The Technology and Games section of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation’s website has published a fairly long article called “The case for piracy.” In this article, Nick Ross looks at some of the reasons people feel driven to pirate. The article doesn’t actually touch on e-books per se—the majority of it seems to be about how badly Australian TV mangles imported TV shows and does not show international sports events live, though there are a couple of sections about the music and movie industries too—but the sort of media producer indifference (or even, as the article puts it, “contempt”)...

The Register reports that Australian bookstore chain Dymocks is rolling out its own local Amazon-style end-to-end self-publishing solution. It will include all the traditional publishing services, such as book/e-book design, editing, cover art, and so on, and also e-book and print-on-demand delivery “anywhere in Australia.” It’s not clear exactly how much this service will cost, though judging from the article it will be aiming to undercut existing self-publishing operations that reportedly charge as much as $AU3,000 for a 100-book print run....

Ars Technica reports that Apple is again stepping up to the plate to defend its developers from patent troll Lodsys, stating in its most recent filing that it has every right to intervene in Lodsys’s lawsuits against its developers. Apple contends that its licenses to Lodsys’s technology extend to developers, who would not have the resources necessary to represent Apple’s interests in the suit. An interesting note in the piece is that Apple’s defense acknowledges Lodsys’s patents as valid, and is based on the doctrine of “exhaustion”, that its license extends to third-party developers. However, others are insisting...

While Amazon was buying up The Book Depository, Pearson Australia, the parent company of Penguin Books, was busy negotiating with REDgroup to buy Australia's Borders and Angus & Robertson websites. Other booksellers are now calling for an investigation by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) to ensure that the deal won't give Penguin an unfair competitive advantage in the tightly controlled Australian market. From The Canberra Times: The acquisition, which has been in the works for just three weeks and is due to take effect on July 28, indirectly places one of the nation’s largest book publishers in competition with its...

Although you can still get into the country, the Australian Borders are closed. The Borders bookstores, that is. The Bookseller reports that, within the next two weeks, all remaining Borders bookstores in Australia will close, because no buyer for the Australian stores could be found. This will result in 315 people losing their jobs. Previous Borders store closings in Australia had already laid off over 500 people. As we reported earlier, private equity firm the Gores Group has bid on half of Borders' 405 remaining American stores. Meanwhile, following up another Borders story, about Kobo taking over Borders' e-bookstore...

It begins! The ebooks-in-the-cloud concept that I warned against earlier this week, the one publishers say is the ideal future marketplace (for them, not for consumers), is in private beta right now in Australia. It’s using the Monocle web-based ebook reader–which I find really awesome, to tell the truth–and partnering with Readings, a small Australian book chain, to sell ebooks to Australian customers. It looks great. It’s the future of ebook sales. And it stinks. I really don’t have any complaints about Monocle, except that I caught a couple of bugs during my brief testing of the ...

I’m a journalist, and a member of the journalists union, the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance (of which the Australian Journalists Association, the AJA, forms part). All members receive a monthly magazine with news and in-depth articles about the industry, but this year is special – it’s 100 years since a wily bunch of Aussie scribblers formed the AJA. So, a century into Australian journalism proper, the union has published a report of the state of the industry, and where it expects the future to lay. (SPOILER: online). The report is called Life in the Clickstream II (a similar report came out two years ago),...

Just got off the phone with Mark Tanner, who is Google’s ebooks rep in Australia. He’s ensconced down in Sydney in the Googleplex (Aust version) in Pyrmont. Interesting guy. He’s the man charged with getting the Google Ebookstore successfully launched here and publishers and retail partners signed up. He emailed me the other day and was nice enough to do a quick interview. Even though I’ve had a play with the GE site (see how here), chances are that the question foremost on my mind was the same as the one on yours: “When?” Unfortunately Mark has to follow the company line. “We’ve...

A day or so after those in the US finished celebrating Thanksgiving, I had reason to thank my lucky stars for pirates. In particular, the ebook pirate who ripped off my book and posted it on a well-known non-legitimate download site. I’d name the site, but I don’t think that’s the done thing. People can use Google any way they like. I’m a journalist who became an author in 2006 when my book Baby Steps: a Bloke’s-Eye View of IVF was published by a major Australia publisher. It went out in paperback and, as an afterthought – as it was back then...

“Hi everyone, and thanks for tuning in! Welcome to another episode of Publishing Hypocrisy … the game where we show both faces of the bookselling industry!” “Our first contestant tonight - is Jane from Melbourne! Hi Jane.” [Applause] “Hi, Brad! I’m a bit nervous!” “Jane! [Pulls her in close] You’ve got nothing to worry about – you know exactly how the game works … You pick a topic and then simply rank three examples of modern publishing and bookselling hypocrisy in order of heinousness – and hilarity.” “Let’s go to the big board! And you folks at home - don’t forget to play along!” “Well...

Colour me excited. In recent months, a few things have happened in our sunburnt country that have left it teetering on the brink of the ebook mainstream. And they said it would never happen in our backwards, sundrenched, animals-made-from-bits-of-other-animals land. So look out North America, Britain and others … Here are five reasons why we’re about to enter the ebook big-time. (Please suppress any laughter – we’re painfully aware you’ve been enjoying these conditions for years). 1. Amazon just dropped the “Whispernet tax” for Aussies Early this week, some eagle-eyed readers here noticed that books they had on their Kindle wishlists got $A2...

Little more than a day since the launch of paid Aussie titles in Apple’s local iBookstore, Borders has hit back with price cuts across their ebook range. Due to the “old publishing” paradigm of geographical restriction, Borders in Australia can’t formally guarantee to beat Amazon’s price on ebooks, as they do (incl. postage) with paper books. However, a quick check of Borders.com.au reveals that they are selling most books cheaper than Amazon. Parent company REDgroup Retail is the first to sign all of Australia’s major publishers to ebook deals, as well as many of the small indie publishers missing from the iBookstore. In...