To hear one leading ebook developer tell it, EPUB3 is still greeted with obstinance by a sizable handful of publishers and distributors.
But holding out is getting ever harder to justify, especially as digital production specialists become more adept at utilizing EPUB3’s features to improve the user experience.
“If for no other reason, I am excited about using EPUB3 for the rich navigation it affords,” writes Laura Brady, Principal at Brady Type.
“Particularly in nonfiction titles, giving the reader a number of ways to access content is a fairly simple but robust way to offer a deeper e-reading experience.”
Explaining how to build those tools in EPUB3, Brady shows how “not all innovation needs to be disruptive in order to be rich.”
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Amazon Adds Book Review Tools (Ink, Bits & Pixels)
Amazon fleshes out the range of options at readers’ disposal for how they share feedback with other potential readers, including information on book’s predominant mood and how much violence it contains.
Related: In Ebook Discovery, Who Gives the Best Recommendations?
Rights Departments Crippled by Rising Volumes (Pub Perspectives)
As publishers pursue new sources of revenue through foreign rights deals, the workflow challenges are building up accordingly. Many rights professionals cite a lack of industry standards for royalty statements and shortcomings in digital rights management systems as two major obstacles to scaling up.
Related: Why Publishers Must Invest in Rights Departments
Librarians Lead National Push for School Library Funding (Teleread)
The American Library Association backs a petition from a coalition of library and publishing organizations to receive Congressional funding for K–12 school libraries, citing the nearly 9,000 public school that don’t have one.
Digital Formats Flying High at Egmont (The Bookseller)
In what the Danish publisher calls its “best year ever,” 2014 saw “screen-based media” account for 58% of Egmont’s full-year revenue, which rose 10% since the previous year. Profits before taxes were up 36% during the same period.
Atavist Revamps Publishing Platform (Capital)
The publisher and digital content platform Atavist upgrades its interface and tweaks its monetization options to allow a broader range of users to earn income from it.
When E-Reading Imitates Life (Book Business)
What if readers could be recommended titles based on factors other than what and how they’ve previously read? One industry insider envisions a near-at-hand future in which mobile devices can use information about users’ non-reading activities to curate content recommendations based on those other aspects of our lives.
Crowdfunding Publisher Adds Reward Program (Teleread)
The crowdfunding-powered self-publishing start-up Inkshares introduces a reward program allowing users to accrue “Inkshares Credits” for recommending titles on the platform along with other activities. Credits can then be put toward purchasing content or supporting a project under development.
Barnes & Noble Banks on Rebranded Bags (Bloomberg)
Shoring up its brand identity as a bookseller and not an “everything store,” Barnes & Noble rolls out a line of redesigned bags for its physical locations, after reducing the number of stores it earlier expected to close.
