There have been a couple of interesting discussions over the last couple of days on articles pertaining to piracy of e-books. (A lot of piracy-related articles here tend to grow interesting, long discussions—take this one, for instance.) They have brought in a lot of new readers—at least, we hope they’ll become new regular readers—who have raised a number of interesting points. The City of Lost Wages One common theme seems to be feeling deprived of income by pirates. Celine Chatillon wrote: Every pirated book is a royalty (about 50 cents in most cases) that I do NOT earn. I’m unemployed and in poor...

Andrew Savikas of O’Reilly has posted a very interesting chart of the breakdown of format downloads by percentage of O’Reilly books for the last two years. The chart shows PDFs falling from around 90% of the total to around 50%. The sharpest drop in PDF happened around the end of 2008, and the decline has been more or less stady since then (save for a big spike brought on by an “any book for $9.99” promotion earlier this year). The biggest gain has been seen by EPUB format, which seems to account for about 25%, followed by Mobipocket...

On O’Reilly Radar, Hugh McGuire has made an interesting and provocative post that suggests that e-books may become more than just “digital versions of print books”. In fact, he suggests that “the line between book and Internet will disappear.” The thing is, I just can’t see why that should be right. McGuire explains that, as digital information, there should be a lot more that we can do with e-books than we actually are doing with them now. The idea that e-books should be confined to being simply digital representations of paper text without additions or improvements, he feels,...

From the Tools of Change blog comes important information for those with disabilities: For years we've supplied our digital files to Bookshare, a non-profit that provides accessible reading material to the print disabled. For qualifying readers, our books are made available worldwide, and we've really enjoyed working with Jim Fruchterman and the Bookshare team along the way (I'm also on their Advisory Board).   Although the DRM-free EPUB files in our ebook bundles are compatible with many reading systems for print disabled customers, many readers prefer the DAISY format that Bookshare provides, and either don't qualify...

The O’Reilly Tools of Change blog has launched a new weekly column covering at e-book news. This week’s column looks at the Samsung E60’s UK release by WHSmith, the $70 price cut for the Aluratek Libre (from $169 to $99), the new Laser EB101 device in Australia, the Pocketbook announcement we covered earlier, and a couple of brief notes about the Blio and the new Sony Readers. One reader that isn’t mentioned in the O’Reilly article is the new Sharp device (pictured above). Sharp’s President Mikio Katayama becomes the latest electronics exec to trash-talk the iPad, claiming the...

   (Not a geek? You might still want to check out this offer–there are at least a couple of titles that might make good ebook gifts for the geek in your life.) You may already know that I love O’Reilly Media, the company that publishes lots and lots of tech-oriented manuals and reference works. First, I love them the way you might love any company that collects knowledge, organizes it for easy access, and distributes it for mass consumption. More important (from an ebook perspective), I love them because they’re one of those few, smart...

O’Reilly’s Tools of Change site has an interesting essay by former Google Deputy General Counsel Alexander Macgillivray on copyright issues that need to be addressed for e-books and other digital media. The interesting thing is that many of the issues he brings up are not the ones commonly argued between copyrighters and copyfighters. For instance, he touches on jurisdictional/licensing implications in region. While we already know about the big mess that regional licensing causes in being able to buy e-books from one country while in another, he wonders about issues caused by buying e-books while in one country...

I just received an e-mail from O’Reilly informing me of O’Reilly’s “Ebook Deal of the Day”. Today (Friday, May 21) only, O’Reilly is offering any e-book from its 2,000+ title catalog at a discount price of $9.99. To take advantage of this offer, enter the discount code FAVFA in the O’Reilly shopping cart. Remember, O’Reilly offers its e-books in multiple formats with no DRM for one purchase price....

On O’Reilly’s Tools of Change blog, Hugh McGuire—the co-developer of the Book Oven on-line content management system for publishing, among other things—explains why a better publishing platform might actually be made from Wordpress, of all things. McGuire started Book Oven with the goal of building books “in the cloud”, so that online collaboration would be easier, and the book would be more portable to different devices. But while pitching his system he encountered suggestions that “It would be great to have a tool that’s as easy to use as Wordpress.” That started him thinking. Wordpress is familiar to most writers...

Inc. Magazine has a profile of Tim O’Reilly, discussing how he founded and grew O’Reilly Media from nothing into a $100 million company over the course of 32 years. The article says that O’Reilly has always had a tendency to look to the future, to predict what the next big thing was going to be and be ready for it. One of those things has been e-books: Chemical reactions, [O’Reilly] says, require activation energy in order to begin, but once that happens they tend to proceed on their own. "I think there is that...

O'Reilly Radar has some data on the 46,000 (paid and free) bnooks available through the iBooks app: 29.5% are fiction and literature, 6% mysteries and thrillers, 5.5% biographies, 3.7% history, 3.4% Christianity, 3.3% historical, 3.3% children's fiction, 2.6.5 sci-fi and fantasy. As far as publishers go: 23.5% Penguin Group US, 19% Simon & Schuster, 15.9% HarperCollins, 6.9% St. Martin's Press, 5.7% Grand Central Publishing, 5.2% unknown (Smashwords). The also give the mean price paid for books by category: fiction & literature $10.14, mysteries & thrillers $8.85, biographies $12.25, History $13.46. The posting has many more details....

Mac Slocum at O’Reilly Radar points out something interesting about Wired Magazine’s new iPad format. According to an analysis on a Reuters blog, Wired is taking a closed-sandbox approach to outbound links with the magazine pieces—rather than calling the iPad’s Mobile Safari to open them, it will open them in a pop-up window within the Wired app itself—so that when it is closed, users will still be in the Wired app. On the one hand, it is understandable that Wired might not want to chance dumping readers out of its app—especially given that this will mean...