Here is the third ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon a few months ago. I’m a little embarrassed that it took this long for me to sit down and type it all up. The first part can be found here, and the second here. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel...

Is Amazon going to stay in the hardware business, or is it going to farm production of its tablets out to other Android device makers? CNet carries some speculation on the matter. Pointing out that the Fire’s explosive sales debut (compared to HP’s TouchPad fizzle) proves that devices need compelling content services in order to sell, and that Amazon is (allegedly) selling the Kindle Fire at cost as a way to boost those services, the CNet article quotes analysts who think Amazon will entice tablet makers into partnerships. Richard Windsor, global technology specialist for Nomura Securities, had this to...

When I started my “Cheap Reads” series, I expected I would be posting a number of entries. I never expected it to be limited to just two for all this time! Fortunately, I’ve found another inexpensive novel that is highly worthy of mention. In recent weeks I became aware of a small-press-published novel that looked very interesting by one of my Facebook friends, Sara M. Harvey. It is called Seven Times a Woman, and is a tempestuous romance set in ancient Japan involving a kitsune woman named Rei-Rei, the god Inari, and a dragon Rei-Rei has to...

On Posterous, blogger Diego Basch writes about how the Amazon Kindle has changed his reading habits. It’s an interesting testimonial on how e-readers can change the way we interact with our books. As a result of having plenty of unread books on his Kindle, Basch now finds he doesn’t watch TV anymore—there isn’t ever a time when he no “next” book to keep him from watching something on the tube. He also finds that he goes through books a lot faster than he used to because he can also read them on the Kindle app on his computer or...

With about a zillion people getting Kindles for Christmas, they’re going to be wanting something to read, and not necessarily for a lot of money, either. I spotted a couple of articles highlighting some of the best works available to read for free on Kindles. One of them offers an intriguing theory on why Amazon’s quality control may be so random. The UK blog PC Pro lists a number of these works, split about evenly between public-domain works and newer titles. I’m not sure whether all of them are available in the US version of the store, international rights...

A couple of days ago I mentioned the lawsuit HarperCollins filed against Open Road for e-publishing the backlist title Julie of the Wolves by Jean C. George. I’ve just come across entertainment lawyer Lloyd J. Jassin’s analysis of the issues on his blog, Copylaw. Bringing up previous precedents that relate to similar matters (such as whether the rights to screen a movie also include the rights to screen it on TV), Jassin discusses the legal basis that courts will sort out in their decision. He also mentions that courts will usually decide cases of ambiguous contracts that seem...

The Kindle DX, Amazon's large-sized ereader, is available on Woot today for $200.  It's refurbished, but carries a full warranty.  The unit has free 3G, but no WiFi. The DX has become my favorite ereader because of its large-sized screen.  It's also much lighter and thinner than my iPad and so you can get the large screen in a much more convenient factor.  Additionally, it makes a great PDF reader.  All my various PDF manuals now reside on the unit....

On ReadWriteWeb, Marshall Kirkpatrick has a piece on the rise of robotic manufacturing and what it might mean for online educational tools. It cites iPhone/iPad manufacturer FoxConn’s plan to improve working conditions by building 1 million new robot workers over the next 3 to 5 years, increasing the number it currently has by 100 times (that’s 10,000 percent). Human workers, FoxConn says, “will move up the value chain.” (Apparently hiring more “mature” workers didn’t work out.) The article discusses what this means in terms of the one million unskilled laborers FoxConn currently employs, and unskilled labor versus automation. A...

Piracy has been a constant in all media industries for the last few years, with trade organizations complaining that it’s been cutting into their revenue. Yet for the last few years until 2011, despite all the MPAA’s furor over piracy, the movie industry has been having record sales with each year being better than the last. Oddly enough, now that movie revenues have dropped a bit for 2011, analysts are not blaming piracy. A Chicago Tribune article sourced from CNN begins: The curtain is falling on the worst year for Hollywood in recent memory. ...

In 2008, I wrote about some authors’ desire to force second-hand bookstores to pay royalties when they resell used books, comparing it to the droit de suite laws in Europe that require royalties be paid on resale of original works of art. Now, Mike Masnick writes on Techdirt about legislation that has just been introduced to bring droit de suite to the United States. The law would only apply to art valued over $10,000. The problem with this law, Masnick points out, is that it makes ownership of art more expensive—people who would buy it as an investment...

Digitization of public-domain works is a good thing, right? Most literature fans would be quick to agree. However, Glyn Moody writes on Techdirt that some of the new public digitization projects have terms and conditions that seem to be right out of the dark ages. The Cambridge University’s Digital Library, for example, places strict limits on what users can do with the books—non-commercial use only, no modification, no passing it on to third parties, and so on. A number of the works in Cambridge’s library date from well before the 1710 Statute of Anne invented modern copyright, suggesting that...

There’s a long-running argument about whether publishers consider readers to be their true “customers”. It’s probably rooted in the way that, before e-books came along and changed the market, middle-man distributors were how publishers sold the vast majority of their books. With the exception of things like order forms in the back of paperbacks, publishers didn’t need to worry about how to sell books to readers—the stores those middle-men turned around and sold books to handled that. They could concentrate on selling books to the middle-men instead and not think about the reader except in terms of making their products as...