Random House, Inc. is allowing unrestricted access to all of its ebooks held in libraries, and the publisher will continue to do so, but with a price increase. The ebook prices Random House charges to library wholesalers are scheduled to increase effective March 1.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) launched a YouTube channel that features content from its collection of video programming. The channel will showcase "Off Duty," a daily lifestyle show debuting Feb. 1 that is based on the section of the same name from WSJ Weekend.

MusicRevolution, LLC expanded its collection of royalty-free music that is freely available via MP3 download at its website, www.musicrevolution.com. MusicRevolution is an online marketplace for production music that offers more than 16,000 tracks.

Cambridge University Press added six more academic presses to its University Publishing Online (UPO) platform. Content from these publishers will roll out in the coming months, bringing UPO's offering to more than 14,000 titles from a total of ten global presses.

The National Geographic Society has partnered with Gale, part of Cengage Learning, to create an online archive of more than 100 years of National Geographic magazine. The collection will be available to libraries this spring and is expected to contain more than 100,000 pages.

These days, getting lots of information is easy; it's using that information productively that's the tricky part. The task is even more difficult when that information comes not from a single information resource, but from several. But for users of Elsevier's various scientific resources, that task just got a little easier thanks to the August 30 release of a unified research platform called SciVerse.

Content might still be king at global health and science publisher Elsevier, but the old definitions of content can't keep pace with the increasingly fast and faceted data needs of core audiences such as researchers, librarians, universities, and corporations. Taking some inspiration from consumer-driven sites such as Apple.com, Netflix.com, and nytimes.com, Elsevier is putting its content API up for grabs and opening an app marketplace.

While certain segments of the economy are rebounding, the content industry has continued to struggle to get back on its feet. With that in mind, many of the top executives from companies across the content spectrum gathered on April 18-20 at the 11th annual Buying & Selling eContent conference in Arizona to discuss Reigniting the Content Economy.

When a 15-year-old kid doesn't know or care what people think about him, he tends to get a boost in punk-rock credibility. When a company doesn't know or care what people think about it, it tends to go out of business. Brand and reputation management is obviously important to a company, and Amherst, Mass.-based Lexalytics is trying to bring the kind of analytical advantages enjoyed by large corporations to smaller companies with Lexascope, the company's latest web-based API for the masses released Tuesday, March 23.

Nothing is free ... usually. But from March 15 to April 15, Alacra is offering free, unlimited access to its updated PulsePro, a configurable desktop and mobile solution that detects key business events from 3,000 hand-curated news feeds and blogs, extracting business intelligence in near-real time and delivering it to users.

As recently as the last decade, content marketing - that is, content not as the product itself but as the basis for engaging a target audience and helping compel that audience to purchase a company's product - was reduced to a fairly short list of flavors. Today, however, companies have an opportunity to engage customers directly with endlessly unfolding content communication opportunities.

In September, The Washington Post's senior editor Milton Coleman published guidelines to the paper's staff members about their activities on the internet-while on and off the job. His email to staff said, in part: "Social networks ... can be valuable tools in gathering and disseminating news and information. They also create some potential hazards we need to recognize. When using social networking tools for reporting or for our personal lives, we must remember that Washington Post journalists are always Washington Post journalists." It was the "or for our personal lives" part that created a firestorm for The Washington Post. But its concern about what its staff members-particularly reporters-are saying online is understandable.

While tempting, it would be a mistake to write off the dire state of the news business as simply a reflection of the general decline in print readership since the rise of the internet or as just another casualty of the recession. The problems run deeper. And to make things worse, the newspaper industry finds itself in this sorry state just as a new generation enters the work force-one with less connection to traditional news media than ever before.

As we enter 2009, it's clear to any reputable scientist that our planet is in peril. Individuals and institutions alike—have begun to look at ways to reduce our impact on the planet. The publishing industry is no different, and there are a number of ways that it is working to minimize its negative impact.

Take a closer look at ProQuest, one of the 12 companies that inspired the most banter among the EContent 100 judges during the voting process.

One of the curious things about romantic breakups is the way that former lovers suddenly turn on one another and seem blind to their former partner's good qualities. Something like that is happening in this much-hyped move off of the digital desktop and onto "consumer devices."

Rupert Murdoch threw his annual anti-Google hissy fit this past April, when he screamed to anyone who would listen that Google is stealing his content. As usual, it was timed to coincide with the annual meeting of the American Society of News Editors (ASNE). Excuse me while I yawn.

I never did believe that information wanted to be free ... just respected for more than its good looks. Apparently, no one else got the memo. Econtent, in and of itself, often isn't seen as particularly valuable. We can find the same material elsewhere on the web if we look hard enough, or we can find something else that we perceive as good enough. For information-and access to it-to be priced profitably, the value of the content must be readily apparent.

You can't read a story or watch a broadcast report about the news business without hearing dire predictions of how bad things are. Yet while so many people are focused on the bad news, both Politico.com and TMZ.com, in just a very short time, have built major media companies. So what makes these two upstarts so successful while stalwarts lay off staff and struggle to say in the black?

As we move into fall, the year-long revival of the paid content argument shows no sign of easing.