From Boing Boing comes news of this year's Locus nominees, shared there because one of its editors, Cory Doctorow, is nominated. I am not a huge SF reader, so most of these have stayed off my radar. But if you go for that stuff, enjoy this list of good books! SCIENCE FICTION NOVEL • The Hydrogen Sonata, Iain M. Banks (Orbit US; Orbit UK) • Captain Vorpatril’s Alliance, Lois McMaster Bujold (Baen) • Caliban’s War, James S.A. Corey (Orbit US; Orbit UK) • 2312, Kim Stanley Robinson (Orbit US; Orbit UK) • Redshirts, John Scalzi (Tor; Gollancz) FANTASY NOVEL • The Killing Moon, N.K. Jemisin (Orbit US; Orbit UK) • The Drowning Girl, Caitlín R. Kiernan...

Could there possibly be a modern author better known for his extremely anti-DRM stance than Cory Doctorow? Certainly not many, at any rate. But Kobo owners visiting the WH Smith e-retail store and attempting to buy Doctorow's books would be forgiven for thinking otherwise: They've all been saddled with digital rights management. (Scroll down for the incriminating screen shot.) The Bangkok-based author Simon Royle brought this truly odd turn of events to our attention this morning; if you happen to be a regular reading of the KBoards, you may have already seen the thread Royle created just after 7 a.m. this morning. "I was happy...

According to the Huffington Post, three independent bookstores are filing a class action suit against Amazon and the "Big Six" publishers. Alyson Decker of Blecher & Collins PC, lead counsel acting for the bookstores, described DRM as "a problem that affects many independent bookstores." She said the complaint is still in the process of being served to Amazon and the publishers, and declined to state how it came about, or whether other bookstores had been approached to be party to the suit. "We are seeking relief for independent brick-and-mortar bookstores so that they would be able to sell open-source and DRM-free books that...

O'Reilly's annual Tools of Change for Publishing conference just got underway this morning at the New York Marriott Marquis in Manhattan. And while we unfortunately weren't able to make it New York for the event's first day, we will be on the scene, tweeting and reporting live, throughout days two and three. Today's big TOC draw, of course, is the (day-long) event being referred to as Author (R)evolution Day, which may very well end up being considered a revolutionary event in and of itself; the focus is on independent authors and the swiftly-growing self-publishing scene. As the TOC site describes it,...

What if Amazon wiped out all your Kindle books and refused to let you open another account? I don’t know what if any sins a customer committed, but such an Orwellian scenario is said to have actually happened. No, I’m not just talking about the remote deletion of 1984, but rather the mysterious zapping of the customer’s entire Kindle library. The most likely scenario here, as guessed at by BoingBoing, is that the Norwegian customer simply lived outside of the territories for authorized purchases. While I love content providers—I’m one myself—Amazon’s latest action shows why the Digital Public Library of America or another nonprofit needs to get into...

Chapters will Have the Kobo Mini & Glo September 30th (Good E-Reader) >>> Nintendo 3DS to get Bookstore in Japan (The Digital Reader) How Indie Bookstores Failed to Recognize the Buying Power of the Mass-Market Reader (Dear Author) Going Blind? DRM will Dim Your World (Boing Boing) ♦ Kindle Daily Deal: Bewitching by Jill Barnett (and) Mockingbird by Kathryn Erskine...

When the O'Reilly and TOR publishing companies announced their now-historic decisions to drop all DRM from their respective e-books, it's probably fair to say that the digital reading community felt nearly as vindicated as it did relieved, and elated. But for the most part, O'Reilly and TOR both serve reading demographics that are especially tech-savvy--the types of readers, in other words, who tend to have the strongest opinions about the uselessness and frustrations of DRM. In a sense, it probably would have been even more surprising if they hadn't eventually changed their DRM policies. At the end of August, though, Harvard Business Review Press opened its own e-book store, and proudly...

Public.Resource.Org archivist Carl Malamud has a guest post on BoingBoing talking about a use case for e-books if ever there was one. However, for this project he is actually starting out with paper—thirty pounds of it. Malamud writes about the peculiar phenomenon of secret, payment-required laws that are on the books all over the United States. The laws begin as privately-produced technical public safety standards. They are then incorporated into federal law because it’s more convenient to do so than to come up with something that comprehensive all over again. However, the companies that produce the standards...

  For ten years, Phil Gyford has been republishing Samuel Pepys's diaries online in one-entry-per-day chunks. On the way, he and a growing community of readers, historians, literary scholars and enthusiasts have annotated Pepys's legendary accounts of life in 17th century London. In this presentation, Phil walks us through the most surprising and interesting moments in his decade of Pepysianism, from random Twitterers who've taken on the personae of other characters in Pepys's saga to Google mashups of Pepys's London. I saw him present this earlier this year at The Story in London and...

Mark Frauenfelder, editor in chief of MAKE Magazine, has posted at BoingBoing that all back-issues of MAKE are now available for purchase in DRM-free PDF format. The price is $9.99 per issue, or all 24 standard plus 2 special issues thus far for $199.99. This is $5 less per issue than the paper copies, though a number of BoingBoing commenters still feel it is too expensive. Going forward, MAKE also offers digital-only subscriptions for $9.99 per year (4 issues), or print plus digital for $34.95....

From BoingBoing: Here's a beautiful display of the portable libraries that were once supplied to Michigan's lighthouse keepers; click through for a partial bibliography of titles, including "MY APINGI KINGDOM: WITH LIFE IN THE GREAT SAHARA, AND SKETCHES OF THE CHASE OF THE OSTRICH, HYENA." "In 1876 portable libraries were first introduced in the Light-House Establishment and furnished to all light vessels and inaccessible offshore light stations with a selection of reading materials. These libraries were contained in a portable wooden case, each with a printed listing of the contents posted inside the door. Proper arrangements were made...

Here are two important posts from Boing Boing about what is going on behind the closed doors of a government in the pockets of the entertainment industry. Latest leaked draft of secret copyright treaty: US trying to cram DRM rules down the world's throats Michael Geist writes in with the latest news on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), the secret, closed-door copyright treaty that will bring US-style copyright rules (and worse) to the whole world. Particularly disturbing is the growing support for "three-strikes" copyright rules that would disconnect whole families from the Internet if one member of...