Electronic Publishing

In the heady days of the personal computer boom, pundits predicted that people would soon begin getting their news and other information on a screen rather than on a page. But it never happened. The problem is structural, replied the experts. If telephone companies were allowed into the electronic information business, then it would really take off as it has in France, they argued.

Five major publishers -- Conde Nast Publications, Hearst Corp., Meredith Corp., News Corp. and Time Inc. -- announced Tuesday that they would join forces to develop an online storefront to rival Amazon.com Inc. The companies -- which publish such titles as Sports Illustrated, the Wall Street Journal, Better Homes and Gardens, Wired and Vanity Fair -- said their venture would sell newspapers and magazines online but could also be used to sell digital comics and books. As more readers cancel their print subscriptions in favor of browsing stories online, which has led to precipitous drops in advertising revenue, traditional media companies have been frantically experimenting with ways to deliver and make money from digital content.

For actors, it's a little like an electronic casting call. The Screen Actors Guild on Tuesday unveiled an online casting directory called iActor for members to upload their head shots, resumes and video and audio clips to create their individual profiles. The service will allow casting directors to search the profiles to find the right actors based on various criteria such as gender, skills and physical characteristics.

Three powerful technology companies have banded together to oppose Google Inc.'s proposed settlement with the Authors Guild and the Assn. of American Publishers over the Internet search giant's book scanning project. Microsoft Corp., Yahoo Inc. and Amazon.com Inc. have signed on to a coalition being assembled by the Internet Archive and Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer, said Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive, a San Francisco nonprofit that is trying to build a free digital library of Internet content.

A federal appeals court on Friday upheld the government's restrictions on how regional Bell telephone companies provide sports scores, stock quotes and other electronic publishing services. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, in a 2-1 decision, rejected arguments made by BellSouth Corp. that the restrictions are unconstitutional.

A federal judge in Washington cleared the way Friday for American Telephone & Telegraph to move into electronic publishing, opening the door for a major new player to create and sell computer databases, videotext and other information services. U.S. District Judge Harold H. Greene dropped his 7-year-old ban, effective Aug. 24, that limited AT&T's role in the fast-emerging information services business to transmitting data for others.

When Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt wanted to leak his proposed new national grazing laws to the media last month, he had one news organ in mind. It wasn't the Washington Post. It wasn't one of the Big Three evening news broadcasts. It wasn't even CNN. Important as it was to Babbitt to reach the right audience--policy-makers, interest groups and other influential environmental players--he took his story to Greenwire.

David Gettman may yet have the last laugh. If "The Angels of Russia" is named a finalist for England's Booker Prize in literature next month, he'll know the book has been read by at least five top literary types (the judges), that they concede it actually is a book--and that it's a good one to boot. So far, though, publisher Gettman is not even smiling. Since Oct. 17, when "Angels" came out, he has pursued the world's English-speaking reviewers persistently, to practically no avail.

Reed International said today that it has agreed to buy the worldwide travel and electronic publishing divisions of Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. for $825 million in cash. Reed, a London-based publisher of travel information in Asia and Europe through its ABC International subsidiary, said the acquisition, subject to shareholder approval, would give it a stake in the fast-growing U.S. travel market. A spokesman for News Corp. said cash from the sale of the divisions, including the flagship Hotel & Travel Index, would be used to reduce debt associated with the company's $3-billion takeover last year of Triangle Publications Inc., the parent company of TV Guide.

Barnes & Noble Inc., which withdrew from the nascent digital book market in 2006, said Monday that it had reentered the growing field and launched "the world's largest e-bookstore." The New York retailer, which operates 777 stores in the U.S., boasted that its online bookshop has more than 700,000 titles. Included in the tally are about half a million books in the public domain and available as free downloads via a partnership with Google Inc.

Three weeks after the release of Amazon.com's Kindle 2, Sony Corp. -- the first major company to introduce an electronic book device, the Sony Reader -- said it would offer customers half a million public domain books that have been optimized by Google Inc. These books, which will join the 100,000 or so available for purchase at the Sony bookstore and other sites, will be free and searchable by title, author and topic.

When the news hit this week that Amazon was releasing a Kindle for iPhone, I jumped to get it. No matter how much I love books, I'd developed a definite longing for the Kindle. It was partly my fondness for new technologies, partly the (perhaps late) realization that e-readers are likely here to stay and partly, no doubt, Amazon's successful hype over the Kindle 2. And this was a way to get a taste of the Kindle without shelling out the $359. So I went to the iTunes store and downloaded the free Kindle app. Then I looked around iTunes trying to find an e-book to read.

Trying to expand its book sales, Amazon.com Inc. released a free application Wednesday that lets iPhone and iPod Touch users read electronic books purchased at the e-commerce giant's Kindle online bookstore. The software performs many of the same functions featured on Amazon's $359 Kindle 2 reading device released last month, including bookmarking, noting, highlighting and adjusting the font size, the company said.

Christopher Paolini's "Brisingr," Philip Pullman's "His Dark Materials" trilogy and Peter Matthiessen's award-winning "Shadow Country" are among the dozen-plus books coming to the iPhone and to iPod Touch from publisher Random House Inc. "We are pleased to be making this initial list of outstanding books by some of our top-selling authors available to a groundbreaking group of readers," Matt Shatz, Random House's vice president for digital books, said in a statement this week.

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy market, Random House Inc. announced Monday that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form, including novels by John Updike and Harlan Coben, as well as several volumes of the "Magic Treehouse" children's series. The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format; its digital library will grow to nearly 15,000. The new round of e-books is expected to be completed within months. Although e-book sales have increased dramatically this year, thanks in part to Amazon.

American Telephone & Telegraph Co. on Friday asked a federal judge to lift provisions in a consent decree that prohibit AT&T from owning the computer data, financial data and other information services it transmits on its wires. AT&T, in a brief filed with U.S. District Judge Harold Greene, noted that the agreement under which the old Bell System was broken up allowed the restrictions on "electronic publishing" to be lifted after seven years unless it were shown it should be continued.

With e-book sales exploding in an otherwise sleepy publishing market, Random House Inc. is expected to announce today that it was making thousands of additional books available in digital form. Random House's vice president for digital operations, Matt Shatz, says e-book sales have increased by triple-digit percentages in 2008, thanks in part to Amazon.com's Kindle reader. The publisher already has more than 8,000 books in the electronic format and will have a digital library of nearly 15,000.

The century-old Christian Science Monitor said Tuesday that it would discontinue its daily print edition in April and move almost exclusively to online publication, becoming the first major national newspaper to abandon a daily paper-and-ink format. The move, which had been expected by industry professionals and the Monitor staff, will cut annual costs by millions of dollars for the money-losing newspaper, which is subsidized by the Christian Science Church.