Amazon.com has announced details of a new program that will enable authors and publishers who use the Kindle Digital Text Platform (DTP) to earn a larger share of revenue from each Kindle book they sell. For each Kindle book sold, authors and publishers who choose the new 70 percent royalty option will receive 70 percent of list price, net of delivery costs. This new option will be in addition to and will not replace the existing DTP standard royalty option. This new 70 percent royalty option will become available on June 30, 2010. Delivery costs will be based on file size and pricing will be $0.15/MB. At today’s median DTP file size of 368KB, delivery costs would be less than $0.06 per unit sold. For example, on an $8.99 book an author would make $3.15 with the standard option, and $6.25 with the new 70 percent option. DTP authors and publishers will be able to select the royalty option that best meets their needs. Books from authors and publishers who choose the 70 percent royalty option will have access to all the same features and be subject to all the same requirements as books receiving the standard royalty rate. In addition, to qualify for the 70 percent royalty option, books must satisfy the following set of requirements: The author or publisher-supplied list price must be between $2.99 and $9.99; This list price must be at least 20 percent below the lowest physical list price for the physical book; The title is made available for sale in all geographies for which the author or publisher has rights; The title will be included in a broad set of features in the Kindle Store, such as text-to-speech; This list of features will grow over time as Amazon continues to add more functionality to Kindle and the Kindle Store. Under this royalty option, books must be offered at or below price parity with competition, including physical book prices. Amazon will provide tools to automate that process, and the 70 percent royalty will be calculated off the sales price. The 70 percent royalty option is for in-copyright works and is unavailable for works published before 1923 (public domain books). At launch, the 70 percent royalty option will only be available for books sold in the United States. http://dtp.amazon.com/
Category: Content creation and design (Page 59 of 76)
Technologies and strategies for authoring and editing, including word processors, structured editors, web and page layout and formatting, content conversion and migration, multichannel content, structured and unstructured data integration, and metadata creation.
DocZone by Really Strategies, Inc., a software as a service (SaaS) XML content management system, delivers multi-channel output from single-source content. DocZone Publisher offers publishers a web-based editorial and production system that supports the creation, management, translation, and single-source publishing of content. DocZone Publisher offers CMS functionality in one system and provides support for high-end XML-based composition to PDF, HTML, EPUB, online help, and MS-Word formats. www.doczone.com.
Inmedius, Inc. announced the distribution of S1000Dimpact v4, to provide support for the S1000D Issue 4.0 Schema, including Descriptive, Illustrated Parts Data (IPD), and Procedural document types or Data Modules (DMs). The change management software links S1000D technical documentation and Logistic Support Analysis Record (LSAR) data, so that modifications in engineering data are tracked and implemented by publication departments. The efficiency of creating initial S1000D Data Modules and managing changes from the logistics source can be enhanced with Impact. Users map technical publishing structures to the logistics source, track changes and create Data Module Requirements Lists (DMRLs) for S1000D projects. Impact also provide workflow capabilities, audit trails and reporting functions to maintain controls and manage changes. Impact is one of seven modules in the Inmedius S1000D Publishing Suite, an integrated solution set, supporting the entire S1000D technical documentation lifecycle. The software modules work together, integrating authoring through publishing. Browser-based Impact works with S1000Dmanager, facilitating a direct link between LSAR data and the S1000D Common Source Database (CSDB) to review and manage engineering changes. www.inmediusS1000D.com
Open Text Corporation announced the release of Vignette Content Management 8. Vignette Content Management 8 introduces a new design aimed to let business users to create websites, microsites and landing pages on-demand, while staying within branding and technical guidelines. The design caters to specific personas in marketing or other departments, providing tools, designs and other resources based on their roles. Vignette Content Management 8 offers a way to create and manage Web experiences by streamlining the management of Web layouts and structures. This includes page management, site and navigation management, content production, taxonomy and task management. Vignette Content Management 8 has been designed to help users move to the new interface at their own pace. Marketers can assign search engine compatible vanity URLs to specific pages, or navigation channels; leverage site templating capabilities to quickly generate microsites for promotions or events; establish seasonal or event-specific designs when and where applicable in a consistent manner; add content contextually within the website; and work with rich media and social media assets. www.vignette.com/v8
