Over at the blog Taleist, Steven Lewis has posted a half hour audio interview with Jeff Rutherford, founder of Delabarre Publishing. Rutherford works with authors, freelance writers for hire, and layout and design experts to produce titles in niche cateogries (so far joke books and travel), then uses his own PR and marketing experience to make sure they're discoverable by those customers who might buy them. Delabarre put its first title up for sale in August 2010, and over the past eleven months has sold over 7,000 copies, most of them at the $2.99 price point. In the interview, Rutherford talks...

On the satire site McSweeney’s, novelist James Warner has taken a crack at that favorite discussion topic of publishing right now, the future of the book. His predictions start out relatively sensible (“2020: All Books Will Be Cross-Platform and Interactive”) and then go right off the deep end. It’s a hilarious article, and does not forget to poke fun at that favorite luddite cause, the smell of books. If you want to know more about the way the future of books probably will not go, check it out. (Found via eBookNewser.)...

Oh wow, the schadenfreude just keeps on coming. As one of the requirements in the copyright lawsuits it files, Righthaven requires that offenders surrender their domain name registrations. (One judge recently told Righthaven off for this, stating that there was no foundation in law or precedent for such a demand, but that didn’t stop Righthaven from continuing to include the demand in new lawsuits.) Now Righthaven’s domain name registrar, GoDaddy, has yanked and redirected Righthaven’s domain, Righthaven.com, for providing invalid whois information. The ICANN requires that domain owners must maintain valid contact information, retrievable via the “whois” command,...

The Righthaven case just keeps getting better and better. Ars Technica had a nice piece yesterday summing up recent developments (Techdirt also had a series of Righthaven-related pieces here, here, here, and here). In short, the EFF succeeded in having the court unseal a document describing the relationship between Righthaven and Stephens Media, the newspaper publisher who was Righthaven’s first customer. It turns out that, based on that document, Stephens is just a little more than that. Stephens splits revenues from the lawsuits with Righthaven 50/50, and has the whip hand in deciding when and if any lawsuits...

Ah, the warm and fuzzy feelings of schadenfreude that come from watching copyright troll Righthaven dig itself in deeper. Righthaven, for those who haven’t been following, is a company whose business model is to look for people quoting or reposting articles from newspapers on-line and then buy the copyright to those articles from the newspapers and file a lawsuit. They’ve filed over 250 lawsuits so far, and reportedly settled with dozens of defendants to the tune of about $400,000. Earlier today, I noticed an article in Ars Technica (one of whose reporters was actually briefly a target of an...

In response to John Scalzi’s e-publishing bingo card, Flickr user Shmuel 510 put together a “Traditional Publishing Bingo Card” containing the arguments he’s tired of hearing in favor of traditional publishing. Like Scalzi’s card, it’s still missing some (in particular, the “smell of books” question again goes unmentioned) but also like that card, it’s particularly dead on in what it does have. It was rather hard picking just four squares to excerpt for this posting. (Found via BoingBoing.)...

John Scalzi has created a hilarious “Electronic Publishing Bingo” card, of which I’ve excerpted the first four squares at left. Go to the site to see the whole thing. Scalzi notes that he is not himself hostile to e-publishing (given that he owes his discovery and subsequent career to a couple of self-e-published novels), but he does get tired of hearing the same arguments (from all sides) over and over again. Of course, there are still plenty of those talking points that there wasn’t room for on the card. As one commenter on BoingBoing points out, it’s missing the...

Wired’s satirist Lore Sjöberg applies his trademark sarcasm to Apple’s in-app subscription requirement and the resulting uproar. Many publishers reacted to the announcement by saying the terms would force them out of the digital-content business and back into print publishing, which is extremely profitable and will never become obsolete. He explains that Apple is able to get away with this because its competition is essentially ridiculous, and compares Steve Jobs to an ancient god of wealth and the underworld. Definitely hilarious....

xkcd has another great strip today that touches on e-books, pointing out that the march of technology may not have brought us what we expected, but it has brought us some amazing things nonetheless. Some of which involve e-books....

It’s no surprise that libraries are coming under increasing budget pressures, both in the US and the UK. If e-book publishers can ever get their act together so that libraries can make them available to more readers, the zero-marginal-cost nature of e-books plus the savings in physical space might be helpful in reducing some of those pressures. But in the meantime, one Virginia library system has produced a hilarious short film and music video to make it clear that, even in the midst of disheartening budgetary pressures, libraries will survive. ...

There still are some ways in which printed newspapers are better than the iPad. ...

Internet humorist Lore Sjöberg has been paying attention to the furors over “dying” industries that have been erupting lately—including one I haven’t covered here, since it didn’t have anything to do with e-books. A proposed deal between the RIAA and the National Association of Broadcasters/musicFIRST would see cell phone manufacturers required to put an FM tuner in every cell phone they make. Sjöberg thinks this is a great idea, but why stop there? He proposes some similar restrictions in the name of saving newspapers, mapmakers, and travel agents. (The newspaper one involves parakeets.) Related: ...