Well, that didn’t take very long. The first major publishing imprint has announced it is going to go entirely DRM-free. Tor/Forge has just posted a press announcement to Tor.com that its entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free, both through the current vendors and through retailers that can only sell DRM-free e-books, by July 2012. “Our authors and readers have been asking for this for a long time,” said president and publisher Tom Doherty. “They’re a technically sophisticated bunch, and DRM is a constant annoyance to them. It prevents them from using legitimately-purchased e-books in...

Is paranoia over piracy leading publishers to extremes that could turn off their readers? Book reviewer Rebecca Blain was nonplussed to open a review copy of an e-book and discover a copyright warning that spanned several pages and included a threat of $250,000 fines for sharing it. She followed up with a post quoting the copyright notice in full, and comparing it to the copyright notices from printed books and a number of other e-books. There seems to be a lot of misunderstanding of copyright out there judging by some of the comments Blain got in response to her...

Update: I had not noticed until it was pointed out to me in the comments that the article I was reporting on was a year old. It was shown in Zite as a recent article (probably because of the “March” dateline without a year in the blog posting format). My eyes slid right over the “2011” in the subject line. I should have done more research, but I was in a hurry to post. I apologize for misreading the date. In fact, there was a more recent article from July stating that, due to friction with Amazon’s...

I’ve long enjoyed hanging around on the Baen Bar, the password-protected web forum where many of e-book pioneer SF publisher Baen’s authors, staff, and readers hang out and communicate with each other—though my ardor for the forum had cooled over its last couple of incarnations. In recent years, the bar has gone through several different software packages and web configurations, due to the providers of previous software going out of business or otherwise not meeting Bar needs, and it had shed a number of useful features along  the way. Happily, I have lately discovered that the Bar has...

Gizmodo reprints an article from Maximum PC about “seven ways to stop piracy without DRM”—aimed at computer game developers, but also mostly applicable to other media that are traditionally DRM’d, such as movies, music, or e-books. The suggestions combine the sorts of things that folks like Valve’s Gabe Newell have been saying for years with some other creative practices that game studios have been trying lately. The suggestions include things like built-in deterrents, waiting to release games until more bugs had been worked out, giving paying customers extra content, and engaging with the community. Some of these solutions...

Jeremy Greenfield reports on the Digital Book World site that Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of social e-tailer Anobii, is urging publishers to drop DRM restrictions on their e-books as a way to fight Amazon. In a DBW slideshow presentation, Berlucchi argues that the big e-vendors use device choice to lock in consumers, licensing rather than selling e-books and offering inferior functionality to that of paper books. Berlucchi calls attention to the actions of the music industry in recent years, eliminating DRM and permitting ownership of music—you can now even import songs bought on one platform into a competitor’s via cloud...

FutureBook has a post looking at the relevance of Charles Dickens to present-day publishing. Dickens, Martyn Daniels writes, wrote and published many stories in installments in pamphlets prior to publishing them in completed form. The ad revenue from the installments helped to support him while he published the final version, and fueled interest in the final form. (Indeed, there’s a famous story about the ship carrying the next installment of one such work to America being mobbed by readers who wanted to learn if a certain character survived.) We find ourselves again asking why we are...

Baen has rebranded its Webscriptions program, changing the name of the site to BaenEbooks.com, redesigning its look, and renaming the monthly e-book package program to “Monthly Baen Bundles”. All account information and previously purchased bundles will remain the same under the new site, though users who have set up their Kindles to receive e-books by e-mail will have to authorize a new email address. Sadly, with this change Baen is no longer providing OPDS catalog support for downloading e-books directly to Stanza. This is disappointing given that some people (such as me) don’t have iOS devices recent enough to...

I finally broke down and bought the very latest e-ARC of the Honor Harrington series, A Rising Thunder. And while it’s still a dozen or so posts down the road in my series of Honorverse e-book reviews, I will note that while I quite liked the book overall, the ending was…annoying. It didn’t so much end as it just stopped. There wasn’t a build to a climax, then a denouement. There was building toward a climax, and then…finis. It was as if the book had been cut off halfway through. As it turns out, that is exactly what did...

How are digital media changing our buying habits? They are changing them, there’s no question, but we often don’t think about how. But something that’s happened over the last few days has led me to think about it. Of all electronic forms of media, I think that computer games (and other software, true, but I’m focusing on games here) are one of the most closely related to e-books, though perhaps they’re a little closer to digital music. As with books and music, they used to come solely on physical media that we buy not for the physical medium...

Happy Thanksgiving, those of you who celebrate it today! As I’ve done for the last couple of years, I looked back at previous Thanksgiving posts I made to see what I had to be thankful for in the e-book world. It hasn’t changed much lately, Most of the things I’ve mentioned are still going strong. I’ve got an iPod Touch again (and an iPad, and a Kobo) that I like to read books on, Baen and its Meisha Merlin writers are still going strong, and e-readers are getting even cheaper. As I said last year: ...

As I mentioned in my review of Honor Among Enemies, with In Enemy Hands the Honorverse series changes from a pure space navy series to something more politically-based. While there are still plenty of naval battles in the offing, at times the space combat takes a distinct back seat to all the political maneuvering. I suspect that this is why a number of readers seem to feel it “jumped the shark” at this point—they started reading it because they liked space battles, and suddenly it turned into something very different. This book begins a phase of the series expressly...