The article in question is a 36-year-old investigative report into football injuries which was scanned and uploaded in PDF form to the New York Times’s website and linked from an article and blog post talking about it. (At the time of this writing, the link seems to be gone from article and blog post, but when I manually typed in the URL displayed in the Phoenix piece, I found the PDF is still on the server.)

Presumably, the Times had the permission of Clark Booth, the story’s original author, to repost it. However, his permission only covered the text of the article, not the photos, ads, and layout featured in the original paper story.

Carioli uses this as a springboard to discuss the thorny matter of copyright in the digital age.

[Former New York Times executive editor Bill] Keller would like you to believe, even though he thinks of the world as being populated by digital pickpockets, that a sane anti-piracy legislation will be enforced only against the largest and most egregious copyright offenders. It’s as if he lives in some alternate universe where major labels haven’t already sued individual downloaders and their parents for hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages. The onus isn’t on the public to prove that copyright legislation won’t be used against us: it’s on legacy media protectorates to come up with solutions that don’t punish their customers.

He brings up the matter of the Pulse RSS reader, which the New York Times got yanked from Apple’s app store because it had the temerity to incorporate a publicly-available RSS feed of the Times’s articles into its app on launch. He also mentions a copyright case that the New York Times lost to freelance writers that has made it more expensive and difficult for newspapers to post their own archives online.

And he notes that the state of indexing and archival surrounding old newspaper articles such as the one the Times reprinted is something of a mess. Indeed, if it hadn’t been for the Times reprinting it, it is likely few people would ever have had the chance to read it again. And if the Phoenix did have a lawyer request the article be taken down, it would probably cost more money than either they or the Times would make out of it, and due to those thorny archive rights issues, it is doubtful that the Phoenix could post it anywhere itself.

So here’s my best suggestion: the Times should help us track down the photographer, pay him or her the going Times rate for the photos they republished, and then, with our permission, upload the Booth article to Scribd.comor a similar service, so that anyone can embed the piece wherever they want. (In the case that Clark Booth didn’t already give the Times permission to reprint his words, they should pay him, too.) Then the Times should promise never to do it again. On pain of — let’s say — taking down their paywall for a month.

I suspect the article will just end up being taken down instead.

Regardless, it’s amusing and perhaps instructive that one of the most distinguished newspapers in the world is capable of making this kind of copyright mistake, at the same time it blasts “pirates” for misappropriating other people’s material. If even the New York Times can’t keep it straight, what chance do the rest of us have?

(Found via BoingBoing.)

The giveaway is, of course, meant to promote Stevens’s web store where he sells merchandise related to the strip (including printed strip collections). But that’s to be expected; Baen’s DRM-free digital giveaways work the same way. And while I never could get into Diesel Sweeties myself, I know a number of people who love the strip so I have it on good authority that it’s good stuff.

First of all, the software can now read PDF files. I tried it out with a TV manual downloaded from the website of manufacturer I support in my day job, and it worked pretty well, including drop-down access to the table of contents. Of course, there are many other ways to read PDFs on iOS by now, including GoodReader, iBooks, Stanza, and Safari itself, but the Kindle Reader at least does it simply and well. People who are in the habit of reaching for the Kindle app first will undoubtedly be happy to be able to use it for PDFs, too.

The other change is a bit more important, however: for the first time, the app allows (almost) the same access to periodical subscriptions as the hardware Kindle. (The “almost” comes in if you have a subscription to something, such as the New York Times, that specifically only allows direct Kindle hardware integration.) This is one of the major hardware features that has been noticeably absent from Kindle apps, and it will undoubtedly come as a welcome addition for those who use it on their readers and had wanted to on their iOS devices.

I just noticed something else about the Kindle app that I imagine it has had for a while and I just never noticed: the ability to sideload your own DRM-free content onto it (and pull downloaded content off of it) through the iTunes apps tab. I never noticed this before, though I hadn’t looked in a while. Of course, for all I know it may have had it since sideloading through iTunes was even possible; I just know that its lack was something I complained about when the app first launched.

To read your Google eBooks offline, you’ll need to install the Google Books app from our Chrome Web Store and ensure your Google eBooks are available to read offline. Please see this article in our Help Center and follow the simple step-by-step process to enable offline reading for your ebooks.

Of course, it only takes a couple of clicks to download the PDF no matter what web browser you use, and that’s just as possible to read offline (and somewhat easier to find than the “make available offline” checkbox in the app). But perhaps Chromebooks don’t allow you to save downloaded content as readily; I don’t know.

(Found via Engadget.)

One noteworthy thing about Pathfinder was that the entire full-length version of the game was offered for free download during its beta-testing period. So when I had the opportunity to speak to Jason Bulman, lead designer for Pathfinder, that was one of the main things I had to ask him about.

