According to the Wall Street Journal they have revised their hardware platform for a second time. They will be offering, among others, a $99 5-inch color debice this fall

“The iPad disrupted pricing strategy for everyone in the e-reader market, and after the price wars with Barnes and Noble and Amazon, everyone’s trying to differentiate themselves from a price-point perspective,” Tony Antolino, senior vice president of DMC Worldwide, said. “We decided to do a revision of our hardware positioning.”

Other rulings give users the right to copy videogames for the purpose of researching the quality and type of security measures embedded therein — obviously the main reason people copy videogames — and the right to turn your electronic book into an electronic audio book, assuming there isn’t a legal audio book version already on the market.

I’m very excited about that last one, because at long last I can have A Million Random Digits With 100,000 Normal Deviates read to me to sleep at night.

Don’t miss his list of “rulings that the Library of Congress refused to make, on the grounds that nobody actually proposed them.” Perhaps Sjöberg could propose some of these himself next time around.



With Andrew Wylie “threatening” (via FT.com, Registration Required) to expand his exclusive book deal with Amazon.com (OdysseyEditions) we thought some of you might find it both useful and interesting to review the Wylie Agency client list. The only thing we don’t know is how current this list is. It’s long, contains the names of MANY well-known authors, or their estates.

Access the Complete List

From the Financial Times:

Wylie theatens broad digital expansion (Registration Required for Full Text, Free)

Andrew Wylie, the literary agent whose exclusive deal with Amazon.com last week stunned the publishing world, has threatened a broad expansion of his digital publishing business to include up to 2,000 titles if traditional publishers refuse to improve digital royalties.

Mr Wylie has established a digital publishing company called Odyssey Editions and struck a deal with Amazon, giving the online bookseller exclusive access to 20 classics including John Updike’s Rabbit series and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man for a two-year period.

Access the Complete Article

Jeff Vogel is the developer behind a number of independent games (perhaps the equivalent of self-published e-books in the video game world) including the Avernum series and Nethergate: Resurrection. And, though he’s nervous about speaking up about it (because he relies on his games to feed his family, after all), he has blogged about three relatively rare cases where he’s more or less all right with people pirating his games.

Though the blog post is about Vogel’s video games, these points could apply equally to music, movies…or, indeed, e-books, if their creators felt the same way. (Though, of course, Vogel does not claim to speak for anyone but himself and his own games in his post.)

One of those cases has to do with computer gaming in the third world, where disparities in income and currency mean that even the $25 to $28 to legitimately buy a copy of his games are beyond most gamers’ reach. Vogel writes that occasionally such gamers email him in broken English pleading for a registration key.

Although he deletes such emails unanswered, given that he doesn’t want to encourage asking him for free keys when he needs to sell the game to feed his family, Vogel does hope that the kids went ahead and pirated his game. There really isn’t any other way for them to get to play it, after all.

Vogel’s second case has to do with the non-monetary rewards that come from distribution of his game—knowing that it is out there influencing other peoples’ lives. And whereas the 5,000-copy target for the game to be paid for is relatively small, if he imagines that 9 copies were pirated for every copy sold, he gets warm fuzzies from knowing that for each game there are 50,000 people out there having a good time because of him.

And his third case has to do with the ongoing recession that is hitting so many people in the wallet right now. Vogel writes:

Someone who is facing long-term unemployment and bankruptcy probably should not pay for my game. And, in that case, if stealing my game gives them a temporary reprieve from their misery (and there’s a lot of misery out there right now), I’m cool with that. I’m happy to help. These are my fellow citizens, and I want to help out how I can.

Though he does add that if someone can pay, they should pay—it’s not cool to take it for free just because you can.

Vogel closes by suggesting that pirates should try to pay for at least one game per year, because paying for games is what helps more games like them get developed (and because doing the right thing just feels good).

Who knows, perhaps they might do so via Steam.

(Found via Slashdot.)

