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The Periodical Publishers Association (more commonly known as the PPA) has opened their doors again to all those wishing to enter the Independent Publisher Awards, 2009. To be eligible for the Awards, each entrant must be an independent publishing company or individual, who are operating with less than a £7 million pound turnover per annum.

For the 2009 event, the PPA has expanded the number of categories to eleven this year, by including Customer Magazine of the year and Team of the year. This year’s event is taking place at Vinopolis, located at the heart of uba cultural Bankside in London, commencing on the afternoon of Tuesday, 1st December. It’s expected over 150 people will attend the awards ceremony which is to be presented by entrepreneur and business mogul James Cann, famed more recently for his fiery joint hosting of the BBC’s Dragons Den television series.

The PPA expects to be inundated with entries as the closing date of the 12th October looms closer. Now in its 6th year of running, the awards have gained great momentum and create a lot of interest in the independent publishing sector, with just a nomination for a campaign being a big accolade to anyone who entries, as it pushes them up the ranks to wider markets and exposure of their brand.

In what must be one of the largest corporate buy outs that America has seen this year, the iconic comic book giant Marvel Entertainment has been bought by the Walt Disney Corporation.

The Disney brand will now encompass all the 5,000 Marvel characters that have graced the shelves of comic book stores for what is 70 years, this year. During this time Marvel Entertainment has seen its fair share of ups and downs, with the business filing for bankruptcy back in 1996 after 57 years of trading, when the comic book sales across the world dropped leaving Marvel with massive debts. It was two years later in 1998 when they emerged as a phoenix company and the sketch books of Marvel were opened once again.

The merger of Marvel into the Walt Disney empire will see the likes of Spiderman and the X-Men now rubbing shoulders with Hannah Montana and Mickey Mouse as the two lucrative industries come together, with the Marvel super hero’s now able to jump the band wagon and expand their presence through Disney’s established merchandising, theme parks, Hollywood studios and third party licensing.

The digital revolution has had another victory over the more traditional paper-based book publishing market, as E-book publisher MP Publishing, situated in the Isle of Man, agrees a deal to release e-books up to six months before the offical hardback publication date.

MP Publishing has partnered with the San Fransico based MacAdam/Cage Publishing, to provide full e-book versions of popluar written works half a year prior to the hardback verison general release.

With the ease of use of e-books comes the users need to be access books immediately. Why should they have to wait for the printing, storage and for the distribution of a title, when it’s ready to go on electronic format. As well as saving time, e-books reduce the publishing bills made up of the print and paper plus any transport costs incurred.

Because the e-book market still in it’s infancy, there is a continual development of new technological advancements providing new and alternative options to view them. As well as using PC’s, laptop’s and specific e-book readers, advocates for the new style of literature can now enjoy an e-book on their Blackberry or Apple iPhone, now utilising video and sound clips making the whole e-book experience very user friendly and interesting.

The now famous Northern Irish band Snow Patrol are venturing into the publishing arena in an effort to support up and coming new talent.

The idea behind the start up of Polar Music is to provide publishing services to music artists by music artists. By cutting out the corporate money makers who would mark up every publishing service they offer, the band hope their more direct approach will give new bands and artists an opportunity to see the publishing processes implemented, giving them more control and input to their publishing requirements.

With Polar Music running as an independent entity to Snow Patrols parent record company, Universal Music Publishing, it will provide an initial stepping stone for breaking artists to been seen in what has become a very competitive market.

How times have progressed for the band, as it was once lead singer Gary Lightbody who had to sell his record collection to afford his rent, but hopefully with the creation of Polar Music, more music hopeful’s will benefit from Snow Patrol’s company, and avoid some of the costly pit falls on the route to stardom.

Inks and pigments have been used for printing on to various substrates for many years. By mixing different colours you can achieve a much wider variety of palettes, which is how and why magazine printing only uses a basis four different coloured inks to then produce the spectrum of colours which make up a finished, printed magazine.

The four colours used are yellow, cyan, magenta, yellow, and black. When the paper passes through each inking station of a printing press, a cylindrical plate which has an etched image of the text pages picks up one of the specific colours and transfers it on to the paper as the paper passes through the inking station. The paper than passes through the other three inking station which builds up the full colour images on the paper.

The printing plates put ink down on the paper in very small dots, which can be seen with a magnifying glass. If you want to achieve different colours, the density of the dots increases which to the naked eye looks like you are creating a new colour. For example, to achieve an orange colour on a specific area, one printing plate in the yellow inking station will be etched in that specific area, so it picks up the yellow ink and puts it down on the paper. Then as the paper passes through the magenta inking station, that printing plate will be etched in the same area so magenta ink will be put down on the same area, thus creating an orange image, as it contains yellow dots and magenta dots which to the naked eye make orange.

There are other ink colours of course like specials like metallic’s, but cyan, magenta, yellow, and black, known as CMYK, or the four colour process has been used for many years to print magazines in the conventional printing process.