Safari Books Online -- a joint venture from O'Reilly Media, Inc., and Pearson Education, Inc. -- has acquired Threepress Consulting, Inc., makers of the Ibis Reader online EPUB reading system. Financial terms of the acquisition, effective Jan. 1, were not disclosed.

News aggregator Digg is using Facebook's new Open Graph to instantly share the stories its users are reading in Digg over Facebook. Stories being read through Digg will appear on news feeds and as Timeline posts. Digg also launched a Newsbar that appears at the top of Digg pages reached through Facebook.

Amazon.com, Inc. and Marshall Cavendish, an educational and consumer book publishers and classroom digital solutions providers, announced that Amazon has signed a deal to acquire over 450 titles of its US Children's trade books business, Marshall Cavendish Children's Books (MCCB).

About.com announced it would provide content from its Twitter feed, homepage, and select content categories over Flipboard, the social magazine app designed specifically for iPad. Flipboard aggregates content from social networks and other publishers. The magazine-style interface will deliver hundreds of lifestyle articles to readers.

Publishing Technology Plc. has partnered with the China National Publications Import and Export Corporation (CNPIEC) to bring the first digital publishing platform to supply content to Chinese libraries. The new site is expected to launch in China in 2012.

Occupy Wall Street protestors have been drawing the media's attention to the influence of corporations on the America political system for months. With primary season now in full-swing it seems that the web is getting in on the action. This week has seen announcements from LegiNation as well as MapLight, both of which aim to keep voters informed about what their elected representatives are up to and who is influencing them.

On Wednesday morning, HBO co-president Eric Kessler told a group of industry wonks that despite the success of digital offerings like HBO GO, it plans to remain true to its cable roots.

Who is the mobile magazine reader? Texterity -- a Southborough, MA-based company that provides digital and mobile publishing solutions -- sought to answer that question in its annual readership survey. The 2011 Mobile App Readership Survey (with results certified by BPA Worldwide) was designed to specifically study magazine app users while on their mobile devices.

Before 2007, the word "kindle" simply meant to light on fire. Since Amazon's release of its Kindle e-reader in November of that year, the product has ignited the emedia market. A new report from InfoTrends, "Reading E-Media: The End User Perspective," addresses the growing markets of e-readers and multipurpose devices such as iPads by questioning consumers about their user experiences with these devices.

It's easy to stop thinking about the changing content landscape over the summer. The days are long and hot, and you're more worried about avoiding the heat than you are about the future of media. However, at least two prominent figures still had media on their minds and were making (sometimes outlandish) predictions.

In publishing, small is the new big. An increasing number of publishers are releasing e-singles -- short works published digitally on a variety of platforms -- to generate ancillary revenue, build brand equity, and reach new audiences. Among those joining the e-singles market are Hearst, Rodale, Princeton University Press, and as recently as last week, Penguin.

On the surface, it might seem that meeting the needs of a niche audience provides very few opportunities for creativity. It stands to reason that the content demands of a niche audience are limited, because audience members only need content and services related to a specific subject matter or industry and nothing more. That assumption couldn't be further from the truth.

Consider the value if you could learn about the world around you based on where you are using the GPS capability in your smartphone. Imagine for a minute holding up your phone and having relevant content delivered to you based on your physical location at any given moment. There are complex and useful applications of the location dynamic beyond simply communicating "I'm here."

It is the very breadth, depth, and possibility inherent in semantic technology that can prevent content companies from experimenting with a technology that may be one of the most useful commercial innovations of the past decade. The murkiness of the word itself—not to mention the standards, acronyms, and jargon that can dominate the discussion of semantics—only adds to the confusion.

With the proliferation of search-oriented online content providers such as AOL, Yahoo!, Demand Media, and About.com, internet users are increasingly likely to find that most of the general searches they do return results from these SEO-oriented content creators and so-called "content farms". Whether this is a good or a bad thing from the user perspective remains to be seen—and opinions vary. But from general tactics, to long tail search and universal search strategies, SEO remains critical to web publishers.

There seems little doubt that the advent of tablets, the ultimate media consumption device, had a positive impact on the news business. But until the Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, in collaboration with The Economist Group, released a study in October, the exact impact was mere speculation.

The holiday season has come and just like every other year, publishing sales reports are coming in and people are declaring that sales weren't good enough. The big news was of course ebooks and e-readers. Amazon reported Kindle sales of...well, no, Amazon won't report actual numbers-let's face it, they don't have to- but they did say that consumers were buying over one million Kindles per week in December and three Kindle models dominated their top sellers' list for the better part of December.

I'm a digitally-savvy consumer. Increasingly, so are my parents, most of my friends, and almost all of my younger relatives, peers, and co-workers. Yet, despite our differences in age, education, and technology know-how, we all share a common trait. We're continuously victimized by less-than-optimal digital experiences -- especially when it comes to ebooks.

If there is one thing that continues to perplex the publishing industry, it's ebook pricing. How do you structure your pricing in a way that is fair to both the reader and the author and still make enough money to continue publishing operations? Many larger publishers want to keep the ebook price structure high, especially at the beginning, to keep from cannibalizing more profitable hardcover sales.

Whereas my personal Los Angeles community of technological early adopters tends to be driven to buy the coolest, most cutting-edge gadgets, we often forget (and I'm the most guilty here) that a huge chunk of the population is driven more by a good value. It could be a function of generation, socioeconomic status, the overall economy, or simply priorities, but while I expected to immediately put digital deals in place with my new film library, I've been forced to recognize that I must first focus on selling this audience entertainment in the way that it wants it right now. That just happens to be on the uber-traditional DVD.