News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, giveaways on this and other blogs, and other cool stuff. Books & Ebooks in the News: Levar Burton aims to bring back Reading Rainbow on the web and in every… Read more »
Happy Groundhog Day! By D. Gordon E. Robertson (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons Do you suppose he’ll see his shadow this year? I hope so; we haven’t had much winter around here this year (the last cold snap excepted), and I know the kids would… Read more »
Tom Doherty Associates, the Macmillan subsidiary, announced this morning that Tor/Forge books are now available DRM-free from all major ebook retailers, including Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Google, Kobo, and Sony. Tom Doherty Associates publishes under the Tor, Forge, Orb, and Tor Teen imprints. I checked most of the major… Read more »
I found quite a collection of interesting blog posts and articles this week, on a whole host of book- and reading-related topics. Last week, Momentum (an Australian subsidiary of Macmillan whose e-books are available in the U.S.) announced it will drop DRM from its e-books. They’ve now published an explanation… Read more »
If you’re interested in books, ebooks, libraries, self-publishing, or even book blogs,there’s quite a lot to interest you this week: The Nation has published a long, thoughtful piece on “The Amazon Effect” by Steve Wasserman. A history of Amazon’s rise as well as an examination of its tactics and its… Read more »
I’ve been pretty busy this week, but I did come across a few interesting articles other than the Tor/Forge announcement. “Retail DRM is an Apple. Library DRM is an Orange.” (Michael Kelley, The Digital Shift) (The apple in question is the fruit, not the hardware/media company.) “There’s a $3 Sweet… Read more »
The big news of the week is that Tor/Forge will drop DRM from its ebooks by early July. Tor UK plans to do to the same. (Tor/Forge is a subsidiary of MacMillan, which is still involved in the DOJ price-fixing lawsuit.) Eliminating DRM has been proposed as one way that… Read more »
OK, I’m cheating slightly here, since a few of these appeared toward the end of last week. But here are a number of articles I found interesting this week: Want to create your own ebook using MS Word? PC World tells you how.. It’s caveat emptor at Amazon, where copycat… Read more »
The Harry Potter ebooks have finally gone on sale at the Pottermore shop!!! US prices are $7.99 each for the first three books, $9.99 for the remaining four, or $57.99 for the entire set. That’s in line with the paperback prices. The books are currently available only in English, but… Read more »
I’m very proud of myself! I figured out how to: 1) download Adobe Digital Editions, so I could download ePUB books with DRM from the Borders and Kobo bookstores (both free books and books I buy.) 2) authorize my computer on Digital Editions, so I can actually open DRMed books… Read more »
