ENTRIES TAGGED "DRM"

Taking ebooks mainstream…in Germany

This one-day event promises plenty of enlightening discussion and debate

Are German ebooks really any different than those in the U.S. or the U.K.? Many strong indicators say yes, they are different. That’s why many ebook debates in the past have not ended with practical guidelines for German publishers and their pursuit of innovation.

That will be different when TOC buchreport: Getting Ebooks Mainstream takes place as a one-day conference in Berlin on April 23, 2013. Many senior-level German publishing and book distribution executives will meet with new, young innovators, to discuss where the market is heading.

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The publishing industry has a problem, and EPUB is not the solution

Ebooks are deliberately being made defective through digital restrictions

This article contains my personal views, not those of my employer Lonely Planet.

I’ll be blunt. Ebooks and EPUB are to the publishing industry what Blu-Ray is to the movie industry: a solution to yesterday’s problem made irrelevant by broader change in the industry. Both have a couple of years left in them, and there’s good money to be made while the kinks get worked out from the alternatives, but the way the wind is blowing is clear.

Whenever someone proposes EPUB as a solution, ask yourself a question: what’s the problem they’re trying to solve? As a standard drafted by the IDPF, a self-proclaimed “organization for the Digital Publishing Industry”, EPUB is built squarely to address the industry’s biggest headache: ensuring that, in the digital age, they retain the ability to charge money for distributing content. The best interests of authors or readers simply do not figure in the equation. Read more…

Publishing News: HTML5 will be the future of publishing

Content is best served in browsers, indie booksellers sue Amazon and Big Six, and ASU reimagines libraries as startup incubators.

MIT Technology Review publisher, UC Berkley students bet on HTML5

At a recent executive retreat, Beet.TV sat down with MIT Technology Review editor and publisher Jason Pontin, who said that HTML5 will be the future of publishing. In a video interview (embedded below), Pontin says the basic content publishers produce — text and video — “can be much more easily offered as scripts, as processes, inside an HTML5 wrapper inside a browser application … A publisher can do almost everything they want to do on the web for multiple platforms with the same code — why make your life harder?”

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Copying is a fact, not a problem

Cory Doctorow says the problem we really need to solve is how to make money when copying happens.

Piracy and DRM continue to be hot-button issues for authors and publishers, with heated arguments on both sides of the fence. I sat down with author Cory Doctorow at TOC NY 2013 to talk about the issues and how we as an industry will move beyond the conflict.

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Ebooks and the future of research

Society cannot afford to lose its distributed knowledge backup system

Knowledge cannot progress unless it is aware of its past: a knowledge-seeker must reference the works of previous generations. Literary scholars return to manuscripts, musicians to partitions, artists to museums…

The continued availability of reference works underpins our entire research system. It has become so ingrained in our methods that it barely registers on our list of values to uphold. Yet, that very availability has dissolved into a mirage, to surprisingly little protest.

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Identifying DRM-free ebooks

Customers deserve to know the restrictions they're buying into

One of my colleagues, Edd Dumbill, asked me a simple question over the holidays that I thought I’d share with the TOC community:

Is there any way to quickly tell whether an ebook on a retailer’s site is DRM-free?

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Are we solving customer problems?

Customers only care about their needs, not your business problems

This article contains my personal views, not those of my employer Lonely Planet.

The challenge the publishing industry faces today is complex. Against centuries of industry inertia and decades of business momentum, the job of transforming publishing is demanding to say the least. The healthy and long-lasting business model we once had is still funding emerging digital models but simultaneously holding them back.

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Wiley & O’Reilly Media sign ebook distribution deal

3,000+ technology ebooks added to the oreilly.com catalog

I’ve mentioned before that O’Reilly’s direct ebook channel is an extremely important sales outlet for us. We want our content to be in all stores but the direct channel is pretty much the only one where we can establish an ongoing relationship with readers.

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Free and the medium vs. the message

Valuable lessons from "Information Wants to Be Shared"

I wrote a short piece earlier about an interesting ebook from HBR by Joshua Gans. It’s called Information Wants to Be Shared and I’m declaring it the must-read ebook of 2012. If you buy it direct from HBR’s website and use the code ADINFO1 you’ll only pay 99 cents, btw.

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