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Digital information industry veteran Jeff Moyer last month launched Reveal Digital, a company that aims to use a lean, efficient funding model to digitize special collections and then make those collections open access. Reveal will treat digitization “as a service to libraries rather than a more traditional publishing or product approach,” he said.
Multidisciplinary Open Access journal publisher PeerJ announced the publication of its first 30 peer-reviewed articles today. Co-founders Jason Hoyt, formerly chief scientist and VP for research and development for Mendeley, and Peter Binfield, formerly publisher of the Public Library Of Science (PLOS), launched PeerJ in June 2012. They quickly garnered support for the project, ultimately assembling an Editorial Board of 800 academics and an advisory board of 20—five of whom are Nobel Laureates. PeerJ is now hoping that its business model can help make academic publishing more efficient and less expensive both for both researchers and libraries.
Publisher and research workflow solutions provider John Wiley & Sons has implemented Labtiva’s ReadCube Web Reader for the Wiley Online Library. PDFs read with ReadCube now allow users to access “hyperlinked in-line citations, annotations, clickable author names, and direct access to supplemental content, making it easier for researchers to discover, access and interact with scientific literature.”
Macmillan on Friday became the last of five major publishers to settle a lawsuit over the pricing of ebooks originally filed by the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and 15 states in April 2012. In an email addressed to “Authors, Illustrators and Agents” Macmillan CEO John Sargent wrote that he believed the company had done nothing wrong and could still win the case, but the risk of losing the legal battle had become too high.
The American Library Association’s Digital Content and Libraries Working Group (DCWG) has begun exploring an idea that could help publishers better understand the powerful impact that libraries can have for their authors and their bottom line.
This weekend, iVerse Media announced that its Comics Plus: Library Edition will be available to school and public library patrons via tablet computers, desktops, and mobile devices beginning on April 1. In recent months, more than 250 libraries have been beta testing the service, which offers about 10,000 comics and graphic novel titles, including “Adventure Time,” “Doonesbury,” “Bone,” “Mouse Guard,” “Sesame Street,” and “Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time.”
Recorded Books has announced worldwide availability of IndieFlix for Libraries, an online streaming service that will offer access to independent films, shorts, and documentaries to library cardholders on computers, Android and iOS tablets and mobile devices, Roku, and later this year, PS3 and Xbox game consoles. The service will offer patrons unlimited access to films screened at more than 2,000 film festivals worldwide, and interested libraries would pay a flat annual fee using a tiered pricing model based on total materials circulation.
In recent TV ads for Samsung Galaxy smartphones, two actors exchange a music playlist simply by tapping their phones together. This quick and easy method for exchanging information is enabled by Near Field Communication (NFC) technology. It isn’t a particularly prevalent feature on smartphones yet. But given NFC’s functionality—it is particularly useful for applications like secure contactless payment—it seems likely to be a ubiquitous feature on smartphones in the future.
With major bookstore chains struggling to draw foot traffic and ebooks proliferating online, publishers are finding it increasingly difficult to help potential customers discover new authors or explore their midlist titles. In this environment, libraries could be powerful partners, noted a group of panelists during the “Libraries: More Important Than Ever for Discovery” session at the Digital Book World 2013 Conference in New York last week. “Nobody loves debut novelist like a librarian. We love finding books,” said Stephanie Anderson, head of readers’ advisory for Darien Library.
Thanks to Unglue.it, it just got a lot easier to answer the question implied by the title of this post. This is because that title, written by Lauren Pressley, is now open for all because of the successful “unglue” campaign run by Gluejar, Inc. The concept is pretty simple, as it is just using the […]
