The cookbook business just got a little more digital. For the first time in its 26-year history, the James Beard Foundation will open up its cookbook awards to digital entries. There will be no separate e-book category and it’s conceivable – though perhaps not likely – that all the winners could be e-cookbooks.
Sales of e-books by U.S. publishers to readers in other countries increased to $21.5 million in 2011 from $4.9 million in 2010, a 333% increase, according to a report released today from the Association of American Publishers. At the same time, print sales by U.S. publishers for foreign readers increased by 2.3% to $335.9 million.
Would you buy a book if it was like other books you bought and you knew others who bought what you liked to buy bought that book, too? The answer to that convoluted question is one of the open secrets of Amazon’s success. Over the past few weeks, there has been some rumbling about Amazon’s recommendation engine in the publishing industry.
Total trade revenues were up to $503.5 million in January 2012 from $396 million in January 2011, a 27.1% increase, according to the latest figures from the Association of American Publishers. E-books led the way with $128.8 million in revenue in January 2012 versus $73.2 million in January 2011, a 76% increase.
The Vook platform is meant to be easy enough so that aspiring self-publishers can use it, but robust enough for enterprise use. It was designed to be able to create and automatically distribute both text-only books and multimedia enhanced e-books to the Amazon, Barnes & Noble and iBooks e-book stores. Call it iBooks Author without the marriage to Apple.
The music industry is the canary in a coal mine when it comes to content piracy issues and the effects that it can have on a creative industry — and that canary is gasping for air, said Cary Sherman, chairman and CEO of the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), the organization that represents the U.S. music industry.
Just when you thought you had a handle on what’s going on in the world of e-book technology, everything changes. A spate of acquisitions have quietly re-shaped the e-book conversion and e-book distribution landscape and it’s just the beginning of widespread consolidation among technology vendors that serve the book industry, say industry executives, bankers and publishers.
Digital Book World
