Here are 2003’s top stories in e-books and related areas, as picked by Jerry Justiano at Pocket PC eBooks Watch. I’ll follow up with my own list.
1. Burned Un-nobled: Barnes and Noble decision to close its ebook store.
2. Ooops She did it again: MS Update its protection. Then within a week, it was cracked again with Convert Lit 1.4.
3. Scan Scum Spam: Harry Potter 5 e-books available within days of worldwide release, thanks to the DRM buster Scanner technology.
4. Ooops: She did it again 2: Little Girl being Sued by RIAA for P2P.
5. AMazingone: Mazingo is dead.
The TeleRead take: My own top picks would be (1) evidence that OeBF president Steve Potash sabotaged the e-book standards work of this once-valuable group, which now deserves a quick mercy killing, (2) the Harry Potter piracy and the continued cracking of the Microsoft Reader format, yet more proof of the imbecility of the Draconian DRM pushed by Potash and allies, (3) the lowering of prices of e-books, A Good Thing even though we still don’t have enough of it, (4) the Supreme Court’s unfortunate ruling that Congress could keep extending copyrights, and (5) the RIAA’s war against individual file-sharers, a good “how not to” for e-book publishers.
With an apology for a little vanity, the sixth story would be an article in the Carnegie Reporter–an importance voice within the philanthropic establishment–describing TeleRead as an intriguing alternative to present business and legal models. Like me, the man who wrote it is pro copyright. We just want to see the concept modernized so it survives.