Related: The ‘Humble Indie Bundle’ and its implications for piracy

Andrew Wylie plans to expand Amazon backlist publishing effort by Chris Meadows

Kindle 3 vs Kindle 2 in size plus hands-on report by PC World’s Perenson – photos also by Andrys Basten

iBook buyers beware – no refund or exchange even if your book has been updated!

iPad e-book app review: DiceBook by Chris Meadows

What is the real platform for ereading? Probably smartphones

Disintermediation Happens – Agents and the new reality by Eoin Purcell

Authors Guild on the economics of the Wylie/Amazon agreement – a 300% increase in author income?; may give Amazon too much power

LibriVox – free audiobooks in the public domain

A secret weapon for authors by Joanna

Wired Gadget Lab on the iPad sheet music page turner foot switch

B&N CEO William Lynch said: “American consumers want to try to hold gadgets before they purchase them”. The article quotes an industry consultant as saying that almost 2 million Kindles have been sold as opposed to more than 600,000 Nooks. Of course the Kindle has had a 2 year head start so this isn’t quite a fair comparison.

Evidently the service is not supposed to be something that would merely replicate a print newspaper on the iPad, and would have its own new staff and would borrow the resources, but not the content, of the New York Post, Dow Jones and external news sources.

A decision is expected by the autumn.

Conceptually, this appears similar to the $300 DIY Book Scanner I covered in December—they both use two cameras to snap two facing pages at a time. The BookLiberator looks a little more tedious, comparing the two: with the DIY scanner, you just tilt up a hinged half-cube to turn the page, but with the BookLiberator you have to lift the entire cube out of the book.

Still, it’s good to see more non-destructive, relatively fast scanning technologies coming out, whatever the differences. Sooner or later, scanning will be something literally anyone can do. (Video embedded below the jump.)

Another TechCrunch writer uses the opportunity to suggest that we are seeing a repeat of the pricing race to the bottom that happened with netbooks: everyone is coming out with cheap devices, and most of them will be junk. John Biggs writes:

I don’t think ereaders can survive the race to the bottom. They serve a far too specific purpose to last very long and, unlike netbooks, there are no virulent pro-junk ereader owners out there. At best they’re indifferent and at worst they’re disappointed by the ebook selections available to them.

Meanwhile, Read Write Web reports that Sony isn’t necessarily going to continue to trade shots with Amazon and Barnes and Noble (and, for that matter, Borders with the Kobo) as they participate in an e-book reader price war.

"Pricing is one consideration in the dedicated reading device marketplace, but Sony won’t sacrifice the quality and design we’re bringing book lovers to lay claim to the cheapest eReader," said Phil Lubell, VP of Digital Reading at Sony Electronics.

It’s easy to see the low prices for tablets and similar devices as heralding the arrival of a load of cheap junk (see the pieces on the Augen “smartbook” and tablet that Kmart is ostensibly carrying). But on the other hand, there was a similar wave of “cheap” e-book readers back when the Kindle and Nook were priced higher, occupying the price range that the Kindle and Nook devices are in now (though most of them have since disappeared from view).

It might just be that by the time the cheap devices currently occupying that niche go away, the “name brand” readers will be ready to take over that price point, too.

Fittingly, I’m in the middle of reading Losing Mum and Pup, a sprightly memoir by Christopher Buckley, son of the late William F. Buckley, Jr. WFB, my political opposite, was a strong supporter of the TeleRead vision of a well-stocked national digital library system. Maybe partly in deference to the father, the son’s  memoir serves up more than its share of Latin and French phrases. Jeff Bezos’s dictionary, as you can see to the left, is up to the task at hand.

You’ll also notice that the updates include Google and Wikipedia lookups, and as a bonus, it’s easier than before for me to select text on my iPad for notes or highlighting. Also handy will be the new search function. It can display multiple occurrences of a word.

Jeff, this is all good stuff. Just please—let Kindle hardware and the apps also work their magic on ePub.

And while you’re at it, I still would like the bold-all-text function I’ve been begging major vendors for. Even with good hardware, some of us can enjoy e-books more easily that way.

Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular "e-pub" standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

Other standards over time may incorporate some of these things. But we’re moving very quickly to improve the state of the art. It’s very helpful not to have to wait for some third-party standard to catch up.

Chris Meadows nicely shot that one down. So ePub at one point would not even allow font-size changes? Come on, Jeff. From afar I love the better traits of the new Reader and may buy one myself, and I recognize that the Amazon has its share of positives. Respect for e-book standards just isn’t one of them.

