ENTRIES TAGGED "Web 2.0"

Bantamweight Publishing in an Easily Plagiarised World

Even professional writers are prone to infrequent accidental plagiarism. But in the world of novels, newspapers, and college exams, there are rules about bootlegging others’ work that are well-established – most everyone agrees on what behaviors are unacceptable and what the consequences are. In bantamweight publishing, however, the rules are not so clear.

Publishing Lessons from Web 2.0 Expo

A collection of publishing-centric takeaways from the recent Web 2.0 conference in New York City.

Social Networking for Books: One Ring, or Loosely Joined?

I have to confess that one of the social networking tools I find most valuable is Goodreads. (It's a close second to Twitter, and way ahead of Facebook, Friendfeed, or Dopplr.) Unlike twitter, where I follow hundreds of people (possible because of twitter's minimalism) and am followed by thousands, on Goodreads, I follow and am followed by a small…

App Mashes Up Digital Text on Facebook Platform

Digital Texts 2.0 is an interesting application for Facebook that lets you group and share digital material. It's intriguing to see cutting edge development occurring in this space. From the Digital Texts 2.0 about page: Digital Texts 2.0 was undertaken by Dr. Stéfan Sinclair as an initiative to experiment with applying the principles of Web 2.0 to the realm…

The Kindle: "Looks Like a Million to Me"

Evan Schnittman of Oxford University Press has a fascinating blog post Looks Like a Million To Me: How I Realized that Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s E-Reader Were Exceeding Sales Estimates, which calculates the combined number of Sony Reader and Kindle units out there to be a million by the end of 2008: Amazon and Sony both use the 6-inch electrophoretic…

Web Community Lessons from Stephen Colbert

Stephen Colbert's cheeky use of the Web contains valuable lessons for book publishers looking to build Web communities.

Nabokov's Final Novel: The Perfect Mash-Up Source

It'll never happen, but the 50 index cards containing notes on Vladimir Nabokov's "The Original of Laura" would make for an interesting digital publishing experiment.

"Dilbert" Embraces User-Generated Content

"Dilbert" creator Scott Adams and his distributor, United Media, are supporting user-generated content through Dilbert.com. Visitors can rewrite captions and redistribute the results, and the full "Dilbert" archive will eventually be available for free. From Webware: I asked Adams why he and United Media are opening up the Dilbert intellectual property like this, and he sent me a response…

Publishers Beware: Amazon has you in their sights

While I was wrong the other day about Google's AppEngine being a lock-in play (see the comments on that post), I don't think I'm wrong that Amazon has serious plans for vertical integration of the publishing industry. Having got retailers on the ropes, they now are aiming at publishers. From a Publisher's Weekly article entitled As Amazon soars, bookstores creep:…

Q&A with WEbook President Sue Heilbronner

In this Q&A, WEbook president Sue Heilbronner discusses her company's Web-based collaborative publishing.