If you needed further evidence of just how out of touch with reality SOPA supporters can be, I just found this post by copyright attorney Lisa Alter decrying the fact that “[the] voice of the individual creator of intellectual property,” which is to say authors, has been largely “absent in the mainstream media debate.” She is coming down firmly on the pro-SOPA side of the debate, with little gems like this: The position of the anti-SOPA activists is antithetical to the principle of protection — for authors, that is — mandated in the Constitution of the...

There’s a long-running argument about whether publishers consider readers to be their true “customers”. It’s probably rooted in the way that, before e-books came along and changed the market, middle-man distributors were how publishers sold the vast majority of their books. With the exception of things like order forms in the back of paperbacks, publishers didn’t need to worry about how to sell books to readers—the stores those middle-men turned around and sold books to handled that. They could concentrate on selling books to the middle-men instead and not think about the reader except in terms of making their products as...

John Scalzi makes a series of posts on his blog called “The Big Idea”, in which he lets an author discuss their latest works. Lately, he has gotten fed up with people leaving comments on these posts saying that they won’t buy the book because the e-book is too expensive. He posted to his blog today announcing that he would be deleting any such comments he came across from now on, Scalzi writes: I think it’s important to understand that eBooks are not special snowflakes; they’re just books in electronic form. As someone who prefers to...

FutureBook’s Robin Harvie has a post speculating on whether e-books will soon be more widely adopted to send review copies. The costs for sending review copies of physical books can run into the hundreds of pounds for just a single book, and this would seem to be an area where e-review copies could save publishers a bundle. However, there isn’t a system in place yet to allow this. At the moment there is no structure in place that allows review copies to be delivered directly to the reviewer as an eBook. Publishers rightly furrow their brow...

Lately, I have been working my way through the works of science fiction writer H. Beam Piper. Piper was one of the great science fiction writers of the fifties and early sixties, and, tragically, he committed suicide right before his works' popularity really took off. Perhaps as a result of the disorder brought about by his untimely demise, the copyrights on many of Piper's works were never renewed. They now reside in the public domain, where they can be read for free on sites like Project Gutenberg, or the Baen Best Of Gutenberg Science Fiction CD. Recently, writer...

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...

John Scalzi has pointed out a problem with Barnes & Noble’s site search feature brought on by fly-by-night self-publishing firms. When you type “Scalzi” into the Barnes & Noble website search box, the first page of results is cluttered with what appear to be illicit republications of Scalzi’s works, but are actually something arguably worse. They are 32-page compilations of Wikipedia articles about Scalzi’s work, bundled by self-publishing firm “Books LLC” and sold for $12.72. (If you should for some reason want a printed compilation of Wikipedia articles about Scalzi’s works, you can get it a lot cheaper...

A few months ago, John Scalzi complained vociferously about the e-ARCs that some publishers try to send him. Frequently these ARCs would require him to jump through hoops—something that you really don’t want to do to the person you’re hoping will give a good review to your book. But it turns out that Scalzi is a good deal warmer to the idea of e-reading in general. He posted recently to his blog about his experiences reading with the Nook that a friend gave him as a gift, and also with his iPad, iPod Touch, and Droid X smartphone....

A couple of months ago, John Scalzi held a contest on his blog, taking entries for stories, plays, or other creative content based upon a thoroughly ridiculous painting depicting Wil Wheaton in a clown-face sweater riding a unicorn pegasus kitten attacking an ogre John Scalzi. The winners of the contest are now being offered as a freely-downloadable, DRM-free e-book in a variety of formats. It is not necessary to pay to download it; however, Scalzi and the others involved in its creation are requesting that downloaders donate $5 to help fight lupus. All proceeds from this chapbook will...

Tor.com has a couple of e-reading-related posts up today, as it nears its two-year anniversary on July 20th. First, Tor.com is joining the throng of other websites and news sources that are developing apps for the iPad, and has posted a call for iPad developers. If you would like to try out, email them your résumé. Hopefully Tor will remember that their app experience has to beat not other blogs’ or magazines’ experience, but the experience of browsing their blog via the web. Commenters are questioning the decision given that the iPad’s web browser is quite...

I’m about a week and a half behind the curve on this, but I’ve just noticed that John Scalzi and Wil Wheaton are putting on a fanfic contest. Write a 400-to-2000-word story based on a rather…remarkable painting featuring Scalzi and Wheaton by the end of the month, and you could win 10-cents-a-word payment for and publication of the story, plus a collection of books from Subterranean Press. Winning stories will be sold in chapbook form to benefit the Lupus Alliance of America. The entry deadline is 11:59 p.m. Eastern, June 30th 2010, with one entry allowed per...