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 her right arm at the end of last year. I’m thankful I have a day job (even if it meant I did have to work today) and the opportunity to write here. And I’m thankful I live in the first world where all I have to worry about are little annoyances like working on a holiday or missing the bus, and not big things like what to do if I get sick or where my next meal is coming from.

As this is an e-book-related blog, though, I like to write about what e-book-related things at this time of year—here are my posts from 2009, 2010, 2011. And I’m still thankful for many of the same things, of course—the prevalence of free or cheap e-books without DRM in multiple formats, the widespread availability of e-reading platforms of all descriptions, the ever-decreasing price of e-readers…for someone who remembers the old days, not a lot changes from year to year.

There are some new things, though. I’m thankful the Justice Department has brought three of the Agency Five publishers to heel in the matter of agency pricing, and is going after Apple and the other two. I’m thankful that the low-budget Android tablet scene is finally getting some good models.

We’re still a long way off from perfect. We still have the niggling little annoyances of DRM, obnoxious pricing, and territorial restrictions. But the wider e-books are adopted, the more voices will be calling out for those rough edges to be smoothed away. And who knows, maybe sooner or later they will be.

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