I don't put Digital Rights Management (DRM) software on the ebooks I sell; it doesn't work, so why bother?  So I've never had an issue with Defective by Design and their campaign against DRM.  To be sure, our opinions differ, DbD essentially objecting to DRM on a philosophical level, and me on a practical level, but I never considered the difference an issue. Until I discovered something about the ebooks I was posting to the Amazon website: My product pages were getting vandalized, as far as I'm concerned, with "defectivebydesign" and "drm-infested" tags, despite the fact that my ebooks had no...

Do I really have to say anything else?  I have dropped my ebook prices, across the board, to 99¢ ($0.99US). Well, except for the free books.  They're still free. Okay, maybe I need to say a bit more about this.  As in: Why did I do it? The short answer is, I did it because my book sales have been in a slump for the past few months.  I could, of course, speculate on all sorts of arcane market forces, bad breaks, genre popularity slips and pirate conspiracies to account for that, but I'm pretty sure the...

The Chronicle of Higher Education article describes the efforts of the American Chemical Society to protect access to its SciFinder service, which had been discovered to have been accessed by Chinese Hackers. (Michael Dennis, vice president for legal administration and applied research at the Chemical Abstracts Service, the division that publishes SciFinder) says sellers use Taobao, a Chinese service similar to eBay, and other online marketplaces to sell SciFinder access, giving buyers hacked user names and passwords and instructions on how to remotely log in to a college Web site so that they appear to be...

The Chronicle of Higher Education article re-explores the Georgia State University lawsuit against a group of academic publishers, which they describe as "part of a much bigger struggle over how scholarly communication will evolve in a digital world." There's been a lot of talk about—and some action on—promoting library-publisher collaborations. But the struggle persists. It's taking place in many theaters of operation across academe: in negotiations over licensing agreements that control access to scholarly content; in the rise of library-based and grass-roots scholarly publishing that might compete with what traditional publishers offer; in the spreading open-access movement. Don't expect a peace...

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, an editor (who uses a pseudonym) describes his experience when finding his published essays had gotten onto a free download site... and whether he, in hindsight, had made a mistake in taking action. The article does provide a good accounting of what is really at stake here: I confess that those relatively small financial perks have not been negligible to me, as my university hasn't given raises for several years. My income alone supports my wife and three young children, so we have been experiencing some lean living in recent years. The checks...

The Internet Archive reports on its blog that it is concerned about the original copies of books being digitized for libraries and other institutions being discarded or moved to "off site repositories" when they are returned.  Their solution is to take these original books and archive them for future use: A reason to preserve the physical book that has been digitized is that it is the authentic and original version that can be used as a reference in the future. If there is ever a controversy about  the digital version, the original can be examined. A seed bank...

The Chronicle for Higher Education reports on a major casualty to the copyright and orphan works confusion: Academia.  Colleges with incredible treasure-troves of digital material, mostly photographs and recordings, but books as well, are afraid of making those materials available to scholars. Wide online access is curtailed, in part because they contain "orphan works," whose copyright owners can't be found. And the institutions that hold the collections—a consortium of major research libraries and the University of California campuses at San Diego and Los Angeles—must deal with legal uncertainty in deciding how to share the works. A university...

A study sponsored by the Pearson Foundation for Harris Interactive surveyed 1,214 college students and 200 high-school seniors heading to college.  More than two-thirds of them showed overwhelming interest in tablet devices, and believed that tablets would transform higher education. Interestingly, this same pro-tablet group largely did not own tablets: Only 7 percent of college students had a tablet, and only 4 percent of the high school students owned one.  Yet almost half those surveyed believed that digital textbooks would replace print textbooks in colleges within five years. Of those who owned tablets, 73 percent liked digital formats over print; only 32...

An article in The Chronicle of Higher Education discusses a recent file-sharing case in which Joel Tenenbaum was convicted of illegally downloading and sharing 30 songs.  His original verdict was an award of  $67,500 in damages to the music companies... a tenth what the jury voted to award the music companies, and an amount still under appeal by both sides. But for copyright-reform advocates, a lawsuit filed against Mr. Tenenbaum by the music industry has provided an instrument to sound alarms about a broader issue: how fear of enormous damages can chill innovation that involves even a minimal...

An article in Knowledge @Australian School for Business discusses the fact that the present Internet addresses system, known as IPv4, will have literally used up its 4.2 billion addresses soon: APNIC, the Asia Pacific Network Information Centre, is the registry that issues Internet addresses for the booming Asia-Pacific region, and is expected to be the first to run out. Registries in other regions may last just a few months longer. The article's writers describe the new address system, IPv6, and its 340 billion billion billion addresses, as the system that will save the Internet from the end of capacity.  It...

In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, iPads are examined in real-world class situations, and found wanting. The article, "iPads Could Hinder Teaching, Professors Say," lays out some plusses about iPads in the classroom... but also some serious negatives.  Some suggest that the older Tablet PCs would be a better choice for classroom use. Despite the iPad's popularity—Apple has sold nearly 15 million of them and just came out with the iPad2; and there are dozens of competitors, like the Samsung Galaxy—early studies indicate that these finger-based tablets are passive devices that have limited use in higher...

And now, may I present the lucky winners of the Read an E-Book Week 2011 Win an E Ink Watch promotion!  The winners are: Glory H from Dubuque, IA; and Paul Milke from Uxbridge, MA! E Ink has been notified, and the watches will be winging their way to you guys! Everyone join me in Congratulations to our winners! The watch contest did well! Most interestingly, I've gotten some very interesting responses for the write-in portion of the contest, asking what people would like to see in the sequel to Verdant Skies. I plan to respond to many of...