publishers

Examiner.com invades 5 Canadian cities

Hyper-local publishing company Examiner.com is set to launch its service in five Canadian cities.

According to the organization, Examiner will now provide localized content to those living in Calgary, Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, and Vancouver. The company will also offer national content for all those not living in the five cities.

Examiner is growing up quickly since its launch in April 2008. Examiner now provides localized content in 162 U.S. cities, according to a company spokesperson. It plans to add 40 more markets in the coming months. With the expansion to Canada now under way, the spokesperson told me … Read more

Facebook's 'share' buttons: Now with numbers

Web publishers and blog owners have a new toy to play with: Facebook announced Monday that it has launched new "share" buttons with counters, much in the manner of Digg's iconic buttons and the third-party TweetMeme app for Twitter sharing.

Plus, there's more: Publishers installing Facebook share buttons can also get data back related to how many times that link has been shared, how many users have hit the thumbs-up "like" button or commented on shared versions of the story on Facebook, and how many people have clicked back to it through Facebook.

These … Read more

Neil Gaiman to create audio book based on tweets

Twitter may not be making money but at least it's providing a forum for some innovative artistic collaboration.

Take, for instance, science fiction writer and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman. He's going to create an audio book based on tweets provided by Twitter users.

You might remember the game of "Exquisite Corpse" where a group of people create a poem or story together by writing down sentences in succession that no one else can see until everyone has contributed. Read as a whole, the mish-mash can be entertaining, at least to slightly inebriated English literature students bored … Read more

Music publishers: 'Copyright should be technology neutral'

Composers, music publishers, and songwriters have told federal lawmakers that regardless of whether music is distributed to consumers via TV, DVDs or digital download, they need legislative help to ensure they get their fair share.

Two weeks ago, I wrote a story about how some of these groups want iTunes and other Web music retailers to pay performance fees for downloads of TV shows and films. They also want online music stores to cough up fees for 30-second song previews. Those revelations didn't go over well with many techies.

But to get a better understanding of what the artists … Read more

Content still king on the Net

The Internet offers everything from searching to shopping to social networking, but Net users still spend most of their time on plain old content sites, according to a survey from the Online Publishers Association.

In the latest installment from its monthly Internet Activity Index, the OPA reported that Internet users are now spending 42 percent of their time online using content sites, more than any other category. That figure represents a 24 percent jump from 2003 when Net users spent 34 percent of their time on content sites.

Content sites include those that offer news, information, and entertainment, such as … Read more

Music publishers: iTunes not paying fair share

Songwriters, composers, and music publishers are making preparations to one day collect performance fees from Apple and other e-tailers for not just traditional music downloads but for downloads of films and TV shows as well. Those downloads contain music after all.

These groups even want compensation for iTunes' 30-second song samples.

At a time when many iTunes shoppers are still fuming over Apple's first-ever increase in song prices, the demands by the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers (ASCAP), Broadcast Music Inc. (BMI), and other performing-rights groups, would likely lead to more price hikes at iTunes. For many, … Read more

Google moves toward micropayments for newspapers

With micropayments and transaction platforms a buzzworthy sector of the Web right now, it's no surprise that Google would want to get in on the game.

But Mountain View's pitch is a little bit different: the payment platform it plans to build, according to Harvard's Nieman Journalism Lab, is geared toward newspapers that want to charge for digital content.

Google's plans are detailed in a document the company sent to the Newspaper Association for America. The document, a response to a query from the association, also requested more information pertaining to paid-content models.

"While currently … Read more

iCal calendars with all-day events not publishing to MobileMe

Reports have surfaced that iCal calendar events that contain all-day events are having issues when publishing to MobileMe. The issues appear to be related to Snow Leopard's version of iCal. Apple is aware of the issue and is currently working on a fix. In the meantime, several users offer suggestions for workarounds with mixed results.… Read more

Readers as patrons in the digital age

A few months ago someone sent me a link to a short story a friend of his had written and posted online. I made the mistake of glancing at it while at work and then got so absorbed I couldn't stop reading until I was done. The story, Mr. Penumbra's Twenty-Four-Hour Book Store was so interesting and well written, I just wanted more.

The writer, Robin Sloan, is now working on a book and is appealing to passionate readers like me to help him get it published. He is seeking financial backers via a Web site called Kickstarter, … Read more