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?

RSuite is exhibiting at booth #34 from June 1^st through the 3^rd at The Society for Scholarly Publishing (#SSP)!

Schedule your time with us today and see how publishers have done the following things with RSuite:

• reduced book production time-to-market by 8 weeks
• automated aggregation and distribution of journal articles to licensing clients
• Increased website traffic by more than 35%
• and much more

Tweet about us at #SSP using the #RSuite hashtag.

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.

Book Expo America is coming up in just a few weeks and we’re so excited to be part of it. RSuite Cloud will be representing Really Strategies, Inc.

At Book Expo America, Book publishers can see RSuite Cloud and understand how it is helping some of the leading publishers:

• Increase revenues with faster time-to-market
• Produce pages in minutes not weeks
• Simultaneously output to print, web, ipad, and more
• Automatically Convert Word files to XML
• Translate and publish to more than 200 languages

People from all  around the world within the publishing industry will be there and we want to see you between May 24^th and May 26^th. We’ll be in the IDPF Digital Zone at Kiosk #2309. Schedule your time with us today!

Tweet about us at #BookExpo using the #RSuiteCloud hashtag.

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.

Tighten up your ereaders..the spammers are coming. Publishing Trends details how ebooks are the latest frontier for spammers. I recently noticed some garbage coming through on the Kindle store and wondered what this is all about.

Products like Autopilot Kindle Cash promote a tool that generates "passive income" and "totally hands free cash." Because many ebook vendors don't check copyright on books that are submitted, people are stealing content from the web and using tools like Autopilot Kindle Cash to quickly create ebooks about the same topic from multiple angles (targeting different keyword variants), and publishing them. Putting the books on Amazon.com also boosts the spammers ranking in search results.

Read the full post on "The Kindle Swindle" at Publishing Trends here.

Address the top 3 digital publishing challenges with XML. Most content producers no longer rely on a single channel for content distribution. To efficiently and competitively expand digital offerings, publishers are looking to re-use existing content to create new products. Whether creating new content “mash-ups” out of existing content repositories or ensuring consistency between publications that share information, content re-use is a powerful capability allowing content to achieve its maximum value. XML provides an anchor for coping with a diverse and expanding number of channels.

Download our latest white paper, "Make XML a Solution Instead of a Challenge."