Although this is not directly about e-books, it uses the economics of digital media in a way similar to some e-book charity efforts, and reiterates an important point about digital piracy. Back in May, I reported on the “Humble Indie Bundle”, a pack of five games that a group of indie developers was offering for Windows, Mac, and Linux as a name-your-own-price download. The group of developers has come out with a second bundle, the “Humble Indie Bundle #2”, and once more the proceeds are being split among the developers and charities EFF and Child’s Play. (This time,...

At TechCrunch, Devin Coldewey has an interesting (and long) article speculating on the possible future of how Internet readers will pay for web content. Coldewey believes that a micropayment system will eventually arise, once someone has figured out how to run it with low enough overhead that payments of a few cents at a time are profitable. Then there will be several tiers of payment—per article, per day, per month, and per year—depending on the type of content and tastes of its readers. He also thinks that, after the dust settles, payments will be on a per-network rather than...

E-books are not the only electronic medium attracting writers. The New York Observer has an article about journalists and novelists migrating to the video game field. Not that authors working in other media is necessarily new; prose writers have dabbled in theatre, movies, and television for as long as those media have been around. But the video game storytelling form brings new sets of challenges to writers—as well as new opportunities for creativity.. In addition to working on a project involving a major movie license, [journalist and fiction writer Tom] Bissell and his partner, Rob Auten—who,...

The Black Library, the publisher of tie-in novels and audiobooks for Games Workshop’s Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000 role-playing game settings, is going digital. To promote the event, the publisher has been giving away some free digital content every Friday for the last four weeks, with something more to go up on the site this coming Friday. Available thus far are the novels First & Only and Nightbringer, the first issue of Hammer and Bolter magazine, and an mp3 of the first disc of the Horus Rising audiobook. The e-books are downloadable in MobiPocket or EPUB format, and are...

In some of my previous posts, I have looked at the computer game industry (especially Valve, with its “Steam” digital distribution service and focus on customer service that can even turn pirates into paying customers) with an eye to the examples it sets for the e-book and publishing trades. It turns out I’m not the only one who thinks like that. Paul Rhodes has posted on the Bookseller’s “FuturEBook” blog about the uses of new tablet and smartphone technology that he saw at the European “GamesCom” video game industry trade and consumer show. Rhodes notes that, perhaps surprisingly,...

Recently, Valve took a page from stores that release free e-books, such as Baen or Amazon: it released a complete game, and all necessary development materials for the game, entirely free through its Steam digital distribution system. Alien Swarm, from the development team hired to work on Left 4 Dead and Portal 2, does for the Ridley Scott/James Cameron bug-hunt genre what Left 4 Dead did for George Romero and zombies. Players take on the role of one of four space marines investigating a colony overrun with slimy alien creatures. It is a complete, if short...

Given that only yesterday I wrote about how Valve is converting pirates into paying customers with its computer game distribution system Steam, it seems to be good timing to note that an e-book on the sociological and cultural significance of video gaming can now be read for free on-line. This Gaming Life by Jim Rossignol is a collection of essays looking at different aspects of the gaming experience. It is posted online at the University of Michigan Library’s website in HTML format, under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works license. (While it does not seem to be available...

I’ve previously reported on computer game studio/distributor Valve’s take on fighting piracy by providing better customer service with its Steam distribution platform, and pointed out that e-book publishers and stores could stand to learn a great deal from what Valve is doing and the success it is having. Here is another example. TechCrunch published an anonymous letter from a reader talking about how Steam changed him from a video game pirate to a legitimate consumer—and did so in spite of the DRM restrictions on many of the games sold through Steam. The reader confesses that a large...

E-books aren’t the only way to tell stories on the Internet. On-line role-playing has been going on for as long as one person has been able to type words that are then seen by another person elsewhere in the world. Of course, there are all sorts of constantly-evolving tools for doing on-line role-play. Ironically, one of the most recent such tools actually looks fairly old. Called “Sleep is Death” (or “Geisterfahrer”—”Ghost Driver,” a German slang term for a driver who does something really stupid), this two-player game uses sprites, a very old computer graphic technique. The game...

Taking advantage of the zero-marginal-cost nature of electronic media distribution, a group of independent computer game developers has teamed up to offer the “Humble Indie Bundle”, a bundle of five games (including the award-winning World of Goo) for Windows, Macintosh, or Linux as a set-your-own-price download. Purchasers can choose how much of their purchase contribution they want to go to the games’ developers and how much to go to the non-profits Child’s Play and the Electronic Frontier Foundation. The default is to split it fifty-fifty, but if purchasers want it all to go to the developers, or...

In a May 3 post on the ClassicBattleTech.com news and announcements page (no specific item permalink that I can find, unfortunately), role-playing game publisher Catalyst Game Labs announces: With the launch of the iPad (along with the Kindle, Sony Reader and others), electronic fiction reading devices have reached a critical mass. Catalyst is enthusiastically embracing this new medium and launching epub formats for both BattleTech and Shadowrun fiction. These e-books include both old titles and new (I found out about this from a friend who was frustrated that the upcoming title A Bonfire...

While it was tempting to grace this post with a picture of blue-skinned aliens, I’m actually talking about a quite different Pandora than the one depicted in James Cameron’s Avatar (though the humans in that movie did use electronic tablets for data display, complete with a very nice user interface for syncing where the image was simply slid off of the desktop and onto a tablet a la Minority Report). After residing in Development Hell for some time, it appears the Pandora open-source Linux-powered hand-held game console is nearly ready to ship. The device will have a 4.3”...