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BtoB (@btobmagazine) says paper use by the magazine, newspaper, book, and other publishing sectors will fall by 12% to 21% by 2015 compared with 2010 levels, according to a report released by RISI, which provides information to the paper industry.

The report, The Impact of Media Tablets on Publication Paper Markets, projects that tablet device sales will reach 195 million units by 2015 and contribute to the decline in paper usage.

“Significant demand impacts could come as soon as 2012,” says John Maine, RISI's VP-world graphic paper.

Reporter Anita Wadhwani says in The Tennessean (@tennessean), “In the past 12-18 months, the religious publishing category has seen its sales jump faster than those of almost every other category of books. The book publishing industry overall has remained relatively healthy during the recession, with a nearly 6% annual growth rate from 2008 to 2010, according to the Association of American Publishers.”

“It’s a great time to be a Christian publisher,” said Byron Williamson, a 20-plus-year veteran of the Nashville Christian publishing industry who has published best-sellers by Newt Gingrich and Max Lucado and launched Worthy Publishing (@WorthyPub) last year.

Independent Christian retail stores, although feeling some pressures from big chains such as Walmart selling religious products, remain a “pretty vibrant” outlet for sales, with 1,500 stores currently selling 30% of all Christian retail products, including music and books, said Greg Bays, senior vice president of sales and marketing for EMI CMG Distribution, a division of EMI Christian Group, a recording company that is now teaming up with Worthy Publishing to distribute books.

The recession may actually have benefited the religious publishing industry, publishers say.

Read this in full.

Do you agree with this rosy outlook? Comment below.

Tablet ownership is skewing beyond the market of young men, according to NielsenWire (@NielsenWire).

Back in Q3 2010, for example, 62% of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and only 10% were over the age of 55. By Q2 2011, only 46% of tablet owners were under the age of 34 and the percentage of those over 55 had increased to 19%.

Ereader ownership is changing too. Sixty-one percent of all eReader owners are now female, compared to 46% in Q3 2010. As Econsultancy (@Econsultancy) says, tablets are from Mars and ereaders are from Venus.

(Smartphone owners are now evenly split between male and female and tablets remain primarily male.)

Read this in full.

In a new Pew Research Center (@pewinternet) report, 49% of college presidents use a tablet computer at least occasionally and 42% use an e-reader. 

How will the fact that tablets and ereaders are becoming more mainstream impact your publishing plans?

On O’Reilly Radar (@radar), Jenn Webb (@JennWebb) interviews Rochelle Grayson (@RochelleGrayson), CEO of BookRiff, (@BookRiff), a publishing start-up going live at the end of September. Jenn asks, “Ever want to compile your own cookbook, travel guide or textbook? Has your publisher edited out sections of your book you'd like to share with interested readers? BookRiff aims to solve these problems by creating new ways to access and compile content.”

Her interview explains how BookRiff works and how it can benefit publishers and consumers. Rochelle says her company is based on an open market concept, allowing publishers to sell the content they want at prices they set and consumers to buy and customize that content as they see fit; each getting a percentage of sales along the way.

A Riff is a remix of chapters from published books, essays, articles, or even one's own content. The concept behind BookRiff is to create an online platform that allows consumers and publishers to remix and to resell content, while ensuring that all original content owners and contributors get paid.

BookRiff’s target audience is “domain experts” who can curate — and perhaps even create — content that is of interest to a specific reading audience. This could include things like cookbooks, travel guides, extended “authors editions,” and custom textbooks.

Read this in full.

How do you foresee this effecting your publishing/sales/distribution plans for the next 12 months?

In The New York Times (@nytimes) Janet Maslin reviews Just My Type: A Book About Fonts by Simon Garfield (@simongarfield), saying, “This is a smart, funny, accessible book that does for typography what Lynne Truss’ best-selling Eats, Shoots & Leaves did for punctuation: made it noticeable for people who had no idea they were interested in such things.”

Knowledge of fonts is essential to advertising, book publishing, professions (like law) that require thoughtfully chosen stationery and any written work that can be done on a home computer. Personal computers are the main reason that font fandom and do-it-yourself design have snowballed in the last two decades. Had Steven Jobs not taken a shine to calligraphy as a college student and decided to include a choice of fonts in computer software, we might not be having this conversation.

Mr. Garfield’s book overlaps with Gary Hustwit’s (@gary_hustwit) 2007 documentary Helvetica, which concentrated entirely on a single, unstoppably popular typeface. Is global proliferation of the very Swiss, clean, antiseptic Helvetica a welcome phenomenon, or is Helvetica the weedy, unstoppable kudzu of the design world? Mr. Garfield takes a somewhat jaundiced view of Helvetica mania, but he hardly limits himself to one narrow school of fontificating. A full look at font history, aesthetics, science, and philosophy could fill an encyclopedia, but Just My Type is an excellent gloss. Mr. Garfield has put together a lot of good stories and questions about font subtleties and font-lovers’ fanaticism.

Just My Type covers phenomena including how the fonts on road signs are tested for legibility and what the fonts used by various political campaigns subliminally communicate about candidates. It explains relatively arcane matters like kerning (the science of spacing letters)....And if it does nothing else Just My Type will make it impossible for you to look at logos, road signs, airports, magazines, and advertisements indifferently any longer.

Read this in full.

Let Somersault help you in the page and cover designs of your books. And stay informed about publishing best practices with the SomersaultNOW dashboard, such as the content in the Editing and Innovation tabs.

