Kio Stark on The Literary Platform has an interesting essay looking at the success of “pay what you want” payment schemes that have been tried in the last few years for digital media. Musicians have released albums, studios have released computer games, authors have released e-books, and so on under a model whereby consumers pay whatever they want to pay in return for the download. Stark likes the model, but suggests a change in terminology—the model should not be “pay what you want,” she feels, but rather “pay what you can.” In other words, pay a fair price...

For an author to “build a community” with his readers has become a popular catch phrase in recent times. In particular, Richard Nash has talked at length about how community-based publishing is the main purpose of his new venture, Cursor. When you have a close relationship with your readers, the thinking goes, they are much more likely to buy your stuff. However, community-building can have a darker side as well, as this March editorial by Guy Gavriel Kay, one of my favorite authors, reveals. Kay talks about how some authors, such as George R.R. Martin and Patrick...

Richard Nash, who used to run Soft Skull Press, has founded a new imprint - Cursor. Richard also has an absolutely fascinating accent - though I'm not sure that's quite relevant to his new venture. Recently he published an article in The Literary Platform which is well worth reading: I’ve spilled much ink, and darkened many pixels describing the community dimension of Cursor, but I’ve had relatively little to say about its publishing dimension, in particular as it relates to established writers and the traditional publishing infrastructure. I have mentioned that we would be doing some classic indie publishing,...

While it is true that C-Span is not a “book”, it is a living repository of history. Over 160,000 hours of video footage of our government at work, spanning 23 years of network history. And C-Span has now made all of that footage available for free, at C-SpanVideo.org. This is every bit as valuable a resource as the Internet Archive—and searchable, too. Including on e-book related matters. For instance, searching on “Digital Rights Management” brought up a number of results, including this clip of Soft Skull Books founder and Cursor developer Richard Nash (who we covered...