Time Warner is reportedly looking to sell off most of its magazines to Meredith, the publisher of titles like Better Homes and Gardens and Ladies’ Home Journal. Read more »
Users of Amazon Prime Instant Video will be able to stream more shows from CBS and Showtime, including past seasons of America’s Next Top Model, Everybody Loves Raymond and The L Word. Read more »
Plympton, the serial fiction startup launched last year by former New York Times reporter Jennifer 8 Lee, is acquiring DailyLit, a site that delivers books in installments by email and RSS. Read more »
Netflix is partnering with DreamWorks to release its first original children’s show this December. Netflix will also add new DreamWorks films to its streaming lineup. Read more »
Starting Tuesday, Inkling is making its free digital publishing platform, Habitat, available to everyone. The company is also introducing an enterprise product, with publishers including Pearson and Wolters-Kluwer as launch clients. Read more »
Macmillan is paying $20 million to settle the class action and states’ lawsuits remaining against it. Read more »
New episodes of CBS’s Under the Dome will be available for viewing on Prime Instant Video four days after they’re first broadcast on CBS. It’s the first time that Amazon has offered streaming access to an in-season show. Read more »
Google is partnering with the U.K. satellite-TV box Freesat to offer an HTML5 YouTube channel. Freesat, which is backed by the BBC and ITV, is a set-top satellite TV box that offers 180 channels and doesn’t require a monthly subscriptin. Read more »
Social magazine Flipboard added eight new employees this week, including three former Hulu executives, bringing the company’s total head count to 77. Read more »
Macmillan, the last remaining publisher holdout in the Department of Justice’s ebook pricing antitrust lawsuit against five publishers and Apple, has decided to settle about ten months after the lawsuit was originally filed. Now Apple is the only remaining party fighting the DOJ lawsuit. Read more »
The New York Times is considering some kind of “entry-level” product aimed at a younger audience. What would this product look like and what should it cost? As a (late) twenty-something, I felt qualified to speculate. Read more »
Nearly 65 percent of U.S. magazines now have a digital replica edition, but those editions make up just under three percent of overall circulation. For some individual titles, though, digital growth was a lot more impressive. Read more »
Berlin-based e-reading startup Readmill launched an iPhone version of its e-reading platform Wednesday. Users’ ebooks will now sync between their iPhones and iPads. Read more »
Amazon has won a patent to create a virtual marketplace where users could resell digital content like apps, songs and ebooks. But it’s unclear whether such a marketplace would be legal under current copyright law. Read more »
Amazon plans to roll out its own virtual currency, Amazon Coins, this spring. But this is no Bitcoin. Read more at GigaOM »
Apple has launched a new section of the iBookstore, “Breakout Books,” that highlights popular ebooks from self-published authors. Read more »
The long-delayed Bookish, a website backed by Hachette, Penguin and Simon & Schuster and designed to promote book discovery and sell books, launched Monday night and is designed to be a one-stop shop for readers looking for their next book. Read more »
The Metropolitan Museum of Art has launched a year-long web series, 82nd & Fifth. In 100 two-minute videos, which will be posted two at a time every Wednesday through December 25, curators talk about “art that changed the way they see the world.” Read more »
Google has come to an agreement with the French publishers who wanted it to pay them for linking to their news content. Google agreed to create a €60 million “Digital Publishing Innovation Fund” and will also help the publishers with ad strategy. Read more »
Amazon announced Friday that by the end of 2013, Prime Instant Video will be the only paid streaming service to offer episodes of Downton Abbey. Hulu Plus and Netflix will lose access. Read more »
Researchers are creating software that analyzes 22 years of New York Times archives, Wikipedia and about 90 other web resources to predict future disease outbreaks, riots and deaths — and hopefully prevent them. Read more at GigaOM »
The Consumer Electronics Association is ditching CBS’s CNET as its CES partner. CEA CEO Gary Shapiro said he’s “shocked” that CBS “would bar all its reporters from favorably describing classes of technology the network does not like.” Read more »
Amazon Studios has chosen its first five pilots for children’s shows, including offerings from the creators of Blue’s Clues and Rugrats. User feedback will help determine whether the shows go into production. Read more »
As the ebook transition moves forward, Amazon should worry that Kindle is not going to be the device leading the revolution. Read more »
Consumer review service Angie’s List is integrating Square technology into its iPhone app, allowing merchants like house cleaners, plumbers and painters to accept credit card payments in the field. Read more at GigaOM »
Amazon announced fourth-quarter and full year 2012 earnings report roughly in line with investor expectations Tuesday afternoon. Speaking of ebooks, CEO Jeff Bezos said, “We’re now seeing the transition we’ve been expecting.” Read more at GigaOM »
YouTube plans to launch paid subscriptions as early as this spring, according to a report in AdAge, and is asking media companies with large YouTube followings to submit ideas for paid channels that would cost a couple of dollars a month. Read more »
Barnes & Noble plans to close about 20 retail stores a year over the next ten years — meaning it would have 450 to 500 stores in the next decade, down from 689 stores today. Read more »
My Damn Channel is looking for a few hundred original comedy series to launch in 2013. The company has hired Eric Mortensen, formerly at Blip, as its director of programming and acquisitions, a new role. Read more »
About two years after ABC pulled them off the air, “One Life to Live” and “All My Children” are coming back to life online. New weekday episodes will be available on Hulu and iTunes this spring. Read more »
Magazine publishers will have to adopt more nuanced digital pricing strategies as tablets take off. They can look to book publishers — who are a lot further along in the digital revolution — for some help. Read more »
Macmillan is making some ebooks available to libraries for the first time. But the company’s two-year pilot program is limited: It only includes 1,200 older titles in the crime and mystery genres. Read more »
In a move that could assist vision-impaired users (and potentially aid smartphone development), Amazon has acquired text-to-speech and voice recognition company IVONA Software for an undisclosed sum. Read more at GigaOM »
“We’ve essentially taken a children’s publishing imprint, put it on the web and turned it into social software,” Mark Ury, the founder of Toronto-based storytelling site Storybird, says. Launched in 2010, the site now has over two million members. Read more »
In an effort to compete against Toronto-based Kobo, Amazon announced Wednesday that it is releasing the Kindle Paperwhite in Canada for the first time and will also sell the basic Kindle there. Amazon launched a Canadian Kindle store in December. Read more »
U.K. digital satellite TV service Sky has launched Sky Go Extra, which lets customers download shows like Girls and Game of Thrones and movies to mobile devices for offline viewing. Read more »
Toronto-based ebook company Kobo is rapidly expanding abroad. On Wednesday the company announced that it has hired Jean-Mark Dupuis, a former sales director at Apple, as managing director for Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Read more »
Yahoo has acquired content pinning and curation site Snip.it. The site lets users “snip,” save and share articles or excerpts from around the web in a graphical interface and fits with Yahoo’s goal of acquiring small companies and focusing on content. Read more »
Amazon is expanding its children’s publishing division with two new imprints. “Two Lions” will publish picture books, chapter books and middle-grade fiction, while “Skyscape” is aimed at teens. The imprints’ first titles will be published in spring 2013. Read more »
The Financial Times is hoping that at least 35 staff members will accept buyouts as it attempts to prepare for a digital-first future. That future includes hiring 10 new digital employees and being choosier about stories, editor Lionel Barber wrote Monday in an email to employees. Read more »
