement of the mind through a sequence of words from beginning to...

  Recently, I discussed a few of the issues facing fiction book publishers. My prediction is that their biggest competition will come from authors who bypass publishers and distribute through electronic channels (Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and even their personal web sites). Where does this leave the publisher in a post-printing world?   Publishers are mastering the defensive moves. It appears their goal is to protect their current markets. However, this doesn’t look like a successful long term strategy. Even small losses in market share will add up over time, and as electronic book readers become more common, publishers will be easier and easier...