In fairness to Jeff, I’m also grouchy toward the International Digital Publishing Forum, the creator and developer of ePub. He is right about the group’s inadequacies. Two years ago and probably earlier, I myself wrote on the sync issue, suggesting that the IDPF come up with an industry standard (since we’re not talking about format matters per se, I’d have been happy simply IDPF simply recognizing others’ efforts in this area).  No such luck. Whatever the reason, the IDPF has been too bleepin’ snailish in the past. I hope that changes, and in fact there are signs it might.

Regardless of Jeff’s monopolistic aspirations and the IDPF’s past slugishness, we need standards for the entire e-book industry to make e-books a truly durable medium; and rich corporations like Amazon and Adobe should be willing to help pay for the technical capabilities for the IDPF to keep up. Yes, Jeff: you should be in the IDPF, just as Google and Apple already are. You’re a freeloader if you’re not. Your dissing of Mobipocket format books—on which some hapless buyers spent hundreds and in some cases thousands of dollars for proprietary-DRMed editions they can’t enjoy on their iPads—shows how trustworthy you are on format matters. Mobipocket the company was once in the IDPF. But it isn’t now. Corporate pressure, now that Amazon owns it?

Meanwhile I’d suggest that the library world and other large buyers and potential buyers of e-books lay down the law for Jeff. “ePub when possible, or we won’t give you business. We’ll buy Kindles in small quantities or on our own to see what you’re up to. But no large institutional buys of Kindles or books in that format.” Hello, American Library Association? How much do you care about open standards? I’m going to send this post to an ALA tech expert and find out what the group is  up to. Any chance ALA can come up with formal collection development guidelines that position ePub as the preferred format for books that don’t have special requirements which the standard format can’t meet? Luckily, ALA’s Office of Information and Technology Policy is an IDPF member; but that should be just the start. I want action.

In an interview, Mr Wylie said he preferred to negotiate a deal with publishers that combined the print and digital rights, but had failed to reach a satisfactory compromise after nine months of discussions with all large publishing houses.

“If we do not reach an accord, Odyssey will grow. It will not publish 20 books, it will publish 2,000 and have outside investors and make itself available to other agents,” Mr Wylie told the Financial Times this week.

Other publishers point out that Wylie’s choice of titles is effectively limited since he is restricted to books from before the mid-1990s, when e-books were explicitly written into publishing contracts. So for current and recent books, those revenue streams are effectively united.

On the other hand, all rights from a number of books more recent than that will have reverted to the authors upon going out of print, meaning that those authors will be free to take the e-book versions to whomever they like. And if they’d like to get higher royalty rates for those books that have already earned out their advances, Wylie is offering them a place to go. (Or, of course, they could start their own e-publishing house, as Lynn Abbey, C.J. Cherryh, and Jane Fancher did with Closed Circle.)

Of course, as other agents have noted, since Wylie broke the territory with his controversial e-publishing deal, traditional publishers have suddenly become a lot more willing to make concessions in the matter of royalties for backlist titles.

In a related note, a FuturEBooks piece on the new Kindle coincidentally sheds some more light on the Wylie/Amazon deal:

It was Wylie who approached Amazon, according to [Amazon executive Steve] Kessel, and he was keen to stress agents should work with publishers to digitise backlist. He denied Amazon was proactively approaching agency houses for an Odyssey 2.0 type deal although we have heard differently.

Most notably:

Q: Why doesn’t Amazon support the popular "e-pub" standard used by your competitors and many libraries?

A: We are innovating so rapidly that having our own standard allows us to incorporate new things at a very rapid rate. For example: Whispersync (which uses wireless connections to sync your place in a book across devices) and changing font sizes.

Other standards over time may incorporate some of these things. But we’re moving very quickly to improve the state of the art. It’s very helpful not to have to wait for some third-party standard to catch up.

That’s right: changing font sizes is a new thing in the world of e-books. And if they had to support that pesky “third-party standard” then they never could have implemented it.

Bezos also points out, to people who just bought older Kindles after Amazon lowered the prices to move inventory prior to the new devices’ launch, that older Kindles do retain resale value quite well—and to be fair, that is true. After all, not much has really changed about the overall e-ink reading experience, and in a lot of respects the old Kindles still work as well as the new ones. They also can be passed down to friends or relatives.

Beyond that, much of what Bezos says here (about the drawbacks of touchscreens, multimedia, and color; the competition; and the growth of sales) he has already said elsewhere.

Yet there are quite a few misconceptions about copyright that tend to persist, and it’s time to try to clear some of them up. (Again.)

