"If the major publishers switch to selling ebooks without DRM, then they can enable customers to buy books from a variety of outlets and move away from the walled garden of the Kindle store. They see DRM as a defense against piracy, but piracy is a much less immediate threat than a gigantic multinational with revenue of $48 Billion in 2011 (more than the entire global publishing industry) that has expressed its intention to "disrupt" them, and whose chief executive said recently "even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation" (where "innovation" is code-speak for "opportunities for me to turn a profit").

And so they will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.

If they don't, they're doomed. And all of us who like to read (or write) fiction get to live in the Amazon company town."

"LM: Literary people, when they talk about books, tend to think of fiction first. But most people, when they think about books, are thinking about nonfiction, which lends itself amazingly well to some kind of enhanced e-book experience. As a piece of that, I’m skeptical of enhancing fiction e-books. The essence of narrative is this sense of causality and meaning, and when you introduce a lot of arbitrary or random branching things into it, it actually loses it’s core pleasure. It’s a tricky issue."

"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. "

"KindleGen is a command line tool used to build eBooks that can be sold through Amazon's Kindle platform. This tool is best for publishers and individuals who are familiar with HTML and want to convert their HTML, XHTML, XML (OPF/IDPF format), or ePub source into a Kindle Book."

"Now, I’m in no position to refute those figures, but I don’t think it takes an economics expert to look at them and realise why the publishers are struggling at the moment; if their analysis people can only shave off $2 per unit by removing the printing, shipping, warehousing and remaindering from the equation, then there’s a business model that was on shaky ground before the ebook entered the picture. I suspect the bits I’ve bolded are where the haemorrhaging could be stemmed most effectively."

"Well. As Dave Gray points out, “An unbook’s community is a very real part of the unbook’s development team.” I wouldn’t necessarily have used the phrase “development team,” for the obvious reasons, but the point stands. Your voice is a part of this book we’re writing, and not the least significant. What do you think?"

"... Their procedures took the physical object as the unit of reproduction. Because the Barrett copy of Uncle Tom’s Cabin was collected in the form that it was, I photographed each newspaper number within it in order. When it came time to plan my own digital project, which included a facsimile reproduction of the Barrett object and a transcription of Stowe’s text, I had multiple choices. But I had already completed a digital reproduction of the Barrett object that included photographs of covers, end papers, and the pages of numbers that lacked installments of Stowe’s text. The theory, I would submit, is an effort to deal thoughtfully with an institutional procedure of reproduction that contrasted with my own interest in the transcription. Had I been in charge of the reproduction–not forced to engage against institutional practices–I might well have decided to reproduce only those pages that include Stowe’s text..."

"This is the home of a free O’Reilly Media book about Apache CouchDB.

The book is designed to guide you gently through using CouchDB with clear but practical scenarios. We progressively showcase key features, starting with simple document CRUD, working through to advanced MapReduce, and culminate with deployment tuning for performance and reliability."

"... that implement must have been peculiarly terrifick, which could sustain the weight of so many Brides, without detriment to its firmness, or elasticity."

"Unfortunately, some web sites alter the books you are reading on-line in subtle ways that you, the reader may not be aware of: they use blended books."

"Actually, I’ve just been informed that we recouped all of our hardware costs about fifteen minutes ago. And we made enough to buy every Mac user a pony."

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

"You pay for downloadable books that can’t be printed, can’t be shared, and can’t be displayed on any device other than Amazon’s own $400 reader..."

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

".epub" allows publishers to produce and send a single digital publication file through distribution and offers consumers interoperability between software/hardware for unencrypted reflowable digital books and other publications.

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

Useful starting point for my acceptance testing list. Noted PPV report, which is a real acceptance test based on subjective estimates; could that be fleshed out?

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

Absolutely frackin' brilliant

I expect there were open-source vs. commercial control wars as well, with every stage of adoption of new tech....