Simon & Schuster and Folger Shakespeare Library have teamed up with Luminary Digital Media to create interactive app adaptations of Shakespeare texts for use in schools. Coming this November, the joint effort will release app versions of Hamlet, Othello, Macbeth, Romeo & Juliet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream. They will continue to release plays thereafter until the entire collection is available.

The app versions will include audio recordings, videos and photos, which are designed to help teach the texts. This includes audio performances produced at the Folger Theatre, as well as expert commentary from Shakespeare scholars. The apps will also have social networking reading tools on a private network so that teachers and students can take digital notes and share them with each other within the networked text. Read more

Travel publisher Lonely Planet has partnered with digital publishing company Inkling to create a new series of enhanced eBooks for iOS devices called Best Trips.

The eBook editions of the Best Trips series are interactive and dynamic. Like their print counterparts, they offer travelers suggestions for people who want to explore a region by car. They include recommendations on hotels and restaurants, as well as for fun activities. The eBook editions allow users to click to call or click to book online, and they feature interactive maps, and a weather forecasting tool. Each eBook has 30 trips that range from two days to two weeks.

The collection includes travel guides to California, Italy, New England, Ireland and France, among others. They are currently available for $14.99 through Inkling or as individual apps in Apple’s App Store.

Doug Stambaugh has been named Vice President of global eBook market development and strategy at Simon & Schuster, a newly created position that has been established to support the publisher’s growing global eBook business.

OverDrive has launched a pilot program that will allow millions of library patrons to check out the same eBook all at once during a two-week period. The Big Library Read project will let members of more than 7,500 libraries globally simultaneously accessThe Four Corners of the Sky by Michael Malone.

OverDrive is working the book’s publisher Sourcebooks on the initiative. Library patrons at participating libraries will need to have a library card to check out the book.

Sari Feldman, executive director of the Cuyahoga County Public Library in Ohio expressed her enthusiasm in a statement: “It is an exciting opportunity to engage readers all over the world in a global book discussion and highlight the critical role libraries play in the discovery process. It has long been accepted as conventional wisdom that libraries help drive the success of authors. Through projects like this, we can affirm that wisdom with hard data and reinforce what we already know – that libraries play a key role in marketing books and authors.”

OR Books has a new eBook available called Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet and appropriately, the publisher is selling the eBook through a name-your-price model.

The book explores the history of the fight against SOPA, the Stop Online Piracy Act. It includes essays by: Aaron Swartz, Larry Lessig, Zoe Lofgren, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Nicole Powers, Tiffiny Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, and Cory Doctorow.

The publisher suggests that customers pay $10 for the download, but there is a drop down option to pay other amounts including: nothing, $2, $5, $25, $50 or $100.

When OR Books put out Julian Assange’s book  Cypherpunks: Freedom and the Future of the Internet back in December, they skipped Amazon and released it through eKiosk, a site that creators sell eBooks and music outside of major online marketplaces, through a network of smaller online shops.

Do you like reading movie scripts? Check out Script Lit, a new series of unproduced screenplays that have been adapted as eBook novellas.

Here is more from the site: “There are many wonderful scripts written that are never produced and therefore aren’t shown to the world. This process of adapting those ‘lost gems’ into eBook novellas gives the writer a chance to be heard and loved by a wide audience. We are SL eBooks and are proud to present Script Lit, the new literary genre.”

The debut title from the collection is Mom of the Year by Denise Pischinger and is available through various eBook stores for $2.99. The second title from the collection, a horror/thriller title called Ambrose Fountain by Brian Sieve will publish next month.

The US Department of Justice  has filed a new document in the Apple eBook antitrust lawsuit. The filing includes an email sent from Apple’s founder Steve Jobs to Rupert Murdoch, head of News Corporation, the owner of HarperCollins, one of the publishers named in the original complaint.

The Verge has the story: “In the email, Jobs told Murdoch he could either continue to have Amazon price ebooks at $9.99, or ‘throw in with Apple and see if we can all make a go of this to create a real mainstream ebooks market at $12.99 and $14.99.’”

While all of the five publishers in the eBook collusion have settled with the DOJ and agreed to terms that would prevent future collusion, Apple continues to fight the case.

Barnes & Noble’s Nook Media has updated its Nook for iOS app, bringing comic books to iPad and iPhone users. The update adds access to buy more than 8,000 comics and graphic novels from Nook. The app now features Nook’s Zoom View tool which lets readers automatically focus on individual panels in graphic novels and comics.

To promote Nook Comics on the Nook iOS app, Nook Media is giving away a free DC Comics 2013 Superman Sampler, which includes excerpts from Superman: Last Son of Krypton, Superman: ForTomorrow, Superman: Earth One, and Justice League Volume 1: Origin.

“With our free, updated Nook for iOS application, we’re delivering to customers with iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch a great optimized reading experience, now with access to NOOK Comics, one of the leading collections of digital comics and graphic novels available,” stated Jamie Iannone, president of digital products at NOOK Media.

Nook has been in the news recently as speculation of a Microsoft buyout has been reported and then called a rumor.

EBook sales accounted for 12.4% of revenue for Hachette Livre’s publishing division in the first quarter of 2013, up from 9.5% in Q1 2012.

U.S. and UK eBook sales are driving this growth. EBook sales in the U.S. represent 34% of the publisher’s trade book sales. This is up from when 30% last year. In the UK eBook sales account for 31% of Adult trade net sales, up from 24% during the same period last year.

Here is more from the press release:

Hachette Livre delivered net sales of €419M, up 7.9% over first quarter 2012, driven by ‘strong business growth’ in General Literature in France and the United States, according to Lagardère’s press release, and strong ebook sales in the U.S. and United Kingdom. In France, net sales were up significantly (General Literature up 40%) mainly due to the release of the last two installments of EL James’ Fifty Shades trilogy. In the UK and Commonwealth, sales were down slightly (-0.2%), with strong Literature sales in the UK offsetting a challenging bookseller retail environment in Australia and New Zealand.

RosettaBooks has partnered with the AARP to publish a series of original eBooks from the nonprofit organization. RosettaBooks will also help the AARP with various distribution.

Together they will publish books on a variety of subjects including: caregiving, brain health, and driver safety. The first titles in the new line published by RosettaBooks are slated to be released this year.

“Digital publishing offers a wealth of opportunities to speak to the wide interests of the vibrant 50+ community. We’re looking forward to addressing their aspirations, entertainment and recreational concepts, and topical issues with timely, insightful information in eBooks created hand-in-hand with RosettaBooks,” explained Jodi Lipson, director of AARP’s Book Division in a statement.