Digiday has a brief piece on beleaguered online magazine Salon. I remember the days, a dozen years or so ago, when Salon was the face of the future of online news media. It had many fascinating feature articles. It was where I first learned about the Palm Pilot, and began my ever-since love affair with e-books and e-reading which ended up bringing me here. I still remember the big to-do around 1998 when Salon broke the story of an affair House Judiciary Committee Henry Hyde with a married woman in the 1960s, as Salon founder/editor David Talbot wanted...

A post by Cory Doctorow on BoingBoing (reprinted under a Creative Commons License): My latest Publishers Weekly column is "A Whip to Beat Us With," which describes how publishers who allow retailers to add DRM to their products hand those retailers a commercial advantage to exercise over the publishers themselves. Jim C. Hines’s e-books are marketed both through a big publisher and solo. The books that were re-priced by Amazon were his solo titles—unagented, and unrepresented by a major publisher. As an individual, Jim has no leverage over Amazon. Not so Macmillan, which controls a much larger number of SKUs and has much...

From boingboing: My latest Publishers Weekly column is "Digital Lysenkoism," a look at the bizarre internal forces that causes people who work at publishers to defend DRM, even though they know it doesn't work. I also recently chatted with a big-six digital strategist, who explained to me how his employer would soon be sending out all of its digital advanced reader copies (ARCs) as DRM-crippled PDFs. We shared a moment of incredulous silence at this. Most reviewers, after all, get hundreds of times more material than they can ever use. I literally get 100 books ...

From TorrentFreak: In short, Doctorow argues that the copyright industry’s fight isn’t against copying, but against general-purpose computers. As more and more devices we buy are general-purpose hardware devices with custom software designed to make that hardware do certain things out of the box, that custom software that drives the device is also custom-izable software that lets the hardware be recoded and repurposed to do completely different things. Shortly, we’ll see basically every industry trying to crack down on the freedom to tinker, to keep the products they sold us in the same state as they were before we owned them. This...

Here is another movie-related story (or a continuation of the same story) about YouTube rights abuses, with implications for all electronic forms of physical media (including e-books). In a follow-up to yesterday’s story about Universal’s allegedly fraudulent takedown of a Megaupload promotional video, Torrentfreak reports Megaupload has instructed its legal team to file suit against Universal over the matter. (One of my friends noted that, if Universal really did do what Megaupload accuses, it should also be liable for criminal charges of perjury.) It will be interesting to see what happens. Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow’s latest column in the...

I’ve touched on the “freemium” philosophy of giving some content away for free and charging for extras before, but here’s a post on AllThingsD with some interesting new findings touching on video gaming. It covers a study by Flurry, an analytics provider for mobile games on Apple and Android devices, on the spending habits of freemium gamers. (Found via Slashdot.) Of the people who play freemium games on iOS or Android devices, the study reveals, most will never spend money on the games at all—only 3% are likely to do so—but within that 3%, the average transaction is $14...

In his latest column for the Guardian, nerd blogger/novelist extraordinaire Cory Doctorow reviews the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and finds it to be lacking in features for a putative iPad replacement. In particular, he dislikes the way that it uses a proprietary docking cable just like Apple, lacks the micro-SD card reader in the wi-fi version, and requires a proprietary application for file transfer rather than acting like a USB hard drive when connected the way most other tablets do. Doctorow mentions that he had high hopes for the Galaxy Tab because it was based on Android, and Google allowed...

Cory Doctorow’s latest column on The Guardian talks about ways to convince people to pay for “legitimate” products rather than downloading free versions off the Internet. He points out that many companies are trying to fight piracy using mostly sticks, when in fact that carrots would work better in some cases. In the article, Doctorow examines the pros and cons of each method—some good, some bad—and how content creators are succeeding or failing at applying them. The methods include: Buy this or you’ll get in trouble Buy this because it’s the right...

At Tor.com, Stefan Raets has written an interesting look at Cory Doctorow’s group-funded self-published book project With a Little Help. (We mentioned it back in October.) The project is a short story collection, published as a Creative Commons project with various limited-edition versions aimed at collectors, and less-expensive DRM-free electronic and audio versions aimed at people who prefer them. Doctorow has a history of releasing e-books for free under CC licenses at the same time as he publishes print editions for pay. Some people will say “despite,” and others will say “thanks to,” but...

On Publishing Perspectives Daniel Kalder talks with Scott Walker, president of Brain Candy LLC and one of the people behind the Creative Commons shared-universe project Runes of Gallidon. Walker believes that there is a gap between creators of commercial media, and the fans who enjoy the commercial media enough to create their own derivative works based on it and distribute them for free. He thinks the gap can be bridged, with financial benefits for all. In Walker’s proposed “transmedia” projects like Runes of Gallidon, there are gatekeepers on the world to make sure that any prospective new additions fit...

Mike Shatzkin has published an interesting pair of posts to his blog talking about the commonly-held belief that DRM is supposed to prevent piracy. Shatzkin explains in the first post why he feels that this is actually a misconception, and that even if DRM does nothing to deter piracy, it can protect sales through preventing casual sharing. Shatzkin refers to the O’Reilly interview with Brian O’Leary, with whom Shatzkin shares an office, about the effects of piracy on sales. He notes that O’Leary feels DRM is ineffective against preventing piracy, but it does prevent casual sharing. ...

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...