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High-profile, best-selling author Tim Ferriss’ (@tferriss) signing a deal with Amazon (@amazon) to publish his next book is causing conversation among traditional publishers. Jeffrey Trachtenberg (@JeffreyT1), book reporter at The Wall Street Journal (@wsj), discusses it in this video.

Virginia Heffernan (@page88) writes in The New York Times (@nytimes) that spelling has become a major problem in publishing. “Bad spellers, of course, can be sublime writers and good spellers punctilious duds.”

Book publishers used to struggle mightily to conceal an author’s errors; publishers existed to hide those mistakes, some might say. But lately the vigilance of even the great houses has flagged, and typos are everywhere. Curious readers now get regular glimpses of raw and frank and interesting mistakes that give us access to unedited minds. Lately, in a big new memoir from a fancy imprint, I came across “peddle” for “pedal.” How did it happen?

Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of full-time copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

There is also “pressure to publish more books more quickly than ever,” an editor at a major publishing house explained. Many publishers now skip steps. “In the past, you really readied the book in several discrete stages,” Paul Elie, a senior editor at Farrar, Straus and Giroux (@FSG_Books), explained. “Manuscript, galley proofs, revised proofs, blue lines. You marked your changes at each stage, and then the compositor incorporated them and sent you the next stage. Now there are intermediate stages; authors will email in ‘one last correction,’ or we’ll produce intermediate stages of proof — the text is fluid, in motion, and this leads to typos.”

Authors, too, bear some blame for the typo explosion....

Craig Silverman, a Canadian journalist with a book and a website about corrections called Regret the Error (@CraigSilverman), expressed chagrin. “We seem to keep removing steps that involve editing and checking and don’t bother to think about how we replace them with something better,” he told me.

Read this in full.

Be sure to bookmark and use daily the SomersaultNOW online dashboard of more than 300 links and RSS feeds assembled specifically for publishing and marketing professionals. Especially see the resources in the Editing tab.

The latest in the Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly) / Digital Book World (@digibookworld) free Webcast series, "Digital Textbooks: Innovations From the Academic Business Model" (#dbw) featured panelists Matt MacInnis, CEO, Inkling (@inkling), Eric Frank, co-founder, Flat World Knowledge (@flat_world), and Brett Sandusky, director of product innovation for Kaplan Publishing (@ReadKaplan).

The panelists all agreed that with expansion of digital capabilities, publishing has become an ongoing venture with continuous opportunities for improvement, thanks to the 2-way communication with readers. MacInnis said the iPad is the vehicle that’s reinventing the textbook from the bottom up. Inkling doesn’t try to emulate a book; e.g., it doesn’t paginate. He said Inkling’s vision for publishing is moving “from pages to objects, from serial to hierarchical, from monolithic to modular, from static to dynamic, from passive to interactive.”

Read this in full.

The discussion's archive is available until August 16 and can be found here.

This article in The New York Times (@nytimes) says, “The publishing industry has expanded in the past three years as Americans increasingly turned to ebooks and juvenile and adult fiction, according to a new survey of thousands of publishers, retailers, and distributors that challenges the doom and gloom that tends to dominate discussions of the industry’s health.”

BookStats, a comprehensive survey conducted by two major trade groups that was released early Tuesday, reveals that in 2010 publishers generated net revenue of $27.9 billion, a 5.6% increase over 2008. Publishers sold 2.57 billion books in all formats in 2010, a 4.1% increase since 2008.

The Association of American Publishers (@AmericanPublish) and the Book Industry Study Group (@BISG) collaborated on the report and collected data from 1,963 publishers, including the six largest trade publishers. The survey encompassed five major categories of books: trade, K-12 school, higher education, professional, and scholarly.

“The printed word is alive and well whether it takes a paper delivery or digital delivery,” says Tina Jordan, vice president of the Association of American Publishers.

Read the story in full.

Also see coverage by Publishers Weekly (@PublishersWkly), “Industry Sales Rose 3.1% in 2010; Trade Ebook Sales the Big Winner.”

Follow all the news about publishing by using SomersaultNOW, our free online dashboard of articles and RSS feeds from more than 300 media sources.

Creativity (@creativitymag) reports that The New York Times (@nytimes) has launched beta620 (@beta620), a site that highlights experimental and ongoing projects at NYTimes.com. It’ll also be a crowdsourced venture, where Times readers can offer feedback and ideas – taking, essentially, formerly live events and making them virtual. The "620" refers to the Times' street address on Eighth Avenue in New York.

It’s similar to Google Labs, Google's experimental playground that shuttered last month, where users could suggest projects and Googlers could share what they were working on. At the Times, just like Google, some ideas may be turned into real products.

Read the Creativity coverage in full.

Nat Ives (@natives), media editor at Advertising Age, describes the 7 projects beta620 has launched with for consumers to try out and comment on:

• The Buzz, which shows how much traction Times articles are getting on social media
• Times Companion, which lets you summon information on topics in the article you're reading without taking you away from the page
• TimesInstant, a search page that shows results as you type
• Smart Search Bar, which sorts results and displays them without taking you away from the page you're on
• NYTimes Crossword Web App, an HTML 5 version of the puzzle's aging digital versions
• Longitude, which plots the day's Times articles on an interactive Google map
• Community Hub, a dashboard featuring stats on your comment history, a feed of comments on Times articles and, soon, Facebook friends' comments.

Read the AdAge coverage in full.

Should your website host a crowdsource section to test new publishing ventures?