India’s Pratham Books’ StoryWeaver platform offers open source of children’s books and encourages users to translate, adapt and use the content for free.
LATin: South America’s Open Education Publishing Project
Can open source textbooks help students to forgo photocopies in favor of required texts in Latin America? The bold open source LATin project aims to find out.
Unglue.it Crowdfunds Unlimited Licenses for Beloved E-books
Eric Hellman’s Unglue.it, now in alpha, asks an author or publisher to accept a fixed sum of money from the public for the unlimited use of an e-book.
AEP’s Charlene Gaynor on Digitization in Educational Publishing
Interview with Charlene Gaynor, CEO of the Association of Educational Publishers (AEP) on digitization in educational publishing.
Who is the “Author” of This Book of Tweets?
This article is part of a series on publishing in the Middle East which is sponsored by the Abu Dhabi International Book Fair. By Yasmina Jraissati On the eve of their fifth birthday, Twitter published some remarkable statistics: on average, per day users send 140 million tweets and 460,000 new accounts are opened. Without a doubt, we are living interesting times. The …
Rethinking Rights in a Transmedia World
By Daniel Kalder As President of Brain Candy LLC, Scott Walker is one of the individuals behind the project Runes of Gallidon, an online fantasy world in which a community of fans are invited to contribute characters, concepts and stories to the central concept. It’s what Walker bills as “a guided collaborative enterprise breaking down the barrier between creator and …
Flat World Knowledge’s “Freemium” Textbooks Gain 140,000 Users, Average $34 Per Sale
• Flat World Knowledge, a three-year-old textbook publisher, has released 24 titles which are now in use by 140,000 students at over 800 universities in the United States and another 50 abroad. • The company allows students to read the textbook for free online, while selling them POD, e-book and other editions. Over half of users opt for these additional …
Argon Fails to Raise Euros for Cory Doctorow Audiobook
By Siobhan O’Leary As we reported last month, German audiobook publisher Argon recently launched an experiment to see if it could raise 9,000 euros in three weeks to finance an unabridged audiobook of Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother that would be available for free online under a Creative Commons license. Well, it didn’t go so well. The publisher was only …
Argon Verlag Solicits Donations to Release Unabridged Doctorow Audiobook
By Siobhan O’Leary The German audiobook publisher of Cory Doctorow’s book Little Brother is launching unusual effort in the hope of raising enough money to release a free unabridged version of the book under a Creative Commons license. Argon Verlag already has plans to publish a 6-CD abridged version that will retail for €19.95, but is trying to raise 9,000 …