publishers

Walk through the produce aisles of any grocery store and on the outsides of avocados, pomegranates, mushrooms, and just about everything else you'll see an astonishing number of stickers and labels advertising various kinds of quality standards: certified organic, fair-trade, all-natural, locally grown, and so forth.

Might we soon be seeing the same kinds of labels on digital content?

A small trade group called the Internet Content Syndication Council (ICSC) has been circulating a document since late May--highlighted Tuesday in an AdWeek article--to drum up industry concern about "content mills," a fast-growing sector of the … Read more

It's odd that the need to create newsletters, fliers, brochures, and the like hasn't gone away, but desktop publishing software has. A decade ago,  you had your pick of at least a dozen programs, but now the field is nearly empty.

Sure, you can still buy heavyweight applications such as Adobe PageMaker and QuarkXPress, but they cost a small fortune--$499 and $799, respectively--and they're overkill for most people.

That's why I'm a longtime fan of Serif PagePlus, a terrific desktop-publishing application that's ideal for designing both print and Web-based documents.

The applications … Read more

A management shake-up, tepid traffic, and a hyped product revamp that still hasn't seen the light of day: Much has been made, lately, of the woes facing onetime social-news darling Digg.

But even if things turn around after the release of Digg's "Version 4," which will go live later this year following an alpha test that's starting to make the rounds, its launch will give Digg an additional challenge. It's built up an elaborate network of influence and deal making between media companies and "power users" over the years, and the Version … Read more

A group of music publishers on Wednesday filed a copyright complaint in federal court against LimeWire's parent company and founder Mark Gorton, according to documents obtained by CNET.

Eight members of the National Music Publishers' Association, including the publishing arms of the four largest recording companies, were named as plaintiffs in the suit. They accuse Lime Group, parent of software maker Lime Wire, and Gorton with "copyright infringement on a massive scale."

The suit comes as LimeWire, the nation's largest file-sharing service, is trying to convince U.S. District Judge Kimba Wood not to shut down the service. … Read more

Microsoft Office 2010 is now available for purchase. We wrote our review for the Office 2010 Professional RTM version, which is identical to the final public release, when Microsoft released it to businesses on May 18. If you didn't get a chance to check out the beta version or an  earlier release of Office 2010, you can now download a 30-day trial version to see which version best fits your needs.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Student ($149.99) includes Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, Microsoft PowerPoint, and Microsoft OneNote.

Microsoft Office 2010 Home and Business ($279.99) includes … Read more

Let it be known that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg wanted a book to be written about the company he founded. At the top of the acknowledgments for journalist David Kirkpatrick's new book about Facebook, "The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World," Kirkpatrick makes it clear. "Had (Zuckerberg) not encouraged me to write this book and cooperated as I did so, it would likely not have happened."

"The Facebook Effect," which will be available for purchase Tuesday, is the most extensive work written about the ubiquitous social-networking … Read more

The Flash Player may be banned from the iPad, but that's not keeping Adobe Systems from other efforts to leave its mark on the Apple devices. The latest development: new viewer software announced Monday that lets publishers create splashy digital versions of their magazines.

With the software, publishers can use Adobe's new InDesign CS5 layout software to create the digital version, then distribute the content packaged with the viewer. The showcase example: Conde Nast's iPad version of Wired, available through Apple's App Store.

The software hasn't been launched yet. "We aim to make our … Read more

NEW YORK--AOL CEO Tim Armstrong wasn't yet at the company when it paid $850 million for social network Bebo two years ago, a purchase that's now considered to be one of the biggest tech industry M&A blunders of the past decade. On Tuesday, onstage at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference, Armstrong said, "I don't know whether or not I would have bought Bebo. Looking backward, the answer's no, but in that time period with what was going on, maybe."

Indeed, at the time, would-be Facebook rival Bebo was extremely popular with teenagers in … Read more

Though it's taken a little longer than we expected, Barnes & Noble has announced that this summer it will launch PubIt, a new DIY publishing option for independent publishers and self-publishing writers to distribute their works digitally through BN.com and Barnes & Noble's e-book store.

The new service will compete with Amazon's pioneering Digital Text Platform (DTP), which many writers have turned to for distributing their works to the Kindle and other devices that run the Kindle Reader software. Sony, too, has a DYI option for its Reader Store, and Apple is now allowing self-publishers to … Read more