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NEWS FEATURES
With the Google Print initiative on one side and the familiar comfort of traditional publishing models on the other, STM publisher Springer has announced plans to launch an aggressive new ebook initiative this summer. Anchored by its online publishing service, SpringerLink, Springer will add ebooks to the database of electronic journal content the company has offered for nearly ten years, and may just breathe new life into the ebook market.
Can’t wait for the kettle to boil? Frantically pushing elevator buttons in a futile attempt to make it come a bit faster? Well, Amazon’s Upgrade was made for you. In May, Amazon announced Upgrade, which gives users immediate online access to the entire text of a purchased book at a fee of an additional 10%–20% above a book’s list price. It also enables customers to search, annotate, bookmark, and print individual pages, leveraging digital functionality to enhance the book buyer’s experience. Amazon Upgrade is built on the same technology as its “Search Inside the Book” program launched three years ago.
Look closely at your cell phone. Watch out! It might be looking right back at you, sending information about your location to a map, where you will join other people in your town as dynamic parts of a real-time geophysical landscape. Cell phones like these are drawing the map of the future, according to the research team behind the SENSEable City Lab.
While Government regulation of communication may seem like a crystal-clear area of the law, the internet has kicked up a whole lot of static. The demand for anytime, anywhere internet access has gone sky-high. In June, the FCC auctioned off frequencies for in-flight wireless internet access on all domestic flights.
Copyright is not user-friendly. In fact, copyright issues are so complex it is hardly friendly to publishers or lawyers either. The complexity of copyright presents such a high hurdle that most users don’t even try to decipher its vagaries and just hit the Send button and hope for the best. Even those who personally want to adhere to copyright or whose organizations mandate it often find the process of clearing rights so daunting that it hardly seems worth it, thus inhibiting their ability to share valuable resources. In an effor to clarify the process, CCC has introduced Rightsphere, which provides “an instant, unambiguous answer to the user’s question, ‘What am I allowed to do with this content?’”
FEATURED STORIES
Whether by acquisition, merger, or the expanding global marketplace, more and more companies find themselves handling content in multiple languages. Managing multilingual content adds (at least) a layer of complexity to the overall content management process. Fortunately, there are systems available that involve both CMS vendors and translation service providers to bring the process under control.
Content creators and users alike leverage tracking tools to help determine how content is being used. Accurate tracking allows content to be delivered in more meaningful contexts for users and advertisers, and can make a significant impact on the bottom line.
Though the term portal remains a broadly misused word, enterprise IT leaders consistently rank portal technology near the top of their investment plans. So it’s no surprise that open source portal projects are trying to claim their share of the buzz.
COLUMNS
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FACES OF ECONTENT
“It’s about your investment in your home and what upgrades you can make to it.”
PRODUCT REVIEWS
Since its user interfaces closely resemble classic Microsoft Office products, using StarOffice 8 is highly intuitive for most users. StarOffice’s price makes it a very tempting alternative to MS Office and StarOffice’s strategic benefits of open source and rich use of XML make it an even more compelling choice.
CASE STUDIES
SealedMedia helps the German Sports University Cologne develop digital coursework by enabling it to easily digitally collaborate while protecting its valuable assets in the process.
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