PaidContent has an article on “the anti-web movement”—the trend toward moving electronic versions of magazines away from the web and into salable apps that offer the lure of easy revenue and a different form factor from what the web can currently do. After the desktop OS and browser wars of the late 90s settled down in to uniform web standards, many of us had thought the web, which runs through my veins, would become the mobile platform of choice in the same way. But, the rise of the revenue-making app store sales channel has coincided...

TechCrunch reports that self-e-publishing site Scribd is moving away from its current Flash format for uploading and viewing documents, and converting everything into HTML5. Erick Schonfeld writes: Scribd co-founder and chief technology officer Jared Friedman tells me: “We are scrapping three years of Flash development and betting the company on HTML5 because we believe HTML5 is a dramatically better reading experience than Flash. Now any document can become a Web page.” This means Scribd documents will be viewable (and look great) in the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser, among others. In fact, they...

Publishers Weekly is reporting that Scribd has teamed up three vendors to provide print on demand service to its customers. Blurb.com will be doing paperback books, HP's MagCloud will be doing periodicals and Mimeo will be for documents of just a few pages. Scribd said that it will be looking for further POD partnerships in the future. Blurb will deliver paperbacks in 7-10 days after an order and it worked out its own API to make publishing of material posted on Scribd an easy thing to do. ...

Last week, the Society of Professonal Journalists released the first volume of its “Digital Media Handbook”—a collection of essays from its members on the uses of various Internet and digital tools including PDFs, videos, social networking, Google Wave, and so forth. While it probably could stand to be a little better-organized in some cases (why did the essay on using hashtags in Twitter come several sections before the “beginner’s guide to Twitter”?), it has a lot of information that could be useful to journalists only just getting their feet wet in the digital arena. Find it on Scribd...

A few days ago I mentioned that independent book publisher Author Solutions had announced an e-book distribution deal with Scribd. Today it comes out they have announced a similar deal with Barnes & Noble for the Nook. As with the Scribd deal, AS e-books will be set at a default price of $9.99, but authors may choose to set their own prices instead. Erin Cox at Publishing Perspectives notes with some amusement that, shortly after Nintendo announced a classic e-books cartridge, Random House has now announced it will be making video games. The Wall Street Journal article is fairly sparse...

A couple of weeks ago, Paul reported on self-e-publishing site Scribd’s plans to add direct mobile download capability. CNet reports that Scribd has now done so: Scribd-hosted documents can be sent to any of a dozen different e-book devices (including Kindle, Nook, iPhone, Palm, EZReader, and others) with two mouse clicks. The documents are sent as PDF files via e-mail or SMS message link. At present, only DRM-free titles are supported, but Scribd CEO Trip Adler has plans to expand to copy-protected versions in the future. Another part of Scribd’s mobile strategy is creating device-specific...

CNet has an article about Smartwords, an idea from start-up company Wordnik that sounds terrific but sure seems hard to describe succinctly. As Smartwords’s website puts it: Smartwords is a lightweight, easy-to-use standard for retrieving and publishing real-time, contextually-aware information about words. It took reading through the CNet article a couple of times to figure out that it might better be described as “an integrated dictionary on steroids.” Existing e-book apps with dictionary support (such as eReader) are largely limited to clicking on a single word to get a definition. Wordnik wants...

From the press release: ... Under terms of the agreement, all new ASI titles published through the AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, and Xlibris imprints will be made available for purchase. As well, a portion of ASI's backlist of more than 120,000 titles will be sold through the site. ... Authors will receive 50 percent of the net sales of their titles through Scribd. A default price of $9.99 will be set for every title, but each author will have the opportunity to set his or her own price. Distribution to Scribd will be included as a free service for all...

Robin Wauters at TechCrunch notes that independent book publisher Author Solutions (ASI) has entered a distribution agreement with e-self-pub site Scribd. New ASI titles will also be made available for sale via Scribd, and part of its 120,000-title backlist will go up as well. Authors will receive 50% of their titles’ net sales, and can choose to set their own price or leave it with the default of $9.99. Brad Stone at The New York Times’s “Bits” blog notes that multimedia e-book publisher Vook has raised $2.5 million in venture capital funding. Vook’s founder, Brad Inman, is planning...

Scribd has teamed up with ProQuestUMI, a publisher of dissertations and theses, to start selling over 14,000 works, form over 14 universities, in its Scribd Store. ProQuestUMI will charge $49 and sill receive 80% of the sales revenues. This is a big market as they have 2 million doctoral dissertations and master's theses available from more than 700 active university partners and update their catalog with more than 70,000 new graduate works each year. You can find out more at here. ...

We have probably already given perpetual-copyright zealot Mark Helprin more coverage than he deserves, but this TechDirt article from Michael Masnick is too good to pass up. It seems that Helprin’s book, Digital Barbarism, has been getting nearly universally panned by reviewers. But according to an op-ed by Helprin in the National Review, the reason for that is not that the book might be bad—it is because publishers assigned the very people Helprin slammed in the book to review it. If nothing else, Helprin does not suffer from an inadequate ego. In the op-ed, he paints himself...

One of the most commonly misunderstood things about lawyers is that, as with forensic debaters, they may often choose to argue two opposite, competing sides of the same issue. This is hardly unusual for them—it’s their job to advocate for whatever side they choose, or even both sides if they think the particular cases have merit. Our pop culture tends to latch onto this and portray any lawyer who does not have a Perry Mason- or Matlock-like dedication to proving clients innocent as being some kind of slimy mercenary---but when you get right down to it,  it’s a very important...