Four months after its founder, Roger Waynick, died unexpectedly, Cool Springs Press has a new publisher. Owner Quarto Group, which had bought Cool Springs Press a month before Waynick's passing, has picked Ray Wolf, a former manager at Meredith Publishing, to lead the gardening-focused publisher — albeit from Minneapolis, not Brentwood.

VitalSource Technologies, a unit of Nashville-based Ingram Content Group, has secured the contract to manage the e-textbook operations for a consortium of Brazilian scientific, medical and technical publishers. The venture will launch with a catalog of 4,000 titles.

Ingram Publisher Services announced today that it has inked contracts with four publishers in the educational, dining, current affairs and business arenas. The unit of Nashville-based Ingram Content Group is now working with the Royal Society of Chemistry, Insight Publications, No Limit Publishing Group and Opinionated About. Get the details here.

Ingram Content Group appears to have taken a big step toward building its profile in Canada. The Nashville-based publishing services firm has signed a partnership deal with the Association of Canadian Publishers to help that group's 125 members market their catalogs to the digital market through its CoreSource product.

Publishing house Thomas Nelson has teamed with singers and songwriters Bill and Gloria Gaither on a Bible project that will be released next summer. The Gaither Homecoming Bible will include "carefully selected favorite hymns, gospel songs, and songs by Bill and Gloria Gaither. Also included will be statements by great historical and contemporary Christian writers, theologians, and thinkers about the part music has played in their own spiritual journeys."

Ingram Content’s eTextbook arm has announced a new acquisition. Vital Source has acquired VPG integrated Media, which provides “e-textbook applications, interactive learning objects and e-whiteboard content, and state-of-the-art video, audio, and animation production services for educational publishers.”

VPG works with both publishers and educators to create and enhance educational content.  VPG clients include Cambridge University Press, Cengage Learning, Elsevier, Houghton Mifflin, John Wiley, Macmillan, McGraw-Hill, Oxford University Press, Pearson Education, Sage Publications and Scholastic, many of the same publishers that currently use Ingram’s VitalSource® platform for content distribution. VPG serves both the K-12 and Higher-Ed publishing segments.

Vital Source President Kent Freeman said the acquisition of VPG puts his team "even further ahead by giving us the ability to not only deliver but to also enhance publisher content with rich media and interactive applications, a requirement for educational publishers to succeed in today’s higher-ed environment."

Samir Husni, an Ole Miss journalism professor and magazine business consultant, says the launch last fall of Athlon Sports was one of 2010's best. When hatched, the Nashville-based Athlon Sports team reached 7 million people but has since grown that number to 9 million through more than 500 newspapers.