Me: Pathfinder originally came about, didn’t it, when Hasbro announced they were sunsetting the 3.5th Edition of Dungeons and Dragons which meant that everybody who had developed adventures for it was going to be out in the cold?

Jason: Well, we saw an opportunity to take what was a very popular ruleset and continue it on. The Open Game License allowed us to use those rules, and we decided that while we wanted to keep the system alive, we wanted to make some upgrades, some fixes, some changes. So we went through the ruleset and we identified the things that we always thought were kind of clunky or didn’t work very well, gave those a tuneup, and then we also decided to add more diversity, more option, more choice to the base classes, so we went through and made a lot of adjustments and changes there too. A lot of this was all designed to make for a better play experience.

Me: And when you were betaing it, I seem to recall that anybody could just download the complete beta version for free. Were you concerned that would have any effect on your sales?

Jason: We were hoping that it would generate interest, right? I mean, allowing everybody to get a chance to take a look at our rules before they hit store shelves and give us their feedback and suggestions really led to them being invested in our game. They were a part of making it. So it really gave us a lot of buzz, it really helped us develop a better game, and in the end it was totally worth it. So we don’t really feel that PDF sales necessarily compete with book sales. I think I personally feel very strongly that the sale of electronic books is a companion. Especially in our industry where people need good reference material. Referencing something at the table is one thing, but sitting down to read? Maybe you want a big physical book for that. A lot of people do.

Me: I notice a lot of gaming places here give the PDF version away free with purchase of a printed book.

Jason: We have a subscription process where if you subscribe to our books we will ship them to you and give you the PDF for free.

Me: And you sell this through the on-line RPG services like RPGNow and DriveThruRPG?

Jason: Actually our PDFs I believe are sold exclusively through our website at Paizo.com.

Me: So, going forward as Dungeons & Dragons continues to evolve into new editions, is Pathfinder going to stay pretty much the same, or are you going to come up with new versions of that eventually?

Jason: Well, you know, our game is only two years old at this point, so we’re not rushing to make a new edition of Pathfinder right at the moment. But the game continues to evolve, and even now two years later there are things that I wish I could have changed or fixed but I didn’t. Some of those things we really can’t fix, they’re endemic, built into the system, so we can’t really change those, but as we go along we make a lot of additions and changes to the game as we move along. It’s a living thing. But, yeah. I mean we’re on a different path now. So we’re doing our own thing, and if the time comes for a new edition, then we’ll certainly look at that. But I don’t think we’re there yet.

Me: The Open Gaming License allowed you to basically take the D&D rules and create a whole new game around them, or rather create a upgraded version of the original.

Jason: Yes.

Me: I noticed that Hasbro basically moved away from the Open Game License.

Jason: Well, they do have a game system license, but it’s kind of different. It works a little differently. It’s not quite as open as the Open Game License.

Me: I seem to recall the Open Game License was originally developed as a marketing move on Hasbro’s part.

Jason: Well, it was an attempt to get the entire industry producing books for D&D. And it worked wonderfully. Everybody started making compatible products.

Me: I seem to recall Hasbro wasn’t terribly pleased with Pathfinder.

Jason: I don’t really know about that. I can’t speak to that directly. I’ve been with Paizo now for six years and I’ve never worked for them. So I can’t speak to that directly. For us, we’re big supporters of the Open Gaming License. We really like that for our publishers, we value them, they put out great products, and the more people playing our games and making our games, the better, in my book. So we’re all for it.

Me: Well, I really appreciate the chance to talk with you. Is there anything else you’d like to add before we finish up?

Jason: No, I’d just like to thank you for the opportunity to let me talk. We had a great show, I hope you had a great GenCon too, and thanks a lot.

Me: What gave you the idea to do e23?

Phil: When I joined the company in ’99 it was already in the works, and it was just Steve looking ahead and saying, "Hey, this PDF format’s neat, maybe we can do something with it." It took a few years to get things up and running, and e23 launched in 2004. The issue was just as it is all the time with our ideas–time to execute an idea.

Me: Now I understand that the original plan was just to reprint out-of-print works?

Phil: Not exactly. The plan was to release out-of-print material in PDF but when I got in there in ’99 we were already discussing completely new releases for e23.

Me: Did you all expect it to have an impact on your print sales when you were going forward?

Phil: We didn’t know. It was something entirely new, and at this point we can say that in our experience the e23 releases have not had any impact on print. We still sell volume.

Me: So basically it added a new revenue stream without taking anything away from the old one?

Phil: As near as we can tell. Part of the issue is the RPG decline in general. There are a couple of key games that are still doing very well. Pathfinder, for example, is doing phenomenally well. But from what we can tell, the e23 releases are, yes, giving us another revenue stream on top of the print releases. We have some fans who actually buy both because they want both.

