In my email this morning, I received a notice from Quora that I had been invited to submit an answer for the following question: Are there any services or business models in which one can trade paperback or hardcover books for digital books, without having to pay full price again? After typing my answer, I thought it was interesting enough to repost here: Not that I've ever heard of—or no model that is legitimate under copyright law, anyway. The idea has been suggested by a number of people as something that publishers should...

Bloomberg Businessweek has a five-page profile on former publisher turned literary agent Larry Kirshbaum, who Amazon picked to head up its publishing division that is stirring up so much fear and loathing in the publishing industry. (The title of the piece, “Amazon’s Hit Man”, and the cover of the magazine issue featuring a burning book with the all-caps block-letter legend “AMAZON WANTS TO BURN THE BOOK BUSINESS” might be taken as some indication of that.) For all that the title and magazine cover are a bit (literally) inflammatory, the article is a reasonably balanced look at Kirshbaum’s career and...

Jeremy Greenfield reports on the Digital Book World site that Matteo Berlucchi, CEO of social e-tailer Anobii, is urging publishers to drop DRM restrictions on their e-books as a way to fight Amazon. In a DBW slideshow presentation, Berlucchi argues that the big e-vendors use device choice to lock in consumers, licensing rather than selling e-books and offering inferior functionality to that of paper books. Berlucchi calls attention to the actions of the music industry in recent years, eliminating DRM and permitting ownership of music—you can now even import songs bought on one platform into a competitor’s via cloud...

On new Silicon Valley news startup Pando Daily, ex-TechCruncher Sarah Lacey posts an email she got from an anonymous publishing industry insider who sees Amazon gunning for the publishing industry with a long-term plan to put big publishers out of business. By selling books at slim or even negative profit margins, this insider notes, Amazon is targeting publishers own profit margins—if Amazon can convince consumers that books are “supposed to be” cheaper, publishers will have to lower prices sooner or later. And Amazon also has its sights on the books that earn the publishing industry most of its money—celebrity...

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...

Ars Technica has a look at the current filings and legal strategies in the Google Books case. There are three current cases against Google—two 2005 cases involving publishers and authors, which are the ones involved in the settlement that failed after four years of work, and one in 2010 from photographers and illustrators. Google appears close to a separate settlement in the publishers’ case. But Google is likely to carry on its battle with the authors, photographers, and other individual copyright holders. Some authors consider the fight a matter of principle. And even if Google convinced...

Mike Shatzkin has another long and thoughtful post, this time arguing that publishers should change the accounting methods they use in order to pay authors more for sales of e-books. At the moment, publishers count the 70% of e-book cover price they keep under the agency model as their revenue, and pay authors a percentage of that revenue. If authors are paid a 25% royalty, for instance, 25% of the 70% works out to 17.5% of the e-book’s cover price. Shatzkin argues that publishers should instead call the whole price revenue, and account for the 30% as a “cost...

Apparently Google has gotten fed up over the failure of the settlement talks in the copyright lawsuits over Google Books, because it has begun to move toward actually litigating the case. An article in TechWorld notes Google has notified Judge Denny Chin that it plans to file a motion to ask that parts of the 2005 copyright infringement lawsuit and a related 2010 lawsuit be dismissed. [Judge Chin] set a deadline of Dec. 23 for Google to file the dismissal motions. The plaintiffs will have until Jan. 23 to respond to the motions, and Google...

Mike Masnick at Techdirt has more details and commentary on why Ray Bradbury’s novels are are becoming available as e-books. Bradbury is noted for his dislike of new technologies, such as video games and the Internet, and indeed has said that Fahrenheit 451 is not actually about censorship but about new technologies such as television that distract people from reading books. But at this point, Bradbury didn’t have much choice—his contracts were coming due, and with e-books at 20% of the market and growing, publishers now require e-book rights as part of new contracts. In other words, if he...

When he was reading Haruki Murakami’s new 944-page book 1Q84 on his Kindle, Gizmodo blogger Mat Honan encountered an unpleasant surprise. One of the best-known features of the Kindle is its WhisperSync, that enables readers to stop reading on one device and pick up where they left off on another. To Honan’s annoyance, when he tried to load the book into a second device he got an error message explaining that the book is only licensed to read on one device at a time. (He also found he couldn’t share passages from the book on Amazon’s social sharing service, but...

At GigaOm, Matthew Ingram writes that our relationship with e-books is “too complicated.” He cites the example of some innovative new e-book-related social-networking services, OpenMargin and Readmill, which can only work with DRM-free e-books—meaning they will not work with most of what Amazon and Barnes & Noble sell. (They’d go great with Baen books, though!) The ability to “share” e-books with friends is not uniformly available, either, often locked down by publishers who want people to buy their own copies. And vendor lock-in means that e-book sellers have a vested interest in making their e-books as incompatible as possible...

Perspectives on e-book piracy from outside the industry can be interesting. On “Tobold’s MMORPG Blog,” blogger Tobold posits that Amazon doesn’t seem to be too worried about e-book piracy if it’s selling its Kindles at a loss. He writes: Thus I wonder whether people reading eBooks are inherently more honest than people consuming other forms of electronic content. Maybe it is only people of a certain age and social class that are interested in books at all. This summer, during the London riots, the only shops that weren't looted were book stores. The underprivileged young people...