On Friday I interviewed Jude Norris, Marketing and Technology Director for Dawson Books. Dawson offers over 170,000 books (mostly academic).  Jude discussed the recent acquisition of Dawson Books by Smiths News PLC, the Dawsonera eBook platform and DawsonEnter, the ordering system for print and electronic books.  More information about Dawson books can be found at [...]

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Literary Reviewing in the Digital Age Panelists:  Bethanne Patrick, Book Maven Media, (Moderator), Bob Carlton, Kirkus Reviews, Ron Charles, Washington Post, Sarah Weinman, Publishers Marketplace Some of the questions addressed in the discussion were:  What are the biggest challenges to literary reviewing?   So many books, so many critics – how do readers sort through [...]

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Margaret Atwood provided a keynote at TOC called, “The Publishing Pie: An Author’s View” Margaret admitted she is not a high tech person, but delivered her genuine, humorous keynote from the heart. She shared much of her experience with publishing, showing us rare pieces of her previous work, including her first book of poetry from [...]

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Reprinted in full from One Librarian’s Perspective, by Tim Kambitsch, Director of the Dayton Metro Library. It is fashionable to declared Digital Rights Management (DRM) dead. And maybe in the world of music it is. For eBooks in the library marketplace, however, DRM is alive and well. The book publishers who may be more conservative [...]

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Ebook sales rise 130% in November Is the $5.00 eBook the New $9.99 eBook? – eBookNewser ALA Midwinter 2011: ALCTS Panel Considers the Impact of Patron-Driven Acquisition on Selection and Collections Google Acquires eBook Technologies | News & Opinion | PCMag.com Kobo adds 175K Education, Technical and Reference PDFs Bridging the eBook-Library System Divide Goodbye, [...]

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Casper Grathwohl from Oxford University Press and Kassidy Lackey from Handmark spoke about mobile applications for reference tools.  Casper provided examples of several vendor-based apps like Gale’s AccessMyLibrary, university library mobile apps, and some apps designed for OUP.  OUP has 85 apps, which cover a variety of reference subjects.  These are marketed mostly to the [...]

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From an Encyclopaedia Britannica Press Release:  Students and teachers who need photos and other images for research, papers and projects can now find them easily and conveniently in Britannica Image Quest, a new online database from Britannica Digital Learning.  The Web site, which is now available to schools, universities and libraries, currently provides images from [...]

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Wow, what a morning.  The best part of this ebook summit has been following the tweets and chats with some incredibly knowledgeable and creative librarians.  So many good ideas for ebooks in libraries.  My highlights have been on twitter, so feel free to have a look @spolanka or follow the conference at #ebooksummit. Added to [...]

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Below is the press release from K-NFB announcing the official availability of the blio reader for Windows.  There’s been a lot of chatter on twitter today about reviews, download issues, complaints from MAC users, etc.  The CNET coverage of blio is worth a look.  For a more colorful review, try The Digital Reader.  KNFB responded [...]

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For your weekend reading pleasure: ModernBookFactory.com: The First Complete Online Audiobook Production and App Development Service for Independent Publishers and Authors Ebooks: the future is now – ABC News (Australian Broadcasting Corporation) Imagining the Dream e-Tool for Education and Training – Scholarly Kitchen And the Best File Format for Open Textbook Publishing Is . . [...]

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