By Siobhan O’Leary Berlin-based investment firm Team Europe Ventures has announced a new initiative to provide funding to promising Internet and mobile Internet startups over the next three years. The €6 million fund will be split among four to five startups each year (approx. €500,000 each), which will be hand-selected by Team Europe Ventures and a team of partners. The …
Translators say, “Show Me the Monnaie“
By Siobhan O’Leary BERLIN: Thousands of translators across Europe and the rest of the world spend their days and nights scanning their dictionaries and thesauruses for le mot juste, making their living working on everything from novels to air conditioner repair manuals. And while translators, particularly of literary texts, are ultimately tasked with the responsibility of matching the precision and …
What Advice Do You Have for Working in Publishing Abroad
By Edward Nawotka When I lived in Dublin in the early 1990s, I helped launch a short-lived literary magazine called The Temple Bar Review. It was a fun gig, but not one that would allow me to stay in the country. For that, I needed a real job — one that would force me to pay taxes — and would …
Should Governments Try to Out-Google Google Books?
By Edward Nawotka A number of European countries, including Germany (as discussed in today’s lead article), France, and Spain have launched national book digitization projects. But the question remains, should book digitization projects should be taken on by public institutions or left in the hands of private enterprise? Or is there a hybrid model, such as Harvard University’s co-operation with …
Could EC Digitzation Debate Pave the Way for a Competitor to Google?
By Liz Bury LONDON: Deep in the Bodleian Library, the scholarly heart of Oxford University, England, is a locked room emitting, I imagine, a low hum. This is Google’s digitization suite, the control center of its scanning operation at the library, into which no Bodleian staffer may enter. That, at least, is the story doing the rounds among British librarians, …
The European Point of View on BEA
By Edward Nawotka Next year BEA will return to New York City, where it will remain at least through 2012. On the face of it, the decision to stop moving it around seems like a good idea, particularly as travel to New York is cheaper than it has been in recent memory. As a consequence, one constituency Americans may see …