publish

News Corp. eyeing HarperCollins merger with Simon & Schuster?

Another merger might be hitting the publishing industry.

News Corp., which owns HarperCollins Publishers, is considering acquiring Simon & Schuster, The Wall Street Journal is reporting today, citing people who claim to have knowledge of the companies' discussions. Simon & Schuster is owned by CBS, the same company that publishes CNET.

At this point, News Corp. hasn't made an offer and a deal "isn't imminent," according to the Journal's sources. However, the move appears to be a response to the recent announcement of a merger between Random House and Penguin Group, two of the larger … Read more

Medium hires former literary agent as director of content

Medium, a publishing platform being developed by Twitter co-founder Ev Williams, has hired a director of content.

Williams announced on his company's blog yesterday that Medium has hired Kate Lee, former literary agent at International Creative Management. Lee left her job at ICM in April, after deciding that she wanted to have some time off. She spent 10 years at ICM and focused heavily on bringing blog writers to the book publishing world.

In her new role at Medium, Lee will serve as director of content, a job that will see her "help get great stuff onto Medium,&… Read more

Apple, publishers cut e-book deal with EU regulators -- report

Apple has reportedly negotiated a deal with European regulators that will help the company avoid litigation for potential antitrust violations while also enabling Amazon to offer lower prices than offered at Apple's iBookstore.

Reuters reports that EU regulators are preparing to accept the offer presented by Apple and four top book publishers: News Corp unit HarperCollins, Lagardere SCA's Hachette Livre, Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck, the owner of German company Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster, owned by CBS, parent company of CNET.

Apple's antitrust issues involving e-books began in the United States last spring. The U.S. government … Read more

Pearson, Bertelsmann team up with eye on digital books

Pearson and Bertelsmann today announced an agreement to create a global consumer publishing organization by combining Penguin and Random House.

The two firms are well-known for their English language publishing activities in the U.S. and the United Kingdom. Penguin, a brand based in the Pearson group and Bertelsmann's Random House will now be combining their resources in a joint venture called Penguin Random House. Under the terms of the agreement, Bertelsmann will own 53 percent of the joint venture and Pearson will own 47 percent.

Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of Pearson, said that the move would result in … Read more

Google, book publishers settle long-running copyright case

Google and a trade group representing U.S. book publishers today announced they have settled a copyright dispute that has dragged on for seven years.

The Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google said in a joint statement that as a result of the settlement, the Google Library Project will receive access to publishers' copyrighted books.

Both parties also said that U.S. publishers can "choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project."

In the statement, AAP and Google said: "Apart from the settlement, U.S. … Read more

Edit your photographs like a pro with ACDSee Pro 6

ACDSee Pro 6 is the photo editing software of choice for many professional photographers. It offers powerful image editing and cataloging tools with secure online storage capabilities that let you store and access massive RAW images for editing and processing wherever and whenever you want or need them. ACDSee is oriented toward maximizing your workflow, too. The fully featured ACDSee Pro 6 is free to try for 30 days. It's not cheap, but it's hardly expensive as image editing software goes. It's well within the budget of sophisticated amateurs, and the price includes online storage space.

ACDSee … Read more

Get a $379 Windows software bundle for $49

Need a good desktop-publishing program? For my money, nothing compares to Serif PagePlus X6. At $99.99, it's a fraction of the cost of Adobe InDesign and QuarkXPress (which, against all logic, still sell for hundreds and hundreds of dollars). And it's nearly as capable as both.

For a limited time, you can get Serif PagePlus X6 for just $49 -- oh, and six other programs, too.

It's all part of Avanquest Software's PC SuperBundle, which includes $379' worth of Windows software for that same price.

I'll come right out and say that PagePlus is … Read more

Publishers' worst nightmare: Amazon again on discount warpath

Last week, HarperCollins, Hachette, and Simon & Schuster cut a deal with the government to settle allegations that the book publishers had colluded with Apple to fix the price of e-books. If you believe the government's charges, the book publishers were trying to prevent Amazon from discounting them to death.

Now it's back to the future. Earlier today came word that Amazon had returned to form, discounting HarperCollins e-books titles.

"We are happy to again be lowering prices on a broad assortment of HarperCollins titles," Amazon spokeswoman Sarah Gelman said in an e-mailed comment to CNET.… Read more

DOJ, please don't let up on Apple, book publishers

It's not wrong for retailers to discount books, and losing market share to a competitor is no excuse to fix prices or cheat consumers.

That's the message U.S. District Court Judge Denise Cote sent yesterday to Apple and the country's top book publishers, as well as e-book retailers.

In April, the Department of Justice filed suit and accused five of the country's largest book publishers of conspiring with Apple to raise e-book prices. Soon after, the DOJ reached a settlement agreement with three of the accused publishers. For months, the book industry attacked the settlement, … Read more