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If you, like many publishers, have been wondering why there is so much talk about semantic web, Publishing Technology has a series of videos on its blog that can give you the quick basics.
These cover the details of what semantic web technology can do for you as a publisher and why you should care. To discuss it in more detail, you can contact Rebecca Appleby in our Cambridge, MA office (rebecca.appleby@publishingtechnology.com).
Publishing Technology China launches at the Beijing International Book Fair
Company to offer full-service digital publishing solutions for Chinese content.
London and Beijing, 31st August 2011 – Publishing Technology plc (LSE: PTO), the largest provider of software and services to the publishing industry, has announced its expansion into the prospering Chinese market by delivering local online hosting platforms and domestic sales representation.
Based in Beijing and managed by digital publishing expert Helen Sun, Publishing Technology China will directly target Chinese publishers, offering a complete publishing solution through ingentaconnect, the largest single platform for research publishers. Ms. Sun will combine her vast industry experience and knowledge of the Chinese market with an existing network of experienced sales representatives located around the country. The innovative technology together with native expertise will increase visibility of Chinese content, create new revenue streams, and facilitate sales to researchers and librarians globally.
The joint venture is the latest extension of Publishing Technology’s operations as demand for digital publishing solutions increases across the globe. Home to over 15,500 electronic publications and over 250 partners, the ingentaconnect interface will be offered in both Mandarin and Cantonese along with a subset of high-profile content to several thousand libraries across the country, creating a new user base for international publishers in addition to encouraging Chinese publishers to move online.
As part of the launch, the company’s Publishers Communication Group (PCG) division will also leverage the established national sales network to roll out its sales and marketing services. Initially, PCG will represent the American Association for Cancer Research in mainland China, as well as BioOne in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong.
George Lossius, CEO of Publishing Technology, commented: “The Chinese publishing industry is fast-paced and flourishing, currently growing at an astonishing rate of 19% a year. With over 8,000 academic journals and a booming scientific research community, second only to that of the US, China represents a major opportunity for us – and it is also relatively untapped in terms of digital resources for publishers and end users. Helen is a tremendously talented digital publishing expert with a proven track record in the Chinese market. This, coupled with Publishing Technology’s innovation and market-leading product, will make it a winning partnership.”
Helen Sun, CEO of Publishing Technology China said: “It is a great honour to work with such a trusted and established company as Publishing Technology, and even more exciting to become a part of it. The joint venture with Publishing Technology will provide not only world-leading technologies with proven marketing and customer service support to Chinese publishers, but it will also offer a great distribution platform in China to all publishers across the Atlantic. Our partnership combines leading digital technologies with digital content providers that already have a wide network within the publishing industry and library community in China and we look forward to welcoming more publishers to our rapidly increasing client base.”
At this week’s Association of Subscription Agents (ASA) conference in London, Publishing Technology’s EVP of Sales and Marketing, Mark Carden, gave a presentation on the role of intermediaries – those organizations and technologies that exist between author and reader — in the publishing industry. Please take a look:
A new online platform known as Copia has launched, combining the functions of e-bookstore and social media network. Yesterday’s article in Mashable provides a nice overview of what Copia is attempting to do. From the article:
After creating an account, users can immediately begin following and inviting people from their existing social networks, including Facebook, Twitter(
) and Goodreads, and connecting with users with similar tastes as they tag books they like. Users can also join discussion groups that align with their favorite subjects and genres, such as mystery or Victorian, and opt to follow those whose discussions they enjoy most to see what books they’ve read and are reading (privacy settings permitting).
The website can be found here.
From this week’s press release:
Portico will offer separate e-book and e-journal preservation services beginning on January 1, 2011. These distinct services will enable libraries to choose where to invest their preservation resources based on their collections, needs and budgets. Existing Portico participants will be offered the choice of e-journal, e-book, or both services at the renewal of their current agreements.
Read the release here.
For readers of The Bookseller, look for a new profile of Publishing Technology’s CEO George Lossius as he shares his thoughts on the industry, and what PT is doing to help move it forward.
There’s also great shot of George right next to the Prince in the TOC!
M&A Deals featured PT as the subject of its lead story last week in an article entitled ”Publishing Technology starts new chapter.” Read the full article here.
In his Publisher’s Weekly article “Betting the House on HTML5,” Andrew Richard Albanese interviews Scribd chief technology officer Jared Friedman about HTML5, “the long overdue update of the Web’s lingua franca, HTML”
Friedman insists the HTML makeover will ”have a great impact on the future of publishing,” affecting and improving the distribution, monetization and overall reading experience of digital publications.
“Until recently,” he notes, books, magazines, newspapers, and other published content “never quite fit in” on the Web, and “formats are a big reason why.” With HTML5, however, format problems are no longer an obstacle—today’s powerful browsers can now embrace book pages as Web pages, a key development for digital reading and publishing, and a significant upgrade from the first wave of image-based digital reading solutions. “If you look at the industry giants that are behind HTML5—Apple, Google, Mozilla, Microsoft,” Friedman adds, “the weight of those players suggests that we’re at a don’t-look-back point.”
Friedman cites format problems with original HTML as one major reason the e-book market has taken so long to mature. With HTML5:
Book pages can literally become Web pages as opposed to images encased in a locked-down, artificial frame inside a browser, preserving complex designs unique to documents, books, or magazines, from fonts to images, vector graphics, rotated text, precise positioning. Maybe most importantly, HTML5 e-books are universally accessible. That means publishers get access to the largest audience possible, because HTML is an open standard, supported anywhere. If you convert your content to HTML5, almost any device can read it.
Twelve scholars joined forces last week and in seven days created a new blog-to-book publishing tool known as Anthologize. This was accomplished as part of the innovative One Week, One Tool program, which “aims to teach participants how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, from inception to launch, in a week.” Unlike Blurb or Lulu, Anthologize is designed as an easy-to-use WordPress plugin. From Alexis Madrigal’s post in The Atlantic:
Anthologize is a WordPress plugin that allows scholars, conference organizers, and bloggers to create eBooks out of websites. Its creators imagine it could be used by researchers to “sketch ideas, collaborate with co-authors, edit and develop research notes into arguments, publish conference proceedings, and engage in public scholarly communication without the typical barriers.” Or perhaps teachers will turn their class blogs into custom publications.
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