Diesel eBook Store and Macmillan Form a Direct Partnership to Sell eBooks

Press Release: "The Diesel eBook Store announced that it has entered into a direct partnership with Macmillan – a global publisher – that will permit the retailer to sell the publisher’s titles directly to the public through its web-based bookstore. Up to this point, Diesel eBooks used a variety of third-party eBook distributors for encryption and fulfillment. ... "

Dynamic Books, College Open Textbooks in Pact to Offer Affordable Textbooks

Publishers Weekly:

Dynamic Books, a publishing platform and line of customizable digital textbooks from Macmillan, announced an agreement with College Open Textbooks to identify quality public domain or open licensed textbooks that can be integrated into the Dynamic Books platform. College Open Textbooks has identified 27 open textbooks on a variety of academic subjects that will be made available through Dynamic Books beginning in January 2011 for a fee of $20 per student per term.

College Open Textbooks is a nonprofit coalition of 15 institutions formed to help reduce the cost of textbooks by finding and promoting the use of public domain, peer reviewed textbooks. COT identifies and promotes the use of these texts (either found in the public domain or licensed under a open Creative Commons copyright) to more than 2000 community colleges around the country. ...

Macmillan Dictionaries/DW Education Launch iPhone/iPad Apps

mediabistro.com: eBookNewser: "Macmillan Dictionaries has teamed up with software company DW Education to launch a suite of iPhone and iPad apps based on their dictionaries. The apps are interactive and users can create personalized word lists. Users can also distinguish between British and American English. The Macmillan website explains: 'These tools will give you immediate access to definitions, phonetics, pronunciation and synonyms, plus the unique Macmillan English Dictionary red-star system indicating frequency of word usage for the most common words in English. In addition, the highly-interactive interface allows you to cross-search for the definitions of other words and to create your own wordlists.'"

John Sargent, Macmillan CEO, Joins the Random House Rant Against Wylie/Amazon

John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, has joined the powers-that-be at Random House in being apoplectic about the Wylie/Amazon deal. You can tell these guys feel quite powerless - rather like Lear raging against the elements. But they are not powerless. They could stop much of what they hate simply by giving authors the 50% royalty they deserve for eBooks, including digital editions of backlist titles. By not doing so, they have invited the current situation.