Me: Do you think that roleplaying games are always going to be PDF electronically, or do you see it moving toward another e-book format that’s more compatible with the readers people use?

Phil: I honestly do not know. I’ve not purchased any other reader except for a Kindle, which I no longer really even use because I decided that I preferred having the physical library. When it comes to RPG releases, I’ve always just used my netbook or laptop.

Me: Have you had any problems with piracy of these e-books that you’ve noticed?

Phil: We’ve seen piracy, and we take care of it whenever we can. When we spot it, we do the best we can to put an end to it. But there hasn’t been so much piracy that we’ve discussed "maybe we should quit" or "maybe we need DRM" or anything. We haven’t seen so much piracy that it’s affected our decisions.

Me: Thank you very much for your time, Mr. Reed.

Phil: No problem, thank you!

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 Howard Tayler of the extremely-long-running strip Schlock Mercenary, who self-publishes print collections and is looking at publishing electronic versions somewhere down the road.

On the game industry side, I interviewed Sean Patrick Fannon, RPG publisher relations and marketing director of digital RPG publisher RPGNow; Jason Bulmahn, lead designer of the Pathfinder roleplaying game for Paizo Publishing; and Phil Reed, chief operating officer for Steve Jackson Games. They all had plenty of fascinating things to say, and I look forward to sharing them with you.

I spent most of my time at the convention wandering the exhibitors’ room, checking out the wares on offer. There were hundreds of booths, and I know I didn’t manage to see everything on offer, but I saw a lot—especially because I was doing a scavenger hunt put on by Cheese Weasel Logistics that involved visiting specific booths, participating in demos or listening to their spiel, and getting a card punched.

There weren’t just game publishers there, or companies that sold dice and miniatures. There were anime companies, at least three different special-effect-photography manipulators, sewing and crafts booths, and so on. The second-hand bookstore chain Half Price Books even had a stand there. Even if your interest in gaming is only moderate, you would still find enough to catch your interest. (Indeed, you could spend all day just looking at all the people in fascinating costumes.)

I also noticed an interesting trend among a lot of game companies: if you bought a physical copy of the RPG, they would give you the electronic version free. A few were doing this the last time I was there several years ago, but the practice seems to have spread since then.

Readers of prose novels have been wanting this sort of bundling for some time, but seems unlikely ever to happen as fixated as prose publishers are on being paid for each and every copy. (Fictionwise’s Pendergrast brothers famously explained that publishers insisted on each DRMed copy being sold separately in their stores—if you bought an eReader version and wanted Mobipocket also, you had to buy even the Mobipocket version separately.)

The game-industry folks I talked to, including those I interviewed above but also people such as Ken Hite of Pelgrane Press, tended to see a freely-bundled PDF as a way to make their print books more attractive to game consumers. Since it had no marginal cost to give a copy out, they didn’t see it as costing anything if it drove a sale of a paper book which did have marginal cost. Piracy was not as much of a concern—while companies would act to stamp out commercial piracy when they found it, they tended to consider most noncommercial theft not to be lost sales that they would otherwise have had, and found that, for now, most gamers seem to want a physical book as well for easier use at the gaming table.

The interviews will go into more detail, and I hope to begin posting those very soon. I may also make them available in podcast form for direct listening.

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 have been selling PDFs for years and discovering that they did not in fact cannibalize print as much as was feared. There are game companies that publish primarily electronically, and that publish their print lines electronically as well.

As I mentioned here before, Steve Jackson Games began its own e-publishing arm as a way to post out-of-print books that would never see print again, but before they knew it they were e-publishing printed games months in advance and seeing little or no fall-off in print sales from their expectations.

While I’m here, I hope to interview some of these people or companies about their e-publishing or self-publishing experiences. I will also try to attend some of the panels here involving writing, and report on them. I will post again when I have more to report.

Although Wolfram is positioning this as an open document format, the readers over at Slashdot are skeptical about the EULA and potential issues down the road, while ZDNet notes that for it to have any chance of taking off, it would have to play nice with PDF.

Given how big and thick role-playing game books tend to be, they would seem tailor-made for such a conversion—if someone could get around the table issue. One of the big reasons for e-textbooks is how big and heavy they are and how much of a strain they put on kids’ backs—but role-playing games are arguably just as bad. Perhaps worse, because kids actually want to carry these monsters around with them. But aside from the ubiquitous PDFs and a few experimental examples I cited in that blog post, there has not been much in the way of e-RPGs—until now.

Last week, my friend Jenna Moran called my attention to the electronic edition of the third edition of her role-playing game Nobilis. (Note: The first and second editions, which I also own, were written under a different name but by the same person.) She comped me a copy of the $19.95 DriveThruRPG e-book bundle, which includes a Kindle version, three EPUB versions (Nook-, iBooks-, and generic-device flavored), and three PDF versions (fully-formatted, small illustrations, and no background art). All the e-books are DRM-free, but are digitally watermarked with the name of the purchaser.

