Christopher Harris's blog

At the Massachusetts Library Association annual conference in Worcester this morning, Ruth Liebmann, director of account marketing at Random House, stated emphatically that libraries own the ebooks they purchase from Random House.

If you give something away for free, why then would anyone buy it? And yet people pay for free every single day. We go to restaurants and order bottled water, or drive our cars instead of riding public transportation. People are willing to pay a premium for a higher quality item (or the perception therein) or for convenience.

Dear Amazon:

I hate reading on the Kindle Fire, and that has bothered me enough to lead to this plea. As someone who is regularly asked to recommend e-readers, it distressed me that I felt such animosity towards the Fire without an obvious reason for it.

Do you want DRM on your ebooks? I certainly don’t, and I would guess that most of you would much rather not have to deal with the security theater of DRM either. So who really wants to lock down your content?

Reading, a social activity. How could that be? Isn’t reading all about sitting quietly with some material and taking in the words and the style and the voice?

One of the interesting conversations that has emerged from ALA’s Digital Content and Libraries Working Group (DCWG) is a comparison of Publishing with a capital P and publishing with a lowercase p. Or, to be blunt, commercial Publishing vs. self-publishing. But is there something in the middle? Something between a capital P and a lowercase p?

Judgment day has come for Apple and the big five publishers in the form of a Justice Department lawsuit charging that the technology company and publishers colluded to artificially increase ebook prices.

In a new report released this morning, Pew Internet looks at “The rise of e-reading.” The major points? 1 in 5 adult Americans has read an ebook in the last year.

To modify the saying … Where does a 300lb gorilla apply DRM (digital rights management)? Wherever he wants. And in the case of many publishers that is everywhere. But what exactly is this seemingly ever-present DRM?

As Jon Stewart would say, we need to talk. Look, I understand things are a bit crazy for you right now. Ebook sales are rising, but they are kind of scary at the same time. Contracts, licenses, DRM, all of this is up in the air. So I get it; I see that you are concerned and looking for solutions.