In an article on the Columbia Journalism Review website Ryan Chittum takes on a spate of recent tech posts “arguing that production costs (you know, minor details like advances, editors, etc.) don’t or shouldn’t factor into the end price” of an ebook. He wags his…
A federal judge late yesterday allowed a lawsuit against Apple and five major publishers filed by a Seattle law firm that has offices in the same building as Amazon.com to proceed. While the decision was — as a Publishers Weekly report notes — “largely expected,” what…
In a somewhat comedic article in the New York Times, Kyle Jarrard writes about the fate of eBooks after their owners pass away. It is a grim topic but one that is not without merit. Many of us would like to think that our books…
The Kindle Fire released late last fall to robust sales despite lackluster reviews. The sales were strong enough to land Amazon the spot as the second bestselling tablet behind the Apple iPad. All of that changed in the first quarter of 2012. The entire tablet…
Edward Jay Epstein made headlines Friday with a big interview with Dominique Strauss-Kahn, drawn from his ebook original Three Days in May: Sex, Surveillance, and DSK, just out from Melville House. It’s reviewed in today’s New York Times, and an excerpt, the opening chapter of…
It’s finally happened: a major publishing house has announced it will abandon DRM protection for its ebooks. Yesterday afternoon Macmillan sci-fi imprint Tor/Forge announced in a release on Tor’s website that “by early July 2012, their entire list of e-books will be available DRM-free.” “Our…
Over at Gigaom, Mathew Ingram suggests that publishers who mandate the use of DRM on ebooks may, more than anything else, be helping Amazon. The idea is that anti-piracy software doesn’t actually do much to stop illegal downloads, as it’s simply too easy to crack. Rather, it…
Among all the seedy details contained in the Department of Justice’s suit against Apple and five of the six largest U.S. trade publishers, one thing stands out: at a time when many feared the rise of Amazon as a mega e-bookseller, the big publishers were…
Over and over in the Department of Justice suit against Apple and five of the six largest U.S. publishers the defendants are said to be obsessed with one thing: pricing. Leafing through the DOJ suit, there’s no evidence that the publishers worried that Amazon, which…
Barely two months after Random House became the darling of librarians across the country by announcing they would not restrict how many times an ebook was loaned out (see the earlier MobyLives report), a boycott has broken out as a result of the prices Random…
