Independent book publisher Author Solutions today announced a distribution deal with social publishing startup Scribd. Under the terms of said agreement, all new ASI titles published through the AuthorHouse, iUniverse, Trafford Publishing, and Xlibris will be made available for purchase through the Scribd website.
In addition, a portion of its backlist of more than 120,000 titles will be put up for sale on Scribd, although there was no indication of exactly how many books that represents.
In March 2009, Scribd had already scored partnerships with a number of major publishers, including Random House, Simon & Schuster, Workman Publishing Co., Berrett-Koehler, Thomas Nelson, and Manning Publications. And all that content is attracting a lot of users too, apparently.
In a statement, Author Solutions [...] Continue Reading...
As you may have noticed, TechCrunch was down for an extended period of time this afternoon. In case you haven’t read about why yet, it’s because WordPress.com suffered through some 110 minutes of downtime, as WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg has explained just now on the company’s blog.
TechCrunch is one of the millions of blogs hosted on WordPress.com (not to be confused with sites that run the WordPress software but are hosted elsewhere). All told, some 10.2 million blogs went down — wiping out some 5.5 million pageviews, WordPress estimates. This was their worst outage in 4 years.
So what happened?
Mullenweg says WordPress is still gathering details but their initial diagnosis is that “an unscheduled change to a core router by one of [...] Continue Reading...
It's the ultimate "why didn't I think of that?" concept, but kudos to Joby for doing more than just keeping a bar story to itself. Following in the footsteps of the magnified Gorillatorch, Joby decided to add a few magnets to the feet of its tried-and-true Gorillapod flexible tripod. The result? The Gorillapod Magnetic, of course! Reportedly, this little bugger supports digital cameras and camcorders weighing up to 11.5 ounces, and it should go on sale worldwide this April for an undisclosed amount. We know you've been dreaming of a way to snap group photos while inside those steel prison bars, and at long last, those dreams can be become reality. In related news, the company is also showing [...] Continue Reading...
Amazon is today adding BlackBerrys to its stable of Kindle-compatible devices and also taking the opportunity to remind us that it's working hard on Mac and iPad versions of its software. The app is a freebie download for Americans (sadly it's not international just yet) and should offer the same functionality as its PC and iPhone brethren -- namely automatic syncing via Whispersync and what Amazon hopes will be a seamless reading experience from one device to the next. There's also an in-app book store, as well as the ability to create bookmarks and view annotations from other portable Kindle readers. Go download it at the Amazon link if you care, or move right along if you don't.Kindle for [...] Continue Reading...