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...

Rumors have been flying about the Apple event announced for later this month. It seems pretty obvious that it’s about time for a new iPad to make the rounds, of course, but Good eReader thinks that Apple is going to announce a new self-publishing platform. “Sources close to the matter have told us that they intend on launching a new digital self-publishing platform to get peoples content into the iBookstore,” writes Michelle Kozlowski. She notes that it’s currently possible for independent authors to get on the iBookstore through Smashwords, but the Apple program will be designed to give authors...

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...

The next Apple event is set to take place on October 4th, and the invitation going out to journalists is captioned, “Let’s talk iPhone”. This caption has led to speculation on the part of tech journalists that the new iPhone will include advanced voice-recognition features that have been in the offing since Apple bought Siri 18 months ago. They also speculate that Apple will just be introducing only one new phone—and not the rumored “low-end iPhone” that some investors have been expecting. Rather than a new low-end model, Apple can just continue to keep last year’s iPhone around as...

Here is the second ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the final part in days to come. The first part can be found 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 Conanmovie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this segment, we discuss piracy, e-book pricing, editing, and the “Storyteller’s Bowl”...

Here is the first ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the other two parts in days to come. 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 seminar. In this first part of the interview, we largely discussed the early history of e-books and e-publishing, with a diversion into how...

When I was wandering around GenCon, I quite unexpectedly came across a booth where Howard Tayler of the ten-years-old-and-still-going Schlock Mercenary webcomic was selling books, sighing autographs, and personalizing the books he sold with requested character doodles. I hadn’t even known he was going to be there, but naturally, I bought a book and had a doodle made. (Which sort of ties into a point that Michael Stackpole made in the interview with him that I have yet to transcribe—that people don’t buy books at cons as books, they buy them as souvenirs.) And then I asked Tayler...

The Pathfinder role-playing game was originally developed under the Open Gaming License as a “replacement” for D&D 3.5th edition after Hasbro announced it would no longer be supporting the game. Hasbro was changing over to its new, streamlined D&D 4th Edition rules, which suddenly left all the 3.5th-edition supplements its OGL had fomented without an available master rule set. However, the Open Game License meant that Paizo, Pathfinder’s developer, was free to take the core of the D&D rule set and create a new, compatible game around them. One noteworthy thing about Pathfinder was that the entire full-length version...

During GenCon, I had the opportunity for a brief interview with Phil Reed, Chief Operating Officer at Steve Jackson Games, in which we discussed e23, Steve Jackson Games’s PDF e-book store. We’ve mentioned the store a time or two in the past, as when “Reverend Pee Kitty” talked about how the program had expanded beyond its original intended goals. I took the chance to find out from Mr. Reed some more about how this program was working. Me: What gave you the idea to do e23? Phil: When I joined the company in '99 it was already in...

This is my coverage of Michael Stackpole’s presentation on how writers can take advantage of the e-publishing revolution. Stackpole does charge for this talk (it was $8 at GenCon; he will be giving it again at DragonCon in September), and gives it at a number of conventions. It was a very interesting panel, and more than worth the admission fee. If you’re in the area of DragonCon, or any other convention where Stackpole is speaking, I strongly encourage you to go. In deference to his need to earn a living, I will condense my detailed notes down to general...

Just as Paul has returned from his trip, I have returned from mine. And while traveling by motorcycle is cool, it pales in comparison to traveling by Tardis! Seriously, I’ve come back from GenCon with recordings of several reviews to transcribe and typed notes on a panel to put up. I hope to begin that process this evening. Thanks to the writers’ symposium programming track, there were a number of authors available, and I interviewed Michael Stackpole and Greg Stolze, both of whom have done self-e-publishing work that I have covered here. I also interviewed webcomic artist...

I am now at GenCon, the original gaming convention and now a huge event attended by dozens of gaming and media companies with an attendance in excess of 30,000 people. I’ve spent the last couple of hours mostly wandering around the dealer room, though I did get in a 30 minute interview with self-publishing writer Michael Stackpole that I will post when I have time to transcribe. It is still an impressive event. The game industry was one of the first sectors of publishing to embrace e-publishing fully. As Stackpole pointed out during our interview, game companies...