Harper Collins starts watermarking eBooks

This week HarperCollins and anti-piracy company Digimarc announced the debut of a new ebook watermarking system to enable the identification of leak points in the company’s supply chain. TorrentFreak caught up with the publisher to learn about its new anti-piracy solution and its overall anti-piracy strategy…

Called Guardian Watermarking for Publishing, the system embeds all but invisible markers into ebooks. Then, Digimarc trawls the web looking for leaked content containing the watermarks. Once found, the anti-piracy company reports the unique identifiers back to Harpercollins who can match them against their own transaction records. This enables the company to identify the source of that material from wherever it occurred in the company’s supply chain.

Speaking with TorrentFreak, HarperCollins said that tracking these pre-consumer leaks provides intelligence to prevent them happening again.

“We have had leaks in the past in the final stages of our supply chain – via isolated instances of early releases by retailers. We therefore intend to be able to track these potential leaks in the future – especially now that our digital supply chain extends to many partners in many markets,” a spokesperson said.

“[The system] empowers us to go back to the source of the problem (ie identify the source) and find solutions to prevent this from happening in the future.”

Read the full article @ Torrent Freak.

Posted in ebooks Tagged with: copyright, ebooks, piracy, publisher

Piracy Doesn’t Harm eBook Sales, Publisher Says

“In order to protect our authors´ rights and interests, Springer proactively screens websites for illegal download links of Springer eBooks and subsequently requires hosts of such download sites to remove and delete the files or links in question,” they write.

The sentence that follows, however, is perhaps of even more interest. While the company admits that piracy is a serious issue, they have yet to see any evidence that it hurts their business (emphasis added).

“While we have not yet seen harmful effects of eBook piracy and file sharing on our eBook portfolio, these are nevertheless considered serious topics,” Springer notes.

In addition to the revelation above, the publisher later notes that torrent sites and other forms of file-sharing “rarely present a threat to eBook content.”

It’s interesting to see that one of the largest book publishers in the industry doesn’t see piracy as a direct threat to its revenues. While Springer doesn’t go into details to explain the absence of a harmful effect, we have to assume that they have some data to back up this claim.

Read the full article @ TorrentFreak.com.

Posted in ebooks, Politics & Law Tagged with: piracy, publisher, publishing

Publishing Jargon-Buster: Ten Words Unpacked

I was a bookseller for ten years, I’ve been a librarian for nearly 20, and a published author for more than ten, and I still learned a few things from this article.

In publishing, as in any other industry, we scatter our days with curious and unusual words which we take for granted. But even for us, new ones pop up to surprise us every now and then. Thinking of Blippar and Wibalin here—though I thought for a while that our books were bound with wibbling. Which made me laugh! Here to entertain and explain are ten bits of jargon, don’t use them all at once….

3) GSM

Grams per square metre: a term used to specify the weight of paper. As an example, a standard piece of A4 paper is 90gsm and a standard printed fiction book might be printed on 52-120gsm. An illustrated book might be printed on glossy “photographic” paper so the pictures show up well, on a heavier weight of paper than used for a standard novel.

Read the full article @ TOR.com.

Posted in Books Tagged with: glossary, publisher, publishing, tor

Douglas County Libraries publishes first ebook

Oral history interview with Attilio F. Caporiccio by Caporiccio, Attilio F., 1916-2007

Why is this significant?

• This is an example of library as publisher, taking local content and making it freely available to the world.
• It showcases the ability of the library to be a player in the digital world, highlighting unique information.
• It shows a new opportunity for short form writing – something one might read during a commute, on a smartphone or tablet.

Read the full article @ myliblog.

Posted in ebooks, Libraries Tagged with: publisher

Publishers still owed millions from Borders

More than two years out, there’s still no indication of how much unsecured creditors might get on the dollar—or when the Borders bankruptcy will officially end.

Top 20 Largest Unsecured Publishing Creditors & Amount of Claim

1. Penguin Putnam $41,118,914
2. Hachette Book Group $36,879,656
3. Simon & Schuster $33,757,445
4. Random House $33,461,062
5. HarperCollins $25,793,451
6. Macmillan/MPS $11,434,306
7. John Wiley & Sons $11,191,435
8. Perseus Distribution Services $7,776,292
9. Source Interlink Companies $6,879,906
10. F&W Media $4,546,275
11. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt $4,400,756
12. Workman Publishing $4,003,126
13. Diamond Comic Distributors $3,906,550
14. McGraw-Hill $3,093,871
15. Pearson Education $2,784,766
16. Rosetta Stone $2,226,553
17. National Book Network $1,956,713
18. W.W. Norton & Company $1,940,826
19. Zondervan $1,886,752
20. Hay House $1,886,752

Read the full article @ PublishersWeekly.com.

Posted in Politics & Law Tagged with: bankruptcy, borders, publisher

Entire Hachette eBook Catalog Will Soon Become Available to All Libraries

Hachette Book Group, which publishes Stephenie Meyer and Malcolm Gladwell among others, announced Wednesday that after two years of pilot programs it will offer its entire e-catalog to libraries. New books will be available simultaneously in paper and e-editions, a policy also recently adapted by Penguin Group (USA).

Read the full article @ infodocket.com.

Posted in ebooks Tagged with: libraries, publisher

One Year Later, the Results of Tor Books UK Going DRM-Free

On April 25, 2012, Tor Books UK announced that it was making all of its ebook list DRM-free. There’s still a lot of debate and interest in the topic. I recently wrote a piece about the subject for Publishers Weekly which I’ve replicated here.

We made this decision in conjunction with our sister company in the US, for our shared brand imprint. It was something that we’d been exploring for quite a while and a move that we felt committed to for our particular area.

…

For our particular readership, we felt it was an essential and fair move. The genre community is close-knit, with a huge on-line presence, and with publishers, authors and fans having closer communication than perhaps some other areas of publishing do. Having been in direct contact with our readers, we were aware of how frustrated many of them were by DRM. Our authors had also expressed concerns at the restrictions imposed by the copyright coding applied to their ebooks. When both authors and readers are talking from the same page, it makes sense for the publishers to sit up, listen and take note—and we did!

Read the full article on TOR.com.

Posted in ebooks Tagged with: drm, publisher, tor