Gene Gable has a detailed and thoughtful review of QuarkXpress 8 over at CreativePro.com.
Category: Publishing & media (Page 33 of 53)
I missed this, and I shouldn’t have, but that is what a few weeks out of the office will do for you. It’s significant for Quark’s new DPS offering, and also bolsters their traditional QPS line, which has been re-architected to better support open development standards and XML. (I wrote an article about QPS for the Seybold Report, but it is behind their firewall.)
There are plenty of Quark skeptics out there (and I have been one of them), and it’s clear that Quark has challenges. But they are also still a sizable company, and they have a talented management team that understands the enterprise publishing market. And while Adobe is formidable, Adobe also does not seem to want to put together integrated server offerings or to take on the services side of a service-intensive business. Meanwhile Quark does, with both QPS and DPS, and a growing list of service partnerships. Since we’re convinced that enterprise publishing is an important market, the message here seems to be to not count Quark out yet.
Charlie Sorrel has some thoughts over at Wired’s blogs.
Here’s a project I would love to do if I had the time–a face-off between Kindle, the iPhone, the Sony Reader, an eBook Technologies ETI-1, and a few other devices. Take a few book types–novel, textbook, graphical book, business document to begin with–and create a feature matrix and evaluation criteria. Also evaluate the e-commerce experience, the experience with public domain and other free content, and the experience of adding your own content. Write it all up, and keep it up to date.
Why didn’t I think of this? Of course, among other things, I don’t have the stomach to deal with the legal challenges.
Time magazines’s Josh Quittner offers some insight into Kindle sales:
According to a source at Amazon, “on a title-by-title basis, of the 130,000 titles available on Kindle and in physical form, Kindle sales now make up over 12% of sales for those titles.”
Amazon’s quarterly results didn’t spell things out more, though the inventory of eBook titles continues to grow:
The number of titles available for the Kindle are now up to 140,000 compared to 90,000 at launch, and the company did not break out any other Kindle figures except to say sales of e-books represent a low double digit percentage of the 140,000 titles available in both e-books and print formats.
Google announced that Knol is now open to everyone. They announced Knol back in December. Knols are authoritative articles about specific topics, written by people who know about those subjects. From their blog post:
The key principle behind Knol is authorship. Every knol will have an author (or group of authors) who put their name behind their content. It’s their knol, their voice, their opinion. We expect that there will be multiple knols on the same subject, and we think that is good. With Knol, we are introducing a new method for authors to work together that we call “moderated collaboration.”
With this feature, any reader can make suggested edits to a knol which the author may then choose to accept, reject, or modify before these contributions become visible to the public. This allows authors to accept suggestions from everyone in the world while remaining in control of their content. After all, their name is associated with it! Knols include strong community tools which allow for many modes of interaction between readers and authors. People can submit comments, rate, or write a review of a knol.
At the discretion of the author, a knol may include ads from our AdSense program. If an author chooses to include ads, Google will provide the author with a revenue share from the proceeds of those ad placements. We are happy to announce an agreement with the New Yorker magazine which allows any author to add one cartoon per knol from the New Yorker’s extensive cartoon repository. Cartoons are an effective (and fun) way to make your point, even on the most serious topics. http://knol.google.com
Today I got one of those phone calls: someone from a call center representing a trade magazine, asking me to verify my contact information for their subscriber database and as proof that I’m an actual subscriber that they can include in their circulation numbers. You’ve undoubtedly gotten many of these. They are as much the banes of B-to-B publishers’ existence as they are annoying to subscribers.
I told the phone rep what I tell them all nowadays: I ask if they have a digital edition of their publication. If so, I ask them to switch me to it. If not, I ask them to cancel my subscription. I do this mainly as my tiny way to help the environment, as well as so that I can see what publishers are doing (or not) with digital edition technologies.
The phone rep on today’s call said that the magazine in question, KM World (published by Information Today Inc.), does not offer a digital edition but that he was going to ask whether I’d be interested in one. This shows that digital editions are on more B-to-B publishers’ radar screens.
Our market study of digital editions cites concern for the environment as one of the three primary factors driving growth in digital editions, particularly in B-to-B publishing (the others being lower costs and speed of delivery). Several publishers told us of their own environmental concerns as well as those of their customers and readers.
The routine subscription database update call that included a question about this is further evidence.
And yes, I also don’t like getting trade publications in print because I don’t want my office to be any more cluttered than it is already. Don’t you?
Adlib Software and LORENZ Life Sciences announced that they have signed an OEM agreement. Under the terms of the agreement, LORENZ will license and embed Adlib’s ExpressConversion technology into future versions of LORENZ’s docuRender for MS-Word product. Adlib and LORENZ aim to eliminate submission quality concerns and automate and streamline regulatory publishing with submission-ready PDFs delivered through LORENZ’s docuBridge submission management solution. Many life sciences organizations attempt to build document conversion solutions in-house or use systems that are not suited to the rigors of the FDA eCTD (electronic Common Technical Documents) standard. Adlib and LORENZ can accommodate the large number (into the tens of thousands) and types of documents generated in today’s research environments, integrate the solution into an organization’s document workflow and provide the quality and compliance to meet any standard or regulation. http://www.lorenz.cc/, http://www.adlibsoftware.com
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