The morning of the first day of the London Book Fair this year felt more like the final hour as tumbleweed practically blew across the floor at Earls Court.
Mother Teresa remains enduringly popular in India, and her Missionary of Charity homes are well established all over the country. Shishu Bhavan (literally “Children’s Home”) in Bangalore is one of two in the city.
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Sanjiv Bhatnagar, the new head of client relations for North America, is well equipped to play a bridging |
role. Half German and half Indian, he is married to Stephanie who is half American and half German
- SSP | June | San Francisco
- AAUP | June | Utah
- 17th AETC | July | Boston
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The next chapter in publishing is being written by Google with their much-anticipated planned entry into the e-book marketplace, Google Editions. With an impressive 25,000+ publishers from around the world already signed on, an estimated 4+ million books (combining expired copyright titles with publishers' own titles), and the promise of a "cloud bookstore" of titles available to read on almost any device, the rapid evolution of publishing is set to take another leap forward when Editions launches in July.
With Editions, purchased books will exist only in a consumer's “library,” or cloud-based collection of titles, rather than as files downloaded to an e-reader or local repository. This personal library can then be accessed from any Web browser—thereby ensuring that users aren’t tied to a given device, operating system, or even a particular vendor—and is the core element of what Google calls an “open ecosystem” in the e-book market.
Google's vision of openness is exactly the kind of approach lauded by digital publishing gurus like Tim O'Reilly; however questions remain regarding vertical integration and other issues. Speaking with Publishers Weekly on May 4, 2010 he opined, "I think "buy anywhere, read anywhere' is a really good vision. But where I feel like Google is still kind of doing it wrong is that they're acting like the old AOL-era Web, rather than like the Web of today. A 'buy anywhere, read anywhere' vision is: I buy my ePub at O'Reilly, I register it with Google, and Google keeps track of the pointer, the cloud file, or whatever, as opposed to 'buy anywhere, read anywhere, as long as the book is hosted by Google. . .'"
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The iPad has certainly lived up to the hype that preceded the “Jesus tablet.” The media has talked about nothing else since January, and shoppers duly responded by snapping up a million devices in just 28 days. But the iPad’s impact on publishing extends beyond the tablet itself, because when Steve Jobs publicly rejected Adobe’s Flash software a few weeks ago, he pushed HTML5 into the mainstream.
As you might have guessed, HTML5 is an upgraded version of the current version of HTML, HTML 4.0.1, the markup language used on the Internet. HTML was developed in the 90s, when the Web consisted mainly of static Web pages, and because it’s not equipped to handle many of the things we now take for granted—such as Gmail and video—we have to make use of plug-in programs like Flash, Flex, or Silverlight. HTML5 is designed to deal with all these new requirements within the browser itself, so you no longer need to download and use this plug-in software.
Developing this improved version is a huge project that will in time bring all kinds of changes to the way we consume digital content. The HTML5 version that’s being used right now is a proposed standard still at working-draft stage; HTML5 as such hasn’t been officially launched and isn’t due to finish for another ten odd years or more. But it’s making headlines now because the part of it that handles rich media—audio, video, and animation—and interactive content has been thrust into the limelight by Apple and, to a lesser extent,
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