Copyright is a monopoly.

By which I don’t mean to say that publishing is a monopoly, though some people might still look askance at the Big Six or Agency Five with that point of view in terms of the recent Agency Pricing controversy. No, copyright itself is a monopoly—a government-granted monopoly over the publishing of certain works.

“But we own those works,” copyright holders might protest. “Of course we have a ‘monopoly’ over them!” They might find this to be obvious, in much the same way people poked fun at Amazon’s strangely-worded “capitulation” to Macmillan in the first few days after Amazon yanked Macmillan’s print titles.

But as much as people snorted at Amazon’s complaint that Macmillan had a “monopoly over their own titles,” it does have that monopoly—but only because, thanks to copyright law, the government says that Macmillan is the only one with the rights to publish those particular works, due to its agreement with the original copyright holders (the authors). Likewise, copyright holders only “own” their works because the government says they do, not from any property inherent in the works themselves.

If it weren’t for those laws, anyone could publish anything with impunity. (As US publishers did with foreign authors’ books, in the 19th century when the US didn’t recognize other nations’ copyrights.) There’s no natural law saying that only the person who wrote the words can copy them, the way that physical objects can only be in the possession of one person at a time. Anyone can copy words or pictures—unless the government steps in to say, “No you can’t.”

There is a common misconception today, especially among people who create copyrighted works, that the purpose of copyright is to protect the people who create copyrighted works. But in a terrific essay in Open Spaces Magazine, law professor Lydia Pallas Loren reminds us that the real reason that copyright was written into the US Constitution was to protect not the creators of the work, but the public as a whole.

Three hundred years earlier, copyright started out as a private monopoly—the Stationers’ Company (the guild of booksellers) got together and decided to respect each others’ rights to print certain books. In 1557, the crown granted a royal charter to the Company permitting them to destroy “unlawful” books, leading to a form of crown-sponsored censorship that lasted for 150 years.

Extremely suspicious of copyright because of the abuses that had come before, the Founding Fathers explicitly limited its scope in the Constitution. In fact, as Loren points out, copyright is the only clause in the grant of powers to Congress that has an explicitly-stated purpose: "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts."

But over the last couple of hundred years, the balance has shifted away from promoting science and useful arts and toward filling the coffers and enhancing the control of copyright holders. This ends up leading to a de facto form of censorship as rights-holders are able to prevent otherwise fair uses simply by having more money with which to fight would-be fair users in court.

One thing that particularly interested me in the article was the mention of the landmark fair use case, pitting 2 Live Crew against Orbison Music in the matter of their parody of “Oh Pretty Woman”. This is a pretty well-known case, and is often brought up in any discussion of parody as legal fair use.

I had always assumed the Supreme Court case had been decided in favor of 2 Live Crew, as the song was a fair use—but Loren points out that in actuality the Court remanded the case to a lower court for reconsideration, but instead Orbison Music saw which way the wind was blowing and entered into a licensing agreement with 2 Live Crew.

2 Live Crew was fortunate. The group had the resources to fight all the way to the Supreme Court that repeatedly emphasized the importance of the promotion of the progress of science and the useful arts as the ultimate aim of copyright. But, in the end, even for 2 Live Crew’s parody, a license from the copyright owner was the result. The need for a license, of course, grants to the copyright owner the power to deny that license which is the power to censor certain kinds of speech.

But others aren’t so lucky. If an author wants to use a particular quote from a song as an epigram for his book, he can still be sued by the rights holder. Even if a court would end up finding his use fair, how is he supposed to find the money to fight it out? Why would he even bother to fight it out rather than just drop it?

The article is very thorough, and Loren explains, the history of the laws, the theory behind the laws, and the harm being caused by the changes to the modern copyright system in ways that most readers can easily understand. This is the kind of article to show to someone who does not understand why copyright reform is so important—or who is not even aware of it at all.

Related: The discussion that followed Are ‘second-hand e-books’ possible?

Today they presented Co-founder of Foursquare and an expert in mobile apps, Naveen Selvadurai, who described the Foursquare site and the concepts behind it. The video will be up on their Publishing Point site soon. Have more than 2million users and over 100 million checkins after only 17 months of operation.

While not directly ebook related, the video of the presentation is worth seeing because it underlines how social media are becoming the more and more important in current society. (It also looks like a really cool thing to do; I’m going to sign up.)