Last week as I was driving through Penn's campus, I noticed a sign for "ebook rentals." What did that mean and what is the impact was for publishers?

Today in eBook Newser I learn that Amazon is renting college textbooks on the Kindle. College students can rent textbooks from Amazon for any length of time. The bonus is that any notes students add to their textbooks will be saved via Amazon's Whispersync technology and the students can retrieve the textbooks AND their notes in the future if they decide to purchase the book or rent again.

While I see great advantages for students, I wonder what this means for college textbook publishers. Leave a comment below if you publish textbooks; we'd enjoy hearing your thoughts on this.

BSI recently licensed RSuite CMS (content management system) by Really Strategies, Inc. to manage its complex and extensive content and metadata assets and related editorial and production processes. BSI British Standards is the UK's National Standards Body. “BSI will take advantage of RSuite’s sophisticated workflow functionality to manage content in a range of formats and optimize its editorial and production processes,” stated Rob Diana,  director of product engineering at Really Strategies, Inc.

Click here to read more about BSI's selection of RSuite.

Mark your calendar. On October 25th publishing executives will gather in Philadelphia for the 5th annual RSuite User Conference.

The RSuite User Conference is a forum for publishers who want to learn how content management is the key to building a successful digital publishing strategy. Attendees will hear case studies from some of the world's leading publishers, learning what works and what doesn't work when developing and implementing a CMS.

This year's event will take place at the conference center at the Chemical Heritage Foundation in Old City, Philadelphia.

<update>June 7, 2011</update>

Since announcing the release of the EPUB 3 specification, the blogosphere and tweet streams have been alive with the sound of music to publishers' ears. No doubt Amazon's news that it will finally accept EPUB also adds to the collective hallelujah chorus.

While there is already an abundance of information, news, and opinions on EPUB 3, this post aims to highlight what features and functionality are most important for publishers to understand:

• Improved accessibility support---It's a big deal that DAISY is converging completely with EPUB 3. This will promote rapid take-up of the standard in education and government segments. 
• MathML support---this alone garnered hoots and hollers from RSuite's tech team. No longer must STM publishers sketch out equations as art.
• Embedded fonts---the look and feel of your PDF is maintained because publishers can deliver fonts along with the epub file.
• Improved SVG support---vector graphics mean images scale with your pages and pages are "lighter" thus loading faster.
• New and improved metadata---who doesn't love publication metadata that can include specific handling and distribution instructions!?
• Video and audio support---publishers can synchronize audio with text. This will also raise the bar for all of us, e.g. enabling switching seamlessly between listening in the car and reading at home!
• Javascript---scripting offers chances for interactivity, think forms, etc.
• Layout---multiple columns, hello! Ladders and widows and orphans, goodbye!

We'd love to add your opinions on new functionality to the list. Leave a comment and I'll continue to add on to the bullets.

Last week Amazon announced that epub format will finally be accepted for the Kindle.

This week at Book Expo America, Amazon announced that Laurence Kirshbaum, former TimeWarner c.e.o.-turned-agent, would be heading up Amazon's publishing operation in New York.

If publishers only suspected it before, this appears to be a strong indication that Amazon is gearing up to become a frontlist publisher.

According to Bookseller.com:

"The news spread swiftly around the Javits Center even though the exhibition floor was not yet open, the first day of BEA being devoted to conference sessions. What people on the publishing side are feeling—(off the record for the most part)—is worried. Publishers, already feeling squeezed, have been feeling even more so since Monday morning.

[Link to full story on Bookseller]

What's this mean for your publishing organization?

A Book Publisher's Guide to
Single-Source, Multi-Channel Output

A webinar from Really Strategies, Inc. [click here to register]

When: May 18, 2011 | 10:00 to 11:00 pm EDT

Snapshot: According to industry analysts Frost & Sullivan, 2011 is “The Year of the Tablet.”  For book publishers, this means that delivering content to devices like the iPad and Kindle is not an option…it's imperative.  Book publishers are recognizing that better content management will accelerate revenue and profit growth. Technology like XML and content management software are the enablers that produce ebooks.

In this free webinar, Dan Dube,  EVP of Cloud Solutions at Really Strategies, Inc. will present a case study that illustrates how publishers are producing and publishing to traditional and digital media from the same source content with the (literal!) push of a button.

Really Strategies is pleased to add The American Institute of Physics to its growing list of STM and journal publishers who are using RSuite to manage content.

"The American Institute of Physics selected RSuite to manage and store its vast amount of content, including metadata, full-text XML, PDFs, images, and multimedia assets,” stated Evan Owens, AIP’s Chief Information Officer, Publishing. “We see RSuite as a key technology that will allow us to implement industrial strength content management, including version control and automated content distribution, to best support our digital publishing program."

Click here to read the official press release.

According to the Association of American Publishers (AAP) ebooks ranked as #1 format among all trade categories for the month of February. The stats track monthly and year-to-date publishers’ net sales revenue in all categories of commercial, education, professional and scholarly books and journals.

A couple potent highlights from the AAP report:

• February 2011, e-Books ranked as the #1 format (Adult Hardcover, Adult Paperback, Adult Mass Market, Children’s/Young Adult Hardcover, Children’s/Young Adult Paperback).
• January/February 2011 compared with January/February 2010---e-Books grew 169.4% to $164.1M

[Read more here]

If you're not generating ebooks, start. If you are generating ebooks, take a look at your back list and bring it forward.

Have any interesting metrics that you can share?

Digital Publishing: Everybody Wins | A free webinar serires for publishers

When: April 13, 2011 | 1:00 to 2:00 pm EDT

Snapshot: Learn from Anthony Allen, Director of Production at American Society for Training & Development, how ASTD embraced XML and are now reaping the benefits of custom content packaging, automated transformations to EPUB, taxonomical content discovery, and cool apps. ASTD is a membership organization and also a niche market publisher; to better serve its members and streamline the publishing process, ASTD looked to XML.

In this free webinar from DCL and RSuite, you'll learn how to calculate return on investment (ROI) on your XML projects, how to reduce the cost of metadata tagging, and see “ASTD Streams,” ASTD’s newest semantic content application for personalized content delivery.

Register here!

Really Strategies just returned from Publishing Business Conference and Expo in New York City where thousands of publishing professionals came together for 2 days of education and networking. While our cheerful staff pictured here had various  conversations with publishers, the recurring theme was definitely ebooks.

• How do I generate ebooks for my back list?
• How do I create ebooks and publish along with my print version?
• How do I publish to multiple languages?

Lightbulb moment for me was hearing so many publishers still ask, "what is XML?". Clearly the fact that I've been embedded in the technology aspects of publishing solutions for the past 15 years has made me overlook the fact that XML is still a mystery for many publishing folks. It's understandable. The great thing about RSuite Cloud, a cloud-based production system, means that XML can remain in the background. At the end of the day, publishers need to publish their work...output formats, file formats, technologies...these can stay in the background, allowing publishers to stay focused on the content.

I get in my car and drive to work everyday, but I certainly don't understand the details of my car's engine.

Learn how RSuite Cloud is helping publishers to publish to ebooks, print, and web in an automated way that improves productivity while reducing cost. Click here to recieve your free white paper.