Nobilis was a prime candidate for the e-book treatment for a couple of reasons. For one thing, the second edition of it was one of the heaviest and unwieldiest RPG books I’ve ever owned. A gorgeous book, in point of fact, but running to 304 coffee-table-book-sized pages, which makes it tricky to carry around places. I haven’t seen the print version of the third edition, so I don’t know physically how big it is—but the PDF version comes in at 372 8.5” x 11” pages, so I’m guessing it weighs about the same.

The other reason is that, being diceless, it does not have as many or as elaborate tables as most role-playing games (though there are some), meaning that there is less need for extensive reformatting.

However, simply because the nature of books displayed on e-readers is so different from print, some adaptation was necessary—and not just for tables. Moran has written a rather long, well-reasoned explanation of the process she went through to make Nobilis read well in EPUB (and Kindle).

One of the major changes involved reducing the number of “flores,” epigrams from fictitious books included in sidebars as flavor text in the printed version. They were an important part of the book’s overall identity, But on the smaller screen, putting them all in would have been too disruptive, so Moran decided to go with a smaller number and use them as section breaks. There are also some minor differences in formatting, including using clickable links to represent footnotes rather than placing them at the sides of the page as in the PDF and printed book.

I’ve read through portions of the book on Ibis Reader, my iPod Touch, my iPad, and my Kobo Reader, and on the whole am very impressed with the quality of the translation. The links to footnotes and the art gallery section work very well (except, of course, on the Kobo, which still has no method of clicking on links). Some elements are not completely the same from version to version, but the core of rules and setting are present in both.

As for the game itself, it’s a little hard to describe. The idea is that characters take on the role of Powers, people who have been endowed with a spark of divinity allowing them to exercise dominion over concepts in the world. Someone might be the Power of rainfall, meaning he embodies and controls the concept of rain in the world. The game is set against a backdrop of a war for the future of all creation—the gods who gave the players’ their power are off fighting that battle, and the players are left in charge of taking care of the homefront while they’re away.

The game is very atmospheric, but the atmosphere has changed a bit since the second edition. The earlier editions were somewhat dark and moody, which some people can find a bit off-putting. The new edition is based in the same setting, but seems to recast everything to be somehow…cuter.

I don’t know if I’ll ever get to play this game, but I have had a lot of fun reading it. Moran has a marvelously active imagination, and has poured it out onto these digital pages in a very accessible way. And her explanation of how the conversion process worked is almost as fascinating as the book itself.

Although I got my copy free, if I hadn’t I would have had few qualms about paying $19.95 for this download given that it’s already a game I enjoy. With three different EPUB formats, three different PDF formats, and a Kindle version, all DRM-free, it’s really a bargain.

The second section may be of particular interest to the Teleread audience. Titled “Adapting to New and Evolving Technologies”, it contains reports from librarians and consultants over topics like the Kindle Lending Program, e-accessibility issues, and SLA 2010.

Via Resource Shelf

Although the e-books will be available for free, they will still be copyrighted. The National Academies are not government organizations, so their work is not in the public domain.

(Found via Slashdot.)

Although they lack metadata or search capabilities, these digital back-issues will still be a valuable resource for scholars, historians, and others with an interest in movie history.   

He points out that focusing on taking books down from file-sharing sites is only a short-term fix, and ultimately short-sighted, and suggests that publishers should start focusing on ounces of prevention rather than pounds of cure. He also notes that holding back on releasing e-books out of fears of piracy is counterproductive, as it removes the ability of consumers to buy legitimately the digital copy they desire—and if a book is crippled by too-restrictive DRM, it will also force consumers to look elsewhere.

In order to be successful, legal ebooks need to bring more value to the consumer than pirated ones and we can already see great progress in making this happen. The majority of legitimate ebooks are good quality because they are published by passionate people, who spend a lot of time and resource in making sure they publish worthwhile content. There are also opportunities to profit from additional content (merchandising, games etc) for blockbuster books, and we are seeing more and more examples of this being done very well.

McNab notes that Mobcast is focusing on doing that very thing—making it easier for consumers to find and buy the books they want, and experimenting with new business models to see what works best.

Those are some methods of fighting piracy that I can get behind, and that seem less like throwing money away than what traditional publishers have been doing. I’ve blogged a lot of articles that talk about fighting piracy by improving the experience and reducing prices for people who buy legitimately. Hopefully sooner or later the traditional e-book publishers and retailers will take notice.

(But I do have to quibble a bit with the about-the-author blurb that calls Mobcast, founded in 2007, “an early player in the eBook market”. I was buying e-books from Alexlit and Peanut Press back in the mid 1990s. 2007 is a little too late to call yourself an “early player.”)