Remember the Supreme Court case about the Thai exchange student who bulk imported cheap overseas copies of textbooks and resold them in the U.S. (making over $1 million in sales) to finance his doctorate? The judges handed down a decision today. By a six to three majority, they found that the student’s importation and resale was legal under the Fair Use Doctrine. Just because the books were printed overseas did not exempt them from the right of First Sale, which means that people who buy them can resell them as they please. Ars Technica has more details on the decision. Essentially,...

There is a risk to relying on cloud services, as I’ve found to my chagrin time and again: they may not always be there when you need them. Etherpad servers have crashed, taking the only copy of my writing with them. Web-based IM service Meebo shut down, leaving me scrambling to find a replacement. And now comes the latest blow: Google plans to close down its Google Reader RSS reader service (along with a number of other, lesser-used services) as of July 1. I used Google Reader exclusively to find stories to reblog when I was writing more actively here—I would...

A few days ago I brought up a patent Amazon got on reselling “used” digital content. It turns out that’s not the only odd patent Amazon’s gotten lately. Dan brought to my attention U.S. patent number 8,370,271, which Amazon just received on “recurring delivery of products.” Essentially, Amazon just received a patent on the ability to ship a new order of a particular good every so often to a customer without being asked. Or, as one pundit put it, Amazon has just “patented the milkman.” Amazon has already been offering this service for some time now. If you order some sort...

Self-publishing has a lot of advantages and just as many countervailing drawbacks. The biggest advantage is, of course, you get to be your own boss and can publish whatever you want to, without some publisher taking a cut of the money. But the dark side of this freedom is that it can leave you vulnerable if some big company with money and lawyers decides it doesn’t like what you’re doing. And even if their claims are completely outlandish, it will cost you money you don’t have—more money than your book will ever make—to fight them, and you don’t have any guarantee...

I’ve written quite a few pieces here about the various attempts to try to create a workable digital resale market—most recently with digital music resale firm ReDigi, which is currently engaged in a legal dispute with music label EMI over its activities. Now it looks as if, as with a lot of its digital media sales, Amazon may have achieved yet another leg up on the competition. On paidContent, Laura Hazard Owen reports that Amazon has been awarded a patent on the idea of a marketplace for “used” digital content. Amazon applied for it back in 2009, and it...

A month and a half since Baen made the jump to Amazon availability, the publisher is about to add another feather to its cap. On her forum on the Baen Bar, publisher Toni Weisskopf has mentioned that Baen e-books will soon be available DRM-free in Apple’s iBooks store. A formal announcement will be made when the exact timeframe has been nailed down. As with the current Amazon deal, EARCs and monthly discount bundles will continue to be exclusive to Baen. The time since the program happened has seen some minor controversy erupt on the Baen Bar. After December 15th,...

Remember how, back in 2009, Wizards of the Coast pulled all its PDF products from on-line gaming store Paizo and announced it was ceasing PDF sales altogether? Apparently it only took about four years for the company to change its mind again. Wired’s GeekDad reports that WotC has launched a new e-book store site, dndclassics.com, in conjunction with on-line RPG e-book seller DriveThruRPG. The site currently offers over 80 products ranging in age from the old red and blue books up to the latest 4E stuff, with prices ranging from $4.99 for older products to $17.99 for...

On Friday, Aaron Swartz was found dead in his apartment; he’d apparently hanged himself. Swartz was only 26, a brilliant and troubled young man who suffered from clinical depression, and also an Internet activist who spoke out and acted out in favor of making access to public information more free to everyone. He was a friend of both Lawrence Lessig and Cory Doctorow. Swartz’s other accomplishments include RECAP, a tool that uploaded public-domain legal documents retrieved from the subscription-based PACER document record system into a duplicate free-access database. He was also reportedly involved in the early stages of...

Since I originally posted about Baen’s deal with Amazon, a couple more details of about the deal have come to light. First of all, the deadline for buying any of the old Baen bundles is Saturday, December 15th. That’s when the deal with Amazon goes live, and the old $10, $15, and $18 monthly bundles vanish, replaced by the higher-priced single books only. If there are any old bundles you might want, better look at and snap them up now. They’ll soon be gone. Second, there has been some discussion over what is to happen with the monthly serialized...

Toni Weisskopf has posted a series of messages to the Baen Bar indicating major changes in the offing for the Baen Ebooks (nee Webscriptions) store. Baen is finally on the verge of getting its titles placed directly into Amazon (and is negotiating with others such as Barnes & Noble, etc.) The problem is, that comes with pesky contractual obligations. The changes amount to the following: “Old” bundles containing books that have already been published will no longer be available for bundle-priced purchase. (Already-purchased ones should still be available for download, though it is possible some books may...

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone (in the US, anyway—those impatient Canadians celebrated it weeks ago)! Hopefully you are replete with turkey (or ham, whichever you prefer) and spending the day with your families…in which case you probably won’t see this until at least Black Friday. But hey, we can be thankful any time of year. I have a lot to be thankful for this year. I have my family, who are just close enough to spend time with when I want to but far enough away I don’t have to when I don’t. In particular, I’m thankful my Mom survived losing...

Everybody’s coming out with tablet gift buyers’ guides this time of year (including us in not too long). I thought it might be a good idea to come out with more of a thinking guide, something to suggest ideas for you to consider while you read those guides—a “buyers’ guide guide” if you will. These are the primary considerations I think a tablet buyer should be keeping in mind. 1) Walled garden or the open road? Many of the most popular tablets this year are locked up in someone’s walled garden. The iPad and iPad Mini are no-brainers...