Open Road Integrated Media has teamed up with app maker hoopla digital to add its e-book catalog to hoopla’s app.
Titles including: The Color Purple; Up the Down Staircase; Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee; M.C. Higgins the Great and The Hero and the Crown will all be available through Hoopla’s content library.
Hoopla digital works with North American public libraries to distribute e-books and interactive content to patrons through computers and mobile devices. Their catalog includes more than 440,000 movies, TV shows, albums, e-books, audiobooks and comics.
E-book company Open Road is restructuring its management as it shifts its business focus from just e-books to all digital content.
The company will now focus in two areas: publishing and content. To support the evolution the company has promoted two employees and hired two new employees.
Rachel Chou, a founding member of Open Road and chief market and product officer, has been promoted to general manager/chief content officer. Tina Pohlman has been promoted to executive vice president/publisher. Jeff Driskill has joined the firm as chief financial officer. Matt Shatz joins as senior vice president of sales and business development.
Digital publisher Open Road Integrated Media has partnered with women’s blog network BlogHer to publish an eBook anthology of works from the blog.
The content for BlogHer Voices of the Year: 2012 will include contributions chosen by a committee of the blog’s readers. Readers have selected works from almost 1,700 submissions in various categories including: heart, humor, identity, op-ed, parenting, and visuals. BlogHer co-founder/CEO Lisa Stone said that the book has been long in the making. She stated: “We have long had a vision of bringing the great writing in our community together in a curated ebook format.” BlogHer and Open Road will co-publish six different collections over the next year, each based on a particular theme.
The partnership is part of Open Road’s Publishing Partners program, which includes eBooks from magazines such as Esquire, Cosmopolitan and Seventeen.
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Today we bring you another installment of Youth Media Movers and Shakers. We’ve culled through industry publications looking for the recent executive placements we think you should know about. If you have executive news that you want us to... Read the rest of this post
By Duncan Calow
It is only March, but 2012 has already seen a series of contract disputes over digital media and technology hit the headlines.
First, rock star Peter Frampton announced he had filed a lawsuit against his record label for half a million pounds worth of unpaid music royalties and other damages. Frampton claimed he was contracted with A&M Records to receive a 50% royalty for the use of “licensed” music but had not received payment on any digital sales.
Then there was news that book publisher HarperCollins had filed a lawsuit against digital publisher Open Road for copyright infringement in relation to e-versions of the children’s book, “Julie of the Wolves”. HarperCollins claims its author contract gave it the exclusive ability to publish the work in any format but Open Road claims to have been granted the e-book rights.
And even ‘new media’ companies have their problems too. PhoneDog.com, an interactive mobile news and review website, was reported to have sued a former employee for £217,000 after he converted a Twitter account, which it was claimed was originally set up on behalf of the employer, for his own use after leaving the company.
Each of the cases involve very different parties with very different facts and very different contracts.
The first is just one of many cases over how revenue in sales of digital music should be split between artists and labels, often with a focus on how physical distribution terms can apply to digital delivery. The second case raises, once again, the crucial question over how far fundamental expectations within a contract about how a work can be exploited can change as technology develops. The final dispute highlights the need for all businesses to keep employment contract and policies up to date to reflect the way in which social media and other technology is adopted in the workplace.
It remains to be seen how successful any of the claims will be as the full circumstances of these cases emerge over time or as the parties reach settlements.
What is clear, however, is that keeping contractual arrangements up-to-date with an ever evolving media and technology landscape continues to be a challenge. It is also a form of challenge that existed well before digital. Legal text books recount the disputes that arose as theatre plays were first filmed for cinema – or when cinema films were first shown on television and released on video.
The pace of change is of course faster now and the inherent nature of digital technology allows greater opportunities for re-use. Accordingly, it is commonly suggested that the best solution is to work with technology-neutral contracts that reflect a ‘converged’ digital media. Yet in practice there is often still a need to main sector specifics and capture particular technical details.
In fact, dealing with digital successfully in a contract is often a balancing act between maintaining familiar structures and form alongside sufficient further foresight and flexibility. Future developments may not always be predictable but contracts can still try to provide for that uncertainty.
Meanwhile, it’s a pretty s
Digital publisher Open Road is launching a new imprint, Iconic E-books, with Erica Jong's Fear of Flying and Alice Walker's The Color Purple to be among its first titles.
The Iconic E-Books titles will be those that have "universal name recognition whether as memoir, popular fiction, literary fiction, or non-fiction".
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What happens when 36 authors collaboratively write a novel in six days?
The Novel: Live co-founder Garth Stein explained the writing marathon’s fundraising success this week: “We set a goal of 60,000 words in six days … and were thrilled when we ended up with 72,000 words. But more importantly, we raised over $10,000 in donations for literacy.”
Besides the sales from the novel (due for release in spring 2011), funds were raised at an online auction. One New York woman paid $450 to include a specific character name in the novel, for example. These funds will help programs like Writers in the Schools, 826 Seattle, and the Richard Hugo House. People all over the world watched the writers work live through online video. Overall, the viewers spent more than 165,000 minutes on the site’s chat room.
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