Is the youngest generation going to grow up thinking of books as digital objects first, and print relics a distant second? That's what Shane Richmond, the Head of Technology (Editorial) at the Telegraph, thinks. In an editorial published today he argues that print can't compete with digital when it comes to search, annotation and portability: My daughter’s generation will probably have ebook textbooks. They will never experience dog-eared, vandalised, outdated school books, shared one-between-two. They will enjoy books that are enhanced with video, interactive graphics and picture galleries. And they will see these things are the norm. Printed books will be...

One area where the rise of ebooks has upended traditional publishing is in the 12-month window between hardcover and paperback editions, suggests The New York Times. For new releases, even a $15 ebook edition can be considerably cheaper than the hardcover, and that has some publishers concerned that price-conscious customers who would have bought a trade paperback might be choosing the digital format because they don't want to wait a year. Does this mean ebook editions actually cannibalize future paperback sales rather than (or in addition to) hardcover? The newspaper notes that customers, and therefore bookstores, love paperbacks, which suggests that...

Long has my inbox-on both LinkedIN and Facebook-been filled with inquiries on various ePub creation software, especially regarding two specific platforms: Sigil and Calibre. Both are free, open-source creations of unselfish and brilliant folks that saw the eBook industry coming a long time ago. I've fiddled around happily with Calibre for over a year and been fairly happy, but only just this week did I pay heed to the various forum posts praising Sigil. After watching a few video tutorials and scrolling through the basic crash course I downloaded the open source system in less than a minute. The pros of...

Today Wolfram launched CDF, a new document format that incorporates interactive charts, infographics, tables, and anything else that you can produce in the company's own Mathematica (or that you can import as MathML expressions from Excel and Word). Conrad Wolfram writes, "The idea is to provide a knowledge container that’s as easy to author as documents, but with the interactivity of apps—for CDFs to make live interactivity as everyday a way to communicate as spreadsheets made charts." Although Wolfram is positioning this as an open document format, the readers over at Slashdot are skeptical about the EULA and potential issues down...

You forgot to record Monday night's premiere of the new C-SPAN documentary on the Library of Congress, didn't you? Well, you can watch it online for free at C-SPAN's LOC minisite. The 90 minute film takes a holistic approach to its subject, covering everything from the library's founding to its architecture to its vast collection (including a Braille copy of "Mein Kampf"). If you just want to watch the section about how the library uses technology to preserve and study manuscripts, jump to 1:15:45 and watch the part about the Preservation Division. If you're even more impatient, jump straight to 1:20:45, which...

Apple released its new operating system update, Lion, via the Apple Store this morning, which makes this an exciting day for a certain swath of geeks. How exciting? Well, Ars Technica has just published John Siracusa's 27,000-word review of the new OS, covering everything from iOS-inspired interface changes to continuous document saving to how background processes are handled. It's one of the most comprehensive third-party overviews you'll find, and it's available for free in a 19-screen article on Ars' website. But what's interesting is the website also offers it as a $5 ebook on Amazon.com, or you can pay a $50...

Eoin Purcell points us to a new BBC audio report on publishing, pricing, and piracy. "Some great voices and opinions there," she writes. Here's the BBC's own description. Despite £3bn being spent on books in the UK last year, a dark digital cloud of uncertainty still hangs over the world of publishing. In the second of his reports into the impact of technology on the world of books, arts editor Will Gompertz looks at what the digital revolution means for the publishing business. Listen to the report here. (Flash required.)...

Overdriveblogs.com writes that after a successful recent beta-testing period, starting today the company is rolling out a DRM-free ebook option to all libraries. Here's a list of some of the publishers who are participating (although territory issues may impact availability in some cases): AMG Bold Strokes Books Books to Go Now Carina Press Gideon Informatics Joe Konrath KBS Microsoft Press O’Reilly Media Rock Nook Romance Divine LLC Rosenfeld Media Sher Music Simonelli Editore TidBITS University Press of Colorado Wildside Press More from the blog post: "All DRM-free eBooks are available under the one-copy/one-user model, which means you can add a copy to your collection and one user at a time can borrow the title from the library. Just...

Here's their announcement: "Our wysiwyg HTML/CSS/SVG/MathML editor Bluegriffon will have a sibling! "Our company Disruptive Innovations together with friend Innovimax will release in a near future a new native EPUB wysiwyg editor on the market, BlueGriffon EPUB Edition. It will be commercial, standalone (ie not a webapp), based on the open-source BlueGriffon. Unlike most existing solutions on the market, it will not rely on a private pivot format. While most other tools can only do 'Export to EPUB', BlueGriffon EPUB Edition will open EPUBs, create EPUBs, save EPUBs. Do whatever you want with the metadata or the contents. Add, modify or remove...

Update, July 6th: It appears Hamster's guts are actually the Calibre ebook conversion engine. To save yourself the trouble of dealing with unnecessary/untested programs, you can just download Calibre, which is cross-platform. (Thanks, Peter!) (Windows platform only.) From Lifehacker: "Hamster Free eBook Converter allows you to convert eBook files in proprietary formats for Sony, iRiver, Amazon, Kobo, and other eBook readers into a version that can be read on any other reader, or on all of them as a simple PDF or file format they all understand." Free from HamsterSoft, or you can check out a demo video below.  HAMSTER Free eBook...

Last Saturday, Sue Polanka of No Shelf Required sat down with Rick Lumsden, Britannica's Executive Director for Institutional Sales and Marketing, to find out a little more about the publisher's new ebook platform. The interview is only eight minutes long, but here are some of the key points if you don't have an opportunity to listen: * Ebook platform launch coincides with new Britannica Education Publishing project, which is in partnership with Rosen Publishing and consists of hundreds of nonfiction titles. * Platform offers standard user interactivity features like notes, highlighting. * Britannica's own platform is browser-based, but will offer downloading to external...

One view of the future of publishing, which I’ve brought up here a few times, is that publishers need to begin reaching out directly to consumers. On FutureBook, Amsterdam-based publishing exec Jürgen Snoeren disagrees, suggesting that in the rapidly changing publishing environment, publishers need to focus first on their core competency—producing excellent content. Snoeren points out that publishers can’t hope to beat Amazon at its own game—but Amazon does not seem to have as much of a problem competing with them. When the Kindle was released in Germany, the lack of German content did not seem to hinder...