"The tech world loves to bandy about the term “social,” but its concept of “social” seems to be based on what single twentysomethings do. “Social” in the sense of “families” is off the radar, as is “social” in the sense of “sharing.” It’s happy to make recommendations for individual purchases social, but shared purchases are verboten.

It’s shortsighted. If the demise of the music industry has taught us anything, it should be that walls don’t work. Sooner or later, demand will find a way around. The blistering success of itunes showed that there’s a substantial market for aboveboard, legal ways to allow people to get what they want; this isn’t just about piracy. But piracy may have to happen to make the literary version of itunes acceptable to publishers.

Put differently, the industry needs to learn to lean into change, rather than resisting it. I foresee a monster market for e-textbooks as soon as they offer something analogous to re-selling your used copies. Until then, the value proposition mostly isn’t there. (Yes, there are issues with disability access, but those strike me as solvable if the will is there.) Students will continue, quite rationally, to buy paper textbooks and re-sell them. "

"Next time you hear someone invoke "information wants to be free" as a justification for demanding free-as-in-no-payment-expected content, ask them: precisely what content have you released for free lately?"

"Note that his findings regarding pricing is interesting: he dropped his prices, and is still selling the same number of games, just making half as much money."

"I can understand why a retailer would want to use my copyright as bait to lock in readers—but exactly how is this good for me? This is why I'm not selling digital downloads of the professional readings of With a Little Help. With so much friction and goofiness in the marketplace, I'd rather give the MP3s away under a Creative Commons license and solicit donations through PayPal. My listeners don't want DRM. They want to get their books with a minimum of hassle. But, for the record, I'd put my books in Audible and the iTunes Store in a hot second if only they'd sell them on the same terms that I'd be willing to buy them: no DRM and no license agreement except “don't violate copyright law.”"

"See, this is the problem with Amazon's Kindle—even they can't tell their customers exactly how the DRM works. They blame the publishers, but we're not sure that publishers have ever been given adequate information either. (We know the press hasn't.) From what we understand, publishers are contractually forbidden to share any information about their licensing agreements with Amazon, which creates a convenient way for Amazon to redirect all inquiries into a black hole of "it's the publisher's fault.""

"Even more exciting, however, is that Ghosts I-IV is ranked the best selling MP3 album of 2008 on Amazon’s MP3 store.

Take a moment and think about that."

"When SoundExchange, the organization that represents many labels and artists, proposed steep new royalty rates for radio webcasters last year, they shortsightedly killed off their own revenue stream. Instead of their proposed rates being cut back as part of a standard negotiation, they were surprised to see the U.S. Copyright Royalty Board reject opposing arguments and adopt SoundExchange's rates fully. Now Pandora, the popular streaming music site, says it's paying over 70% of its revenue in royalties, and unless Washington changes the rates soon—which looks unlikely— they will have to shut down."

"The public domain is not an “unlicensed commons”. The public domain does not equal the BSD. It is not a licensing option."

"the biggest threat writers face is the overall unpopularity of reading books, not people reading for free"

via Hugh MacLeod, on Twitter

"SDRM is what Amazon should be using if it is worried about piracy."

"From personal experience I can tell you that the big labels are beyond clueless in the digital world - their ideas are out-dated, their methods make no sense, and every decision is hampered by miles and miles of legal tape, copyright restrictions, and co

"...it is impossible to involve a mobile carrier with a technology without infecting that technology with Awful Crap."

"In my mind, the bellwether for ebooks is which format/platform is most popular for comics."

"Would you believe, I needed Sony’s authorization, to read Charles Dickens on my new PRS-505?"

Extradited to the US, he faces a possible 10-year sentence and $500,000 fines

"Monkey-butt Linux running on my dot-matrix printer"

BlackMask may (may) be coming back from the death of over-restrictive copyright enforcement.