Crain’s New York Business has a profile of Tor’s plan for a DRM-free e-book store. (The article is paywalled, but you can read it via Google News search.) It summarizes the situation with the DoJ antitrust lawsuit, and points to that suit and the success of the DRM-free Harry Potter e-book store as the reason publishers are seriously considering DRM-free options. That said, there is some new material here. Tor founder Tom Doherty and manager of science fiction Patrick Nielsen Hayden talk about wanting to build the kind of “diverse retail economy” you see in bookstores, and are in...

Tor/Forge has announced, via a posting to blog Tor.com, the impending creation of a direct-to-consumer DRM-free e-book store, to carry SF books from Tor and fantasy books from Forge. The store is scheduled to go live sometime in “the summer of 2012,” which meshes with Tor’s prior announcement that all its books would be going DRM-free by July. “This isn’t in lieu of the existing online retailers, but in addition to them,” said publisher Tom Doherty. “We think there’s room for all kinds of retail models in the growing e-book field—and we aim in particular to...

PaidContent reports that a judge has stayed an e-book price-fixing class-action case against publishers Hachette and HarperCollins on the grounds that the publishers are close to settling with state governments over the matter, and the states’ lawsuits trump the class action. Apart from Macmillan and Penguin, who are fighting the suit, Simon & Schuster wasn’t named because it has not signed a formal settlement memorandum yet. This is hardly a surprise, of course, but it’s understandable that the plaintiffs would find this a bit disappointing; damage awards would likely be higher in a jury trial than in a state...

In what must be some of the least surprising news ever, one day after Tor’s US imprint, Tor/Forge, announced it was going DRM-free by July, Tor UK has just made the same announcement. It’s pretty clear they were planning this all along; I expect the reason they staggered them was to try to get two separate news bumps from it. At any rate, this should at least satisfy the folks asking about it in the comments thread on Charlie Stross’s blog post yesterday....

Yesterday was a day for reactions to the Tor DRM-free announcement, for sure. John Scalzi has a post in which he applauds the move, while featuring a quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden in which pnh indicates that Tor will in no way be scaling back its efforts to fight piracy just because it’s dropping DRM. Scalzi feels this is a victory for people who “just want to own their damn books” and suspects that other publishing houses will be following suit. Charlie Stross has another lengthy post to his blog, following up on his post last week about Amazon’s...

So, perhaps this isn’t really very news-related, but it’s a pet peeve that’s been bothering me for the last few days: John Sargent’s statement on the DoJ agency pricing lawsuit. I’m not bothered so much by what he’s saying in it (though I think his prefacing it with “Dear authors, illustrators, and agents,” without a word for the consumer still shows just how out of touch he is with the people who ultimately buy his company’s books), but by its appearance in another context. If you go to the blog Tor.com, the very first post you find on the...

According to Blomberg, the DoJ has filed an anti-trust suit against Apple, Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster in the New York Federal District Court.  The suit alleges collusion in ebook pricing. The article doesn't say much more, as all parties have denied comment. From the TOR website comes this statement by John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan: Dear authors, illustrators and agents: Today the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Macmillan’s US trade publishing operation, charging us with collusion in the implementation of the agency model for e-book pricing. The charge is civil, not criminal. Let me start by saying that...

Does self-publishing represent a threat to traditional publishers, or perhaps an opportunity? A number of people in the publishing industry seem dismissive of self-publishing writers or their numbers. But Philip Jones of FutureBook thinks that this is a mistake. He notes that readers who buy cheap self-published books will be spending time reading them that they might otherwise have spent reading more expensive works from traditional publishers. What strikes me most about indie writers, however, is not what they write, but how they publish it. Konrath may be a 'downmarket' writer for some, but he is...

Harper Collins’ takes a different approach from its competitors in its quest to ripoff Aussie readers.  Rather than massively overcharging Australians to prop up their foreign operations, they have gone for a more mixed, global price hike strategy.  This does, of course, involve over-charging Australians.  But hey, why not take a global stance by overcharging everyone.  Not that this should surprise anyone given HarperCollins is owned by Rupert Murdoch’s communications empire.   The price samples below come from an Amazon advanced ebook search by entering Voyager and eliminating the odd (not relevant titles) and books that did not have both Australian and...

Several days ago I wrote an article about the astonishing price hikes inflicted on Australians by French usurers Hachette Livre.  So large, in fact, that the average of the prices samples was: 164%.  Macmillan's hike? Much larger. Astoundingly, believe it or not, there are even bigger ripoff merchants at work.  Most ebook readers will easily be able to guess the villain here. In fact, Macmillan jacked up their prices not long before xmas – ONLY IN AUSTRALIA. Unlike Orbit, Macmillan's websites are absolutely terrible from a reader point of view, without even an obvious book list, except in the case of the...

From the press release: Pan Macmillan announced today a partnership between its new digital imprint, Macmillan Bello, and Curtis Brown, one of Europe’s largest and most prestigious literary agencies. Macmillan Bello was previously known as Macmillan Compass, the working title for the imprint when its forthcoming launch was first announced in June this year. Pan Macmillan’s Managing Director, Anthony Forbes Watson, says, “Why Bello? Because Bello is an African footballer, Spanish intellectual, Venezuelan poet and American bass guitarist as well as a big and beautiful modern font, and the way an Italian expresses admiration: Bello is hidden talent discovered – and admired!” From...

The following is the full press release issued by the law firm in this important lawsuit.  As a former corporate lawyer who used to teach antitrust law to my fellow employees, I must say that I'm surprised that it took so long for someone to do this.  On its face, the current arrangement seems to be a pretty clear violation of the antitrust laws related to price fixing and certainly also contains strong elements of conspiracy.  I would be pretty nervous if I were the publishers' lawyers. SAN FRANCISCO – Hagens Berman, a consumer rights class-action law firm, today announced it...