Monthly Archives: November 2008

Macmillan & ebooks

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Eoin Purcell

Images thanks to Flickr user pt and cc.

Images thanks to Flickr user pt and creative commons.

Palgrave Connect
Bookbrunch (which is fast becoming my book news source of choice, the fee structure cannot be far away!) offers an interesting story on Palgrave Mamillan’s launch of an ebook platform:

Palgrave Macmillan is to launch its own ebook platform, Palgrave Connect, in January 2009. More than 4,000 ebooks will be available in collections organised by year of publication and by discipline, with 2009 and backlist collections available to purchase on a one-time fee, perpetual access basis

Macmillan seems to understand digital. It’s a brave statement and one I may yet regret, but I think they have learned an enormous amount about how digital can work and how valuable communities are from their protected (from the perils of the TRADE market I stress) efforts at Nature. It seems to me too that they are the furthest along the road to offering any real competition to Google and its access platform.

I’m interested to see how this floats come January and launch. I’ll keep you posted!
Eoin

RTÉ’s US Election Coverage

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When theory becomes reality
One thing the internet does is allow organisations provide almost infinite options for their viewers/readers or listeners. You don’t see it too much in practice though.

That’s why I like RTÉ’s US election coverage (*) right now. They have revamped the site so it looks different from the news page: have look here and they have

More importantly they are pulling in material from around the web, provided by others that adds value for their users. The Political Compass, The NPR Feed, The Electoral College Explained and a really nice Electoral College Map and I’ve just spotted they have an electoral vote counter on the main page too!

By far the best element of the site though is the extra content and access to the correspondents and reporters who are in the US. There is a Charlie Bird blog, a Robert Shortt blog that includes some vlogs and a Mark Little blog. That is exactly what a media organisation should be using the web to do, to centralise their content and to pull in the best of the rest.

Very impressed,
Eoin

(*) Some people I know [and like] work at rté.ie so I might be biased. I don’t think so, but I think it’s worth saying.