This is actually a competitive offering to Amazon’s Digital Text Platform for doing very much the same thing, except Smashwords is far less limited:

Smashwords says it pays “much higher royalties” than Amazon, distributes to multiple outlets, and does not apply DRM to the eBooks the way Amazon does.

It is unclear whether the lack of DRM applies to Sony who has earned my ire by adopting ePub for its new crop of readers but only after saddling it with DRM. I suspect Sony may be an exception because of the way the article calls out that Sony in particular is accepting submissions worldwide, compared to Amazon which only does so in the US.

van Buskirk concludes with the biggest remaining challenge to innovators like Smashwords, that is filtering. But such a problem to have now that the flood gates have been opened wider for the independent creator and for advocates and fans of open media.

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I was understandably intrigued when I saw a review on Wired for another e-book reader for the iPhone and iPod Touch, a free one called Stanza. It is roughly comparable, only lacking a few features that Annotater provides but possessing one that prompted me to share some thoughts.

What makes Stanza stand out is its integration with a site about which I am honestly surprised I had not heard previously, Feedbooks.

Feedbooks was founded in June of last year and provides a simple yet powerful service. At its core, the site offers the ability to generate PDF formatted electronic books on the fly from a variety of sources for just about every e-book reader on the market. You can also build a variety of different views into your books of interest as RSS feeds. Hence the name of the site.

Feedbooks republishes titles from Project Gutenberg making them easy to search and format for whatever device you posses. They also seem to have a considerable body of CC licensed books, most notably almost all of Cory Doctorow’s works. Authors can also publish their own books through the site. I am not sure if they offer explicit licensing support to authors doing so since I don’t have a title I can publish to test it. They offer a little bit of guidance to the reader on applicable copyright for books in their catalog though I wish they’d expose CC-licensed works more clearly. They do not appear to be using the CC badges and RDF metadata which would seem to be a natural fit with the site. It is early days for Feedbooks so maybe they will add that feature at some point.

You can also create customer newspapers based on existing RSS feeds. I use Bylines on my iPod Touch but for a device that doesn’t have a decent RSS aggregator application available, this feature may be of interest. It seems similar to how the Kindle handles RSS subscription from what I have read about that device.

Feedbooks seems like a great way to consume free and often public domain or openly licensed books for those of us with portable devices and they have done a remarkable job of supporting just about every reader available. For independent authors, they also offer a venue worth considering if you are already making your works available as free PDFs. If they have or add explicit Creative Commons license support, all the better.

Technorati Tags: ebooks, free

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Reader Kevin Crosby wrote in to recommend an interview with Zittrain on the podcast, Lawyer to Lawyer.

This is a legal podcast which does a survey review of hot topics. This specific episode interviews Harvard’s Jonathan Zittrain on his new book “The Future of the Internet – And How to Stop It” which looks at the current trend in monetizing (hate the word, but it fits) the internet by creating tethered hardware systems. The most famous tethered hardware system being Apple’s iPod.

This is a pretty good introduction to the core ideas of the book. Cory recently posted an in-depth review of the book itself on Boing Boing. I tend to agree with Cory’s views that the dangers of open systems and tethered devices are far from coincidental. Cory’s past discussions of the authoritarian urge when discussing massive online monitoring and tracking dove tail well with this point. Malware becomes yet another stalking horse to feed this urge, a negative one as opposed to the drive towards ad personalization, what that idea’s proponents would like us to think of as a positive argument for that same movement to centralized control.

Mostly I am in agreement with what I understand of Zittrain’s characterization of “generative” technologies. This meshes well with my views on the power and attraction of open media and open systems more generally. I however think the risks Zittrain perceives in maintaining openness are well worth it. I don’t entirely agree with the character and frequency of these threats though acknowledge that openness is not entirely without problems of its own making. As to the other thrust of his argument, living in one of the states that actually enacted UCITA, I feel the pain of not just tethered devices but tethered software acutely.

I have yet to read the book itself but Cory’s post has an update pointing out that it is also available as a CC-licensed download. That makes sense as it positions the work as participating in the the world of “generative” media. Time to add another item to ever growing stack to read.

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The candid thoughts of the publisher are encouraging that they understand the larger issues at stake.

But there’s a political issue here as well. I think that publishers (music and book) are spending too much time circling the wagons and not enough time thinking of ways that they can use technology to advantage. Certainly, our move here is a bit unusual, but someone has to take the plunge. May as well be us. After all, we were the first publishers in the United States to come out publicly against the DMCA. Time to put our money where our mouth is, as they say.

Using technology to advantage resonates well with the the NRKbeta doctrine, a coinage deriving from an interview with folks at the Norwegian broadcaster, NRK, after their own experimentation with BitTorrent and DRM-free downloads.

The only way to control your content is to be the best provider of it.

Like other publishers they are taking a wait and see approach to the experiment. While they are optimistic that the torrents will have a positive effect on sales, they will condition future such releases on the success of this effort.

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What I love about the Open movement is it can define the most amazing stuff. Sure, I can release novels via open media, but there’s so much more out there. IP lawyer Colette Vogele hinted to me about an open law movement (I need to look into this more before blogging about it). There’s the open science movement. And, with Violet Blue leading the way, an open sex movement.

Her podcast is called Open Source Sex, for cryin’ out loud. She sometimes talks clinical, but more often she’ll read erotica from one of the books she’s edited. Her very sexy blog is Creative Commons Licensed. She releases her ebooks DRM free at Digita Publications. She lectures on cyberlaw. She is sexy, mighty, and so freaking brilliant. I want to meet her some day but would fear I’d turn into a babbling fangirl.

Violet Blue Explains Open Source Sex in the Introduction to her ebook. 

(if not BLINDINGLY obvious, her blog and her podcast are NOT work safe OR kid safe.)

(Photo by Violet Blue, released under BY-NC-ND)

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One tool you can use to help find open media is a wonderful Firefox extension, MozCC. Since its inception, Creative Commons has published machine readable versions of their licenses for creators to embedded in their web sites to help automated discovery of their work. MozCC takes advantage of this metadata and shows icons in Firefox’s status bar indicating whether the page you are viewing points to CC licensed material and what the CC conditions are.

So install the extension and see what you have been missing. And for creators out there, do not forget to include either the full metadata provided by CC if you can or at least use the links the CC license generator provides. (MozCC is smart enough to spot just the link if that is all you are able to include, as is the case with many hosting providers.) Oh and if you have questions about make sure your license is correctly visible to MozCC, don’t hesitate to drop me a note.

The easier it is for audiences to find open media, the more both they and the creators benefit.

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