Ephox announced the latest version of the company’s rich text editor, EditLive! V7. Integrated with IBM Lotus Web Content Management and IBM Lotus Quickr software, EditLive! allows business users to create content in a desktop word processing environment. With new features to increase user productivity, team collaboration and web site quality, EditLive! V7 is designed to help non-technical users keep company web sites, blogs and wikis up-to-date with relevant online content. EditLive! V7 supports Autosave to preserve content, even if the web browser crashes, or the server session times out. V7 also includes templating functionality, giving content administrators the ability to create reusable content templates for consistent web site styles and standards that can be employed by business users. The HTML editor also improves collaboration for online documents with new context-based commenting capabilities, in which users can comment directly on any text or object in a document and track conversations related to specific comments. For increased quality of content in web sites and wikis, EditLive! adds broken hyperlink reporting. The new version of EditLive! includes enhanced integration with IBM Lotus Web Content Management and now deploys as an application in the portal environment. In addition, performance improvements have been achieved through a series of optimizations to caching, configuration and compression mechanisms. In addition to new functionality in EditLive!, the OEM version now includes several features that were previously only available in the Enterprise Edition. These capabilities include Auto-Correct for automatically correcting spelling errors, the ability to import Word documents, and Thesaurus. EditLive! 7 is available immediately in OEM, Professional and Enterprise Editions. http://www.ephox.com/
FastPencil announced their eBook Publish-Ready Format for eReaders offering an authoring solution to ensure an author’s book can be read anywhere today and in the future. FastPencil provides authors with an end-to-end publishing platform where they can maintain control of the content creation, price, distribution and sales activity. FastPencil gives eBook authors flexibility. For instance, authors can take individual book chapters and create eBook editions to promote the larger work. Short-story writers can also use FastPencil to create and publish their stories. Also, as eReaders incorporate multi-media, such as video, audio, animation, slides presentations and games, FastPencil will provide support. FastPencil Publish-Ready Format Features: Auto-generate table of contents, Auto-pagination, Auto-merge into professional book design template, Auto-merge into eBook formats, and Uphold Industry standards compliance (title page, copyright, ISBN). The FastPencil eBook Publish-Ready Format is available now at http://www.FastPencil.com
Unified Development, Inc. (Unidev), a diversified IT company based in St. Louis, Missouri, announced its search for Microsoft Partners in North America, Asia and Europe to implement their global web content management (CMS) system, Auctori. Unidev is a 16 year Microsoft Certified Partner. Auctori, a .Net SaaS CMS Platform, was developed by Unidev for multi-national companies, and currently supports a number of European, North American and Asian sites. This system supports multi-lingual site management and site deployment. Auctori was built in conjunction with a team of search engine optimization (SEO) specialists to implement best SEO practices. The next release of Auctori is scheduled for the first quarter of 2010, and will feature European and Asian hosting in addition to its current North American hosting, with all sites and platforms managed from a single console. Unidev is looking to leverage the Microsoft Partner Channel Builder to deepen their services and solutions to more complex business opportunities, to provide a broader range of client services and to create business relationships with other partners whose skills complement their own. http://www.unidev.com, http://www.auctori.com
Syncro Soft Ltd announced the immediate availability of version 11.1 of its XML Editor and XML Author. Oxygen combines content author features like the CSS driven Visual XML editor with a fully featured XML development environment. It has ready-to-use support for the main document frameworks DITA, DocBook, TEI and XHTML and also includes support for all XML Schema languages, XSLT/XQuery Debuggers, WSDL analyzer, XML Databases, XML Diff and Merge, Subversion client and more. Version 11.1 of <oXygen/> XML Editor improves the XML authoring capabilities, the support for XML development and also a number of core features. The visual XML authoring now uses schema information to provide intelligent editing actions that help keep the document valid and provide a better editing experience. The new compact representation of tags and the quick up/down navigation features improve the ergonomics and the usability. <oXygen/> can use any XQJ compliant XQuery processor for XQuery transformations, different error levels and external references can be specified for Schematron messages and the XProc support was improved with better editing and execution. The XML format and indent operation can use DTD/schema information to provide better formatting and the find and replace is now XML-aware and can accept XPath filtering to delimit the search scope. Starting with version 11.1 the diff and merge support from oXygen is available also as a separate application, oXygen XML Diff. Oxygen XML Editor and XSLT Debugger is available immediately in three editions: Multi-platform Academic/Personal license costs USD 64.00 (includes the one year support and maintenance pack). Multi-platform Professional license costs USD 349.00; Multi-platform Enterprise license costs USD 449.00. Oxygen XML Author is available immediately in two editions: Multi-platform Professional license costs USD 199.00; Multi-platform Enterprise license costs USD 269.00. http://www.oxygenxml.com, http://www.syncrosvnclient.com
Subscribe to the Gilbane Advisor
