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Springer buys CMG, expands med offerings| PHILADELPHIA, Pennsylvania, November 18, 2005 -- Giant health-care publisher Springer Science + Media Business has purchased a smaller rival, Current Medicine Group. The acqusition strengths Springer's presence in phamaceutical oublishing in Britian and the United States, Springer said in announcing the deal. Terms were not announced. About 100 Current Medicine employees in London and Phialdelphia will be folded into Springer, which has 5,000 employees in 19 countries. The sale includes CMG's Current Medicine Group in London; the CMG Science Pess Internet Services in London; Current Medicine in Philadelphia; and Current Science in Philadelphia. Products include books, journals, pamphlets, manuals, news and informational products, and the Images.MD library. |
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Google eyes online book rentalNEW YORK, November 12, 2005 -- The Google search engine company, rapidly expanding into new enterprises, plans to rent copies of books online for a week at a time, sources said. The source, quoted by the Wall Street Journal, said one publisher has been approached by Google with the project. The plan involves only trade books, not textbooks, at this point. Readers would pay 10 percent of a book's retail price for one week of online access. Books would not be downloadable. In California, Google declined to confirm the report: "Google Print is exploring new access models to help authors and publishers sell more books online, but we don't have anything to announce."
The renting project is unconnected, it seems, with the Google Print Library, a multi-year project to digitize virtually every book in the English language for online access.
The Google rental initiative comes amid scrambling by book publishers to get on top of technlogy they had overlooked for years, even as they now fight the Google Print Library project in court to buy time. The Google rental scheme, said one industry observer, may help neutralize publishers's objections to the Google Print Library project.
Already, Amazon.com has added a feature, called Search Inside, that allows customers to preview three-page chunks of selected books by searching for key terms. The feature includes a concordance too. Amazon also has announced a new service, Amazon Pages, which will allow customer to buy part of a book -- a page, a section or chapter -- at pennies a page. Included are only books whose copyright owners have approved. Publishers and authors share in the revenue, as well as Amazon.
Meanwhile, Random House is working on a program for selling books online with customers able to preview pages. The books would not be downloadable. Random House has assured authors they will share in online revenues.
BACKGROUND: Publishers sue to stop Google project |
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Google Print |
Laptop to replace textbooks abroad?BRASILIA, Brazil, November 11, 2005 -- Government funds used for textbooks would be diverted to low-cost laptop computers in Brazilian schools, according to entrepreneur Rodrigo Mesquita who plans to build 3 million of the $100 laptops. Mesquita is working on a government project to introduce the wind-up laptops being developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States. Laptops would improve not only public education but the economy, Mesquita said. He hopes to begin manufacture next year.
A working prototype has been built at the M.I.T. Media Lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for demonstration at a United Nations technology conference in Tunisia. Nicholas Negroponte, Media Lab founder, said 5 million to 10 million units could be built by early 2007. Plans, he said, include distribution in Brazil, Thailand and two dozen other countries that have expressed interest. Several companies are bidding the build the devices. Start-up funding has included $2 million each from Advanced Micro Devices, Brightstar, Google and Red Hat.
There may be U.S. applications. Massachusetts Governor Mitt Romney has proposed buying one for every junior high school and high school student in his state. Romney's proposal carries a $54 million price tag.
The devices, housed in high-impact plastic, would have a power adapter for use where electricity is available. Otherwise, power would be generated with a crank. An eight-inch diagonal screen would be smaller than most laptops. For word-processing the screen would be high-resolution monochromatic. For Internet browsing the screen would be low-resolution color. There would be wireless capability, including networking with other units in areas without Internet access.
Steve Jobs of Apple Computer reportedly offered to donate the Apple OP X operating system but was turned down in favor of an open-source system with which students can tinker. Bill Gates of Microsoft has been in on planning. The first units will use a microprocessor from Advanced Micro Devices and a Linux-based operating system from Red Hat. Software includes word processing, a Web browser, e-mail and, for tinkering, a programming system.
How big the market? At M.I.T. Negroponte sees the range as 100 to 150 million worldwide. |
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El-hi, college sales grow in SeptemberNEW YORK, November 2, 2005 -- Sales of university-press paperback books gained 13.3 percent in September with sales of $21.4 million, according to the latest data from the Association of American Publishers. For the year university-press paperbacks have lost 14.0 percent. Higher-ed publishers sold 9.7 percent more books with sales totaling $213.7 million. The el-hi basal and supplemental K-12 market grew 39.1 percent with sales of $492.9 million. These data for categories in which most scholarly authors do their work:
El-hi
Univ press (soft)
College
Professional
University press (hard)
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| Septem-
ber
39.1%
113.3%
9.7%
1.3%
-42.7% |
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| Year-
to-date
9.7%
-14.0%
N/R%
1.6%
-37.3%
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BACKGROUND: Previous monthly sales report
BACKGROUND: Databank index |
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Association of American Publishers |
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Medical publishers join AAP| NEW YORK, November 1, 2005: The Association of American Publishers has absorbed the American Medical Publishers, adding more than 60 companies to AAP's membership. Both associations said the merger will strengten education and advocacy activities. AAP's Professional and Scholarly Publishing Division will be the home of the new medical publishers. The divsiion is composed of publishers of books, journals, looseleaf, and electronic products in technology, science, medicine, business, law, humanities, the behavioral sciences and scholarly reference. Professional societies and university presses also are in the division. A new committee, the American Medical Publishers Committee, to work on issues of specific concern to medical publishers, such as federal pharmaeceutical regulations, National Institues of Health open access policy, and developments in digital health care information and patient advocacy. |
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Association of American Publishers |
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Supreme Court; No fast rack on Patriot ActWASHINGTON, November 1, 2005 -- the U.S. Supreme Court denied an emergency appeal that would have allowed a Connecticut library to identify itself publicly as the target of federal agents who went into its records to identify who had checked out certain books. Such federal searches have become a hot-button civil rights issue because they lack judicial oversight under traditional U.S. checks and balances to prevent government abuses of citizen rights. The searches are authjorized under the 2001 Patriot Act, which forbids libraries from making public that their records have been entered by government agents. The Supreme Court decision against consxiering the case on short notice does not affect the central arguments of the chjallenge filed by the Connecticut library.
The case itself will be heard by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit in November. The Supreme Court action, however, means that the briefs and motions associated with the case will continue to be filed under seal and will be made publics. In September, a U.S. District Court judge in Connecticut ruled that the plaintiff should be permitted to identify itself publicly, hut the judge allowed the federal government to appeal immediately and the appeals court ordeed a gag while it considers the case.
The American Civil Liberties juniojn filed an emergency application to the U.S. Supreme Court, asking that the gag be lifted. The American Library Association and three other organizations filed a supportive briefs. The briefs argued that the public cannot conduct an informed debate about the Patriot Act if it does not know how broadly or wisely the federal government has used its enforcement powers..
Background:
Patriot Act hits judicial roadblock |
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