MediaFile

Inkling, the three-year-old start-up that transforms bulky textbooks into an interactive experience for the iPad and other tablet devices, launched on Tuesday an ambitious new publishing and search platform aimed for non-fiction content such as books on wine and cooking or ones that covers topics like pregnancy.

Inkling is taking on the big cheeses of distribution by making  content produced on the Inkling platform easier to search through Google. So the titles or chapters or just a page of a relevant book will pop up when someone is seeking a specific topic.

“The problem is people don’t start to search on Amazon,” said Matt MacInnis, founder and CEO of Inkling.  “They start on Google and end up on Amazon.”

It also introduced a new open publishing platform that lets multiple people work on one project giving authors a tool to create books expressly for an interactive environment. Anyone can use the platform called “Habitat” to create material. Inkling gets roughly a 30 percent cut of sales or a publisher can license the platform.

Pearson (which is an investor in Inkling), HarperCollins, McGraw-Hill and Wolters-Kluwer are just some of the publishers who are using Inkling’s Habitat.

By James Ledbetter
The views expressed are his own.

I bought a Kindle in early 2009, which makes me an “early adopter” of tablet e-readers (translation: I overpaid).  In addition to downloading books, I eagerly signed up for some heavily discounted subscriptions: The New Yorker, $2.99 a month; Fortune, $2.49 a month; New York Times, $13.99 a month (it later went up); etc. I did this knowing that most of the time the content was free online. But the digital subscriptions were often much cheaper than print and the Kindle provided many conveniences, particularly when traveling.

This year, my wife bought me an iPad2, and my Kindle now feels like a cassette tape in a CD world; I think I last spotted it gathering dust on my desk a few months ago. You might think, though, that years of paying for digital content from America’s publishers would translate into goodwill on the shiny new platform. I envisioned publishers leaping at the opportunity to help me make a seamless transition from the Tablet 1.0 era, especially because they know I’m already a paying customer.

After all, iPad owners are treated like magazine royalty. Just open up The New Yorker’s iPad app, for example, and you’ll be immediately whisked into an elite land of witty cartoons and bon mots—assuming, that is, that you are a print subscriber or have paid for the iPad-only version. But if you’re a Kindle subscriber? As far as The New Yorker is concerned, you might as well be the old lady from Dubuque. In general, having a Kindle subscription buys you very little in the iPad world, except an unshakable feeling of second-class citizenship.

By Tyler Cowen

The views expressed are his own.

“Can you sign my Kindle?” I guess authors on publicity tours are assuming this line is a joke, but it soon won’t be. Clever entrepreneurs are developing ways that authors can electronically sign a fan’s Kindle, Nook, iPad, or any such device, sometimes together with a photograph of the author and reader, ready for posting on Facebook and Twitter. One version of this new idea is called Autography.

That’s a neat trick, but it’s not yet for everyone. One of the core messages of my latest book The Great Stagnation is that innovations take a long time to work their way through society. They can take decades to spread and to transform our daily practices, and in the meantime a lot of the gains of those innovations go unexploited. Many of the potential gains from “eReading” are still sitting on the proverbial shelf, just as it took electricity many decades to transform the U.S. economy. As both producers and consumers, we haven’t been nearly as radically innovative as we often like to think.

The original publication of The Great Stagnation was in eBook form only, and I meant for that to reflect an argument of the book itself: The contemporary world has plenty of innovations, but most of them do not benefit the average household. After all, the average household does not own an eReader. It’s not even clear whether the average household buys and reads books. So I viewed the exclusive electronic publication, somewhat impishly, as an act of self-reference to the underlying problem itself. It was therefore a bit amusing when some critics suggested that the new medium of the eBook itself refuted the book’s stagnation theory—quite the contrary.

The release of a Financial Times app that bypasses Apple’s App Store is a warning shot at the iPad maker’s quest to rule the high seas of digital publishing.

Launched just hours after Apple announced Newsstand, the iPad maker’s destination to access digital versions of mags and rags, FT made clear why it created the app:

“We are determined to make it as accessible as possible for the user,” John Ridding, chief executive of the FT told Reuters. “Readers will be able to get our journalism through whatever device or channel they may choose.”

The Associated Press is planning to spin off its registry that tracks and licenses digital text as a stand-alone entity.

Launched last summer, the News Registry tags, tracks and measures the use of online content. The AP board of directors approved a plan today to create a new establishment called the News Licensing Group that will be supported by the news industry.

“We are a content company and we think the efforts would be best done elsewhere,” said AP Chief Executive Tom Curley (pictured).

We have out a piece which looks  at the hopes and ambitions of  traditional publishers of newspapers,  magazines and books  in the run-up to the unveiling of Apple’s  long-awaited iPad tablet device on Saturday. The consensus seems to be that the iPad will be a great boost for the industry.  Pictured above is the April issue of Interview magazine‘s version which will be available for 99 cents on launch day.

Here are a few more thoughts we couldn’t get into the  piece:

What does the iPad mean for Amazon’s Kindle?

Brian Murray, CEO Harper Collins:

“People love their Kindle but I think there’s room in the market for both a dedicated book reader like the Kindle, Sony Reader or (Barnes & Noble’s) Nook. But there’s room for a single device that can accommodate books, magazines, and newspapers and surfing the Internet like the iPad. My view is the price of the Kindle,Nook and Sony Reader is going to drop dramatically I suspect to under $100 so there will be a market for certain.”

John Makinson CEO Penguin Books:

“I don’t think there’s likely to be one dominant provider because the Kindle is a very competitive platform.”

Brace yourself for the next salvo in the battle of the ebook readers (or electronic reading devices, or e-reader, or whatever you want to call them).

Barnes & Noble is planning a “major event” next Tuesday in New York to announce a mystery… something.

The bookseller won’t say exactly what it will announce, but we’d be surprised if its NOT a digital book reader, to compete with Amazon’s Kindle and Sony’s Reader series.