Judge sets Nov. 9 deadline for amended Google book deal

A federal judge has set a Nov. 9 deadline for submitting a revised agreement in the battle over Google Inc.'s effort to get digital rights to millions of out-of-print books.
U.S. District Judge Denny Chin set the deadline after a lawyer for authors told the judge that Google and lawyers for authors and publishers were working around the clock to reach a new deal by early November.
A $125 million agreement was being renegotiated after the U.S. government said it seemed the existing agreement would violate antitrust laws.
The original deal was announced by Mountain View, Calif.-based Google and the publishing industry last October to resolve two copyright lawsuits contesting the book scanning plans. (See stories below.)
Michael Boni, a lawyer for authors, told the judge that the new agreement would contain amendments to the original deal to make it more acceptable to the U.S. Justice Department, which had questioned its legality.
William F. Cavanaugh, a deputy assistant attorney general, told the judge that the Justice Department has been in continuing discussions with the parties.
However, he said the government was not yet aware of what the final deal will look like.
He said he expected "meetings in the near term to go over whatever their proposal is."
Cavanaugh asked that the judge give the government a week to 10 days after any deadline for objections to be submitted for the Justice Department to prepare its analysis of the new deal.

Pirates post purloined copies of new Dan Brown novel on Web

You can buy The Lost Symbol by Dan Brown as a Kindle ebook for $9.99 at Amazon.com. Or, if you’re not quite honest, you can download a free pirated copy from an online site such as RapidShare, Megaupload, Hotfile and other file-storage sites.
Those pirated copies are blamed for being at least partially responsible for declining hardcover sales.
The Association of American Publishers estimates that hardcover sales in the United States declined 13 percent in 2008 versus the previous year. This year, hardback sales were down 15.5 percent through July versus the same period of 2008.
Total e-book sales, though up considerably this year, remain a small part of the overall book market, at $81.5 million, or 1.6 percent of total book sales through July.
Adam Rothberg, vice president for corporate communications at Simon & Schuster, says: “Everybody in the industry considers piracy a significant issue, but it’s been difficult to quantify the magnitude of the problem. We know people post things but we don’t know how many people take them.”
Free file-sharing of e-books will most likely come to be associated with RapidShare, a file-hosting company based in Switzerland, says its customers have uploaded more than 10 petabytes of files to its site - more than 10 million gigabytes - and that it can handle up to three million users simultaneously. Anyone can upload, and anyone can download; for light users, the service is free.
RapidShare does not list the files - a user must know the URL in order to download a document. But anyone who wants to make a file widely available simply publishes the URL and a description somewhere online, in a blog or a discussion forum, and Google and other search engines notice. No passwords protect the files.

Eli and Peyton Manning boost Scholastic ClassroomsCare Challenge

There's a football/schoolmatch-up this fall and millions of kids across the U.S. will benefit
Top names in education and in football - Scholastic Inc. and Super Bowl MVPs Eli and Peyton Manning - are joining forces and inviting America's teachers and students, along with several key charity partners, to join them in bringing more than one million books to kids in need across the U.S. via Scholastic Book Clubs' ClassroomsCare program.
The ClassroomsCare program has been successful in distributing more than nine million books since 2001 to kids in need through charity partners like Reach Out and Read and Save the Children.
This year, Scholastic will also be coordinating with the Mannings' youth charities, including the Peyton Manning PeyBack Foundation and The Eli Manning Children's Clinics.
Scholastic will also be publishing a new picture book, Family Huddle,
featuring America's most famous football family, the Mannings.
ClassroomsCare is an annual challenge to the one million classrooms that use Scholastic Book Clubs. Participating classes read 100 books, triggering a donation of books from Scholastic Book Clubs to ClassroomsCare's charity partners. The books are then donated throughout the year to kids in preschool to middle school who in many cases would not otherwise have books of their own.

Inkubook attributes 60 percent of first year sales to email marketing

Online photo book publisher Inkubook, a subsidiary of vanity press AuthorHouse, says that that its ExactTarget email marketing campaigns drove more than 60 percent of the brand`s first-year revenue.
Launched in July 2008 as one of six self-publishing brands owned by Author Solutions, Inkubook posted the first-year results using ExactTarget’s on-demand email technology to build relationships between the photo book publisher and its growing list of more than 50,000 members around the world.
Using ExactTarget’s Core Edition in tandem with its customer database, Inkubook automatically builds and sends messages to its members based on their activity on the book builder’s Web site. The technology allows the company to remain in contact with customers during the book creation process, informing them of their current project status and encouraging them to finish should they abandon a project before completion.
The re-engagement effort, Inkubook`s Market Development Manager Jim Eup said, has driven nearly 20 percent of the company’s first year revenue.
Inkubook sends monthly newsletters to customers featuring season-specific offers and promotions. To extend the reach of the newsletters, the company includes links to its Facebook and Twitter pages in emails and invites customers to share special offers with friends and family, Eup said.

Author Solutions seeks to be largest publisher of digital content

Author Solutions Inc. (ASI) has announced an initiative to become the world's largest publisher and marketer of original digital content.
ASI has begun making alliances with digital content portals, giving its titles widespread digital availability. In the process, ASI will produce digital versions of all new titles it publishes, convert thousands from its backlist, and make them available through several popular e-readers and e-channels to readers worldwide.
ASI in coming months will begin making titles available through Sony's e-Book Store.
"Author Solutions leads the world in new titles brought to market with more than 20,000 annually,” said Kevin Weiss, ASI president and chief executive officer. “We will convert every new title and tens of thousands from our backlist into digital formats and make them available through the leading digital content portals. We believe as our self-publishing business continues to accelerate, we will become the world's largest publisher of original digital content,".
In 2008, ASI brought to market more than 21,000 unique titles through its vanity press imprints AuthorHouse, AuthorHouse UK, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, Wordclay and Xlibris. Overall, ASI has helped more than 85,000 authors worldwide bring more than 120,000 titles to market.
Author Solutions, Inc. is owned by Bertram Capital Management LLC Headquartered in Bloomington, Ind. ASI also operates offices in Indianapolis and Milton Keynes, England.

Sony ramps up e-book self-publishing options

After watching Amazon make huge headway in the e-book self-publishing game with its Digital Text Platform, Sony is finally making a real push into this area with a new Publisher Portal and partnerships with self-publishing companies Smashwords and Author Solutions.
"New authors can select a self-publishing path and get their work published and for sale on Sony's eBook Store in as little as 10 days," Sony representatives said. "As Sony completes the conversion of its eBook store to the industry-standard EPUB format, Smashwords and Authors Solutions will expand the offer to all existing Author Solutions and Smashwords authors to get their titles up on the Sony site."
Author Solutions, one of the larger vanity press companies, with several brands, offers a full suite of self-publishing services, most of which are fee-based. Start-up Smashwords is focused exclusively on e-book creation and sales, and it is free to use - you simply upload a Word file, make some tweaks to your formatting based on a style guide, and presto, you have an e-book.
According to Sony, Author Solutions and Smashwords will offer authors the option to publish content in the EPUB format, "the International Digital Publishing Forum's XML-based standard format for reflowable digital books and publications." Amazon, on the other hand, uses its proprietary e-book format.

Disney launches Digital Books initiative targeting children

Disney Publishing Worldwide said in September that it has launched its online Disney Digital Books initiative.
The company said that the site offers more than 500 children's books, including titles from Disney franchises like Mickey Mouse, Toy Story, Cars and Hannah Montana. More books and features will be added on an ongoing basis, the company said.