ebookporn

“This a page, usually printed with only the book’s title, that precedes the title page in the book. When dinosaurs roamed the earth, the function of the bastard title was to identify and physically protect the paper text block until it was bound. Sort of like the tissue paper they still put in fancy wedding invitations. I daresay that ebooks do not require any such protection. It is utterly without use in an ebook. Begone!”

Context First: Moving inexorably toward a “pre-book world”

This is a very good piece from Brian O’Leary at Magellan Media Partners on how we need to rethink digital content and “publishing in containers” that segregate and isolate the content from the web. With convergence to a single screen everything is funneled through the web, a platform that “includes everything and excludes nothing”. Since the beginning of publishing the book, magazine, film and television supply-chain relied on the ability to exclude but to fully take advantage of digital distribution and discovery on the web we instead need the content to be open and accessible -precisely the opposite of what DRM and ePub is designed to do. Precisely what publishers are striving to prevent. Here O’Leary suggests how publishers should shift how to think of their content:

We need to migrate from thinking about products to instead planning for and offering services and solutions. To get there, four principles apply:

• Our content must become open, accessible and interoperable.  Adherence to standards will not be an option;
• Because we compete on context, we’ll need to focus more clearly on using it to promote discovery;
• Because we’re competing with providers that already use low- and no-cost tools, trying to beat them on the cost of content is a losing proposition.  We need to develop opportunities that encourage broader use of our content; and
• We will distinguish ourselves if we can provide readers with tools that draw upon context to help them manage abundance.

A very dense and thoughtful piece that should be read in it’s entirety. 

~ eP

FULL ARTICLE

phoxbox:

Copyfighter, journalist, sci-fi writer and Boing-Boing editor Cory Doctorow has fallen victim to the almighty content empire of Rupert Murdoch. In an attempt to remove access to infringing copies of the TV-show Homeland, Fox has ordered Google to take down links to Doctorow’s latest novel of the same title. Adding to the controversy, Doctorow’s own publisher has also sent DMCA notices for the Creative Commons licensed book.

Doctorow’s latest novel Homeland tells the story of an infowar, the suppression of information and the fight against censorship.

The setting of the fictional book is a realistic scenario according to activists, and on a small scale the book itself has now become the center of a censorship row.

Published by Tor Books, Homeland is available for sale in most book stores, but because of its Creative Commons license people are also free to share the book online. After all, obscurity is a much bigger problem than piracy for most authors.

As a result copies of the novel are shared for free on hundreds of sites, and this attracted the attention of a Hollywood studio. For a few weeks none other than 20th Century Fox has been sending DMCA takedown requests to Google for Doctorow’s novel.

Since 2009, most major digital music retailers no longer use DRM as the default. Amazon, Google, iTunes—pretty much anywhere you’d buy music, chances are you’re going to be able to listen to it wherever you want. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for apps, movies, or eBooks.

full article

A report published by the European Commission Joint Research Committee claims that music web piracy does not harm legitimate sales.

“It seems that the majority of the music that is consumed illegally by the individuals in our sample would not have been purchased if illegal downloading websites were not available to them,” wrote the researchers in their report,

Attorney Dana Newman on the implications of the Supreme Court ruling in Kirtsaeng v. John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

eP’s two cents:

From the perspective of publishers this is indeed a blow to the status quo. What I believe it does however is force an evolution of the copyright laws to factor in digital content and resolve “right of first sale” ambiguity over electronic formats. Digital content cannot be contained in a copyright landscape designed for physical consumer goods. We need to once and for all deal with ownership vs. access - rent or license vs. purchase. The World’s economy is on an inevitable tilt toward sharing rather than owning. Libraries, storytelling, community, universal access, are all terms that will only grow in influence and importance as we all become connected. 

Yes large retail based content creators have to begin to think about their business differently but that bus already left the station when we began the shift from broadcast TV and Radio to streaming. This ruling just forces print to take it’s head out of the sand. There is now motivation to not only push lawmakers to act, but for the smart and savvy content creators, motive to adapt their business models to the inevitable. Viva progress! 

~ eP