Open Media Review » ebooks

Three Fantasy Authors Launch E-Book Store

Thomas Gideon — Wed, 03 Feb 2010 20:39:17 +0000

The FSF Defective by Design folks posted a link to this on Identi.ca. The site is Closed Circle and features titles from C.J. Cherryh, Jane Fancher, and Lynn Abbey. The titles available from this site aren’t from the full catalog of these authors which would be rather huge. I suspect these are newer titles for which the authors were able to retain rights to distribute electronic editions.

There is a lot of good information on the site aimed at helping fans who purchase the e-books use them. Rather than restricting choice, their store offers a zip file that contains the title in pretty much all of the popular e-book formats. The FAQ has good information on and links to reader software for those new to e-books.

This reminds me not so much of the larger e-book efforts, the platform plays, I’ve written about. This feels very similar to musicians who offer MP3s directly for sale on their site. I love the idea and that these women are willing to do this despite there not being any sort of standard for e-books, even a de facto standard.

The final thought I had in looking over the site is how the e-book files are produced. If there is some software or technology partner encoding these for the authors, that is worth sharing as well. If authors knew exactly where to go to get commodity or free encoding with predictable results, like with MP3 audio, I think that might be key to seeing more author hosted stores like these regardless of the thicket of competing readers and formats.

Amazon Buys Maker of Stanza eBook Reader

Thomas Gideon — Sat, 02 May 2009 14:33:33 +0000

There is not much detail about this story beyond what reads like press releases. According to the NYT article, Amazon has no intention of changing anything about Stanza. That includes its ability to download free books and purchase books from participating services. One of those services, Fictionwise, was recently purchased by competitor Barnes and Noble.

I am excited to see competition in the field of electronic books but I am worried that consolidation is happening so quickly. Usually consolidation spells an end to innovation. I am hugely concerned that the fledgling, and open, eBook format, ePub, is going to be a casualty of this first round of shakedown. While Amazon is allowing books without DRM into its closed Kindle eco-system, unlike its audiobook counterpart Audible, their overall commitment to open formats and supporting the choice of the creator is not encouraging.

Innovators like Stanza, Feedbooks, and Fictionwise have been establishing toeholds on a wide variety of devices while the larger players like Amazon and Sony slug it out with their proprietary devices and formats. ePub had the potential to emerge as a de facto standard much as MP3 did. At this was true so long as the heavy weights remained ignorant to the proven market power of being as widely compatible as possible. Unlike the MP3 format, about which the best feature is just that it lacks DRM, ePub is an open format without, as far as I know, patent encumbrances. It is morally more closely related to Ogg Vorbis in that respect.

Unlike Ogg Vorbis, which has been well adopted by those interested in freedom from intellectual monopolies, ePub has been gathering potentially effective market forces to help drive its acceptance. My worry is that Stanza’s acquisition may dissipate enough of that momentum to olbiterate any such potential. I remain open to being proven wrong.

Doctorow’s Law

Thomas Gideon — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 13:47:35 +0000

I just watched the video of Cory Doctorow’s talk on eBooks and DRM from the O’Reilly Tools of Change conference. In it, he expressed the desire to have Doctorow’s Law, if ever a thing is coined, to be that if anyone puts DRM, locks, on your works, as a creative, they are not doing so in your best interests. Pretty obvious to consumers and advocates of open media. It is nice to have a shorthand for this idea, though, and I wholeheartedly endorse this coinage.

The rest of his talk does an excellent job of explaining how Audible has turned the tables on publishers. DRM started as a condition required by publishers before they would enter into electronic distribution in many cases. Now, though, Audible is enforcing DRM even in cases where authors and publishers wish to release digital audio editions without locks.

As usual, Cory makes his point with eloquence, charm, and plenty of examples. This talk is well worth a watch.

An unexpected case for Open Media

Mur Lafferty — Sun, 27 Jan 2008 17:36:25 +0000

BoingBoing reports about a rotting Detroit book depository (I’d post a pic here, but they’re listed as no unauthorized use). It is a poster child for urban decay. As a writer I look at the millions of words rotting away, all the work that went into those books, and how tragic it is that they’re decaying.

But on the other hand, I realize as we move toward putting more of our content into digital media, this doesn’t have to happen. Honestly, even though I’m releasing Playing For Keeps via PDF issues, I’m not a huge fan of ebooks yet – they’re just not for me. I might be interested in the Kindle except for the DRM associated with it (and the fact that you pay to subscribe to blogs), but I am a still a die hard book lover. But I do acknowledge that every day we put more content online, which means the words will likely never be lost.

(And if we share them via open media, it’s virtually guaranteed they’ll never be lost!)