There is a lot of disagreement about piracy and DRM (digital rights management) among thinkers in the publishing space. This post will express a few thoughts about both but, mainly, this post is a plea not to conflate the two into the same discussion. In fact, whether they are part of the same discussion appears […]
Are free ebooks a good idea or not?
Kindle is certainly engendering a lot of confusion by billboarding the downloads of free ebooks as “sales.” That paradoxical scorekeeping was the lead for an article by Motoko Rich in The New York Times on Saturday that quoted a lot of people, some apparently disagreeing with each other, but none of them necessarily wrong. There […]
Reality changes more slowly than I like to think
I did a panel yesterday at NYU as part of the summer publishing program on “New Visions” for publishing. The group was put together by Leslie Schnur. I shared the stage with four very articulate co-presenters who gave very diverse views of the future. Our audience was a full room of about 50-100 (I wasn’t […]
The publisher’s evolving role
Michael Cairns has a really good post today that distills a lot of thoughts I have had over the last several years into a clear formulation: that the publisher needs to serve as a “digital concierge” for its author. Three years ago, Brian O’Leary, Ted Hill, and I did a study of marketing spend for […]
A few thoughts, some near heretical, about DRM
I got a call today from Laura Sydell of NPR in San Francisco to have a conversation about DRM. I found myself telling the story this way. From the beginning, there were multiple ebook formats, the leading ones being Adobe, Palm, and Microsoft Dot Lit for a time, with Mobi originally intended to be the […]