Tag Archive for e-books

The Right to Read

October 20, 2010 Electronic Reading, Related Work 2 comments
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A couple of weeks ago I blogged here about a short essay I’d written, “E-books: No Friends of Free Expression,” and about a longer academic journal article on which it was based called, “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read.”  Well, since then I’ve had a bunch of people writing in asking for copies of the article, and even more asking me about the “right to read.”ceoec.ru

Here’s what I know about the latter.

To the best of my knowledge, the idea first appeared in a 1994 law review article by Jessica Litman called “The Exclusive Right to Read.”  It was picked up, extended, and given significant legal grounding by Julie E. Cohen in her 1996 (master)piece, “The Right to Read Anonymously.”  Then, in 1997, free software guru Richard Stallman dramatized the idea in a pithy little parable called — you guessed it — “The Right to Read.”

The American Library Association proposed something like a “right to read” back in 1953, when it issued its first “Freedom to Read Statement.”  (The statement has since been updated, most recently in 2004, although it remains relatively quiet on the subject of 3G- and wifi-enabled e-readers.)  Meanwhile, the Reading Rights Coalition, an advocacy organization, was formed in 2009 after the Author’s Guild claimed the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech function violated its members’ audiobook rights — a claim that understandably didn’t sit well with the 30 million Americans with “print disabilities.”  Finally, librarian Alycia Sellie and technologist Matthew Goins developed a “Readers’ Bill of Rights for Digital Books,” which concludes with the important provision that reader information ought to remain private.

I’m sure there’s lots that I’ve missed and would welcome any further information you may have about the right to read.  For now, I hope you’re enjoying National Freedom of Speech Week, and don’t forget that reading is an integral part of the circuitry of free expression.

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E-Books: No Friends of Free Expression

October 6, 2010 Electronic Reading, Related Work 8 comments
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I’ve just published a short essay called “E-books — No Friends of Free Expression” in the National Communication Association’s online magazine, Communication Currents. It was commissioned in anticipation of National Freedom of Speech Week, which will be recognized in the United States from October 18th to 24th, 2010. Here’s a short excerpt from the piece, in case you’re interested:

It may seem odd to suggest that reading has something to do with freedom of expression. It’s one thing to read a book, after all, but a different matter to write one. Nevertheless, we shouldn’t lose sight of the fact that reading is an expressive activity in its own right, resulting in notes, dog-eared pages, highlights, and other forms of communicative fallout antabuse tablets online. Even more to the point, as Georgetown Law Professor Julie E. Cohen observes, “Freedom of speech is an empty guarantee unless one has something—anything—to say…[T]he content of one’s speech is shaped by one’s response to all prior speech, both oral and written, to which one has been exposed.” Reading is an integral part of the circuitry of free expression, because it forms a basis upon which our future communications are built. Anything that impinges upon our ability to read freely is liable to short-circuit this connection.

I then go on to explore the surveillance activities that are quite common among commercially available e-readers; I also question how the erosion of private reading may affect not only what we choose to read but also what we may then choose to say.

The Comm Currents piece is actually a precis of a much longer essay of mine just out in Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 7(3) (September 2010), pp. 297 – 317, as part of a special issue on rights. The title is “The Abuses of Literacy: Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read.” Here’s the abstract:

This paper focuses on the Amazon Kindle e-reader’s two-way communications capabilities on the one hand and on its parent company’s recent forays into data services on the other. I argue that however convenient a means Kindle may be for acquiring e-books and other types of digital content, the device nevertheless disposes reading to serve a host of inconvenient—indeed, illiberal—ends. Consequently, the technology underscores the growing importance of a new and fundamental right to counterbalance the illiberal tendencies that it embodies—a “right to read,” which would complement the existing right to free expression.

Keywords: Kindle; Amazon.com; Digital Rights; Reading; Privacy

Feel free to email me if you’d like a copy of “The Abuses of Literacy.” I’d be happy to share one with you.

The title of the journal article, incidentally, pays homage to Richard Hoggart’s famous book The Uses of Literacy, which is widely recognized as one of the founding texts of the field of cultural studies. It’s less well known that he also published a follow-up piece many years later called “The Abuses of Literacy,” which, as it turns out, he’d intended to be the title of Uses before the publisher insisted on a change.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy the work. Feedback is always welcome and appreciated.

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Ambivalently Scribd

September 23, 2010 About the Book, Distribution, Electronic Reading One comment
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You may remember back in March my announcing that The Late Age of Print was available on the document sharing site, Scribd. I was excited to see it there for many reasons, chief among them the Creative Commons license I’d negotiated with my publisher, Columbia University Press, which provides for the free circulation and transformation of the electronic edition of Late Age. The book’s presence on Scribd was, for me, evidence of the CC license really working. I was also excited by Scribd’s mobile features, which meant, at least in theory, that the e-book version of Late Age might enjoy some uptake on one or more of the popular e-reading systems I often write about here.

Lately, though, I’m beginning to feel less comfortable with the book’s presence there. Scribd has grown and transformed considerably since March, adding all sorts of features to make the site more sticky — things like commenting, social networking, an improved interface, and more. These I like, but there’s one new feature I’m not feeling: ads by Google. Here’s a screenshot from today, showing what The Late Age of Print looks like on Scribd.

Screenshot of Late Age on Scribd

Note the ad in the bottom-right portion of the screen for a book called, Aim High! 101 Tips for Teens, available on Amazon.com. (Clearly, somebody at Google/Scribd needs to work on their cross-promotions.) You can subscribe to an ad-free version of Scribd for $2.99/month or $29.99/year.

Now, I’m not one of those people who believes that all advertising is evil. Some advertising I find quite helpful. Moreover, on feature-rich sites like Scribd (and in newspapers and magazines, on TV, etc.), it’s what subsidizes the cost of my own and others’ “free” experience.

Here’s the problem, though. The Creative Commons license under which the e-edition of Late Age was issued says this:

This PDF is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/ or by mail from Creative Commons, 171 Second St., Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94105 U.S.A.

“Noncommercial” as defined in this license specifically excludes any sale of this work or any portion thereof for money, even if the sale does not result in a profit by the seller or if the sale is by a 501(c)(3) nonprofit or NGO.

I’m pretty sure the presence of advertising on Scribd violates the terms of the license, albeit in an indirect way. It’s not like Late Age is being sold there for money. However, it does provide a context or occasion for the selling of audience attention to advertisers, as well as the selling of an ad-free experience to potential readers. Either way, it would seem as though the book has become a prompt for commercial transactions.

As of today, the site has recorded close to 2,000 “reads” of Late Age (whatever that means), which would indicate that Scribd has managed to reach a small yet significant group of people by piggybacking on my book.

Honestly, I’m not sure what to do about this.

In software terms I’ve always considered the e-edition of Late Age to be more like shareware than freeware. That is, my publisher and I are comfortable with some folks free-riding provided that others — hopefully many others — go on to purchase the printed edition of the book. The e-edition is not, in other words, a total freebie. Columbia has invested significant time, money, and energy in producing the book, and if nothing else the Press deserves to recoup its investment. Me? I’m more interested in seeing the arguments and ideas spread, but not at the cost of Columbia losing money on the project.

In any case, the situation with advertising on Scribd raises all sorts of vexing questions about what counts as a “commercial” or “non-commercial” use of a book in the late age of print. This became clear to me after finishing Chris Kelty’s Two Bits: The Cultural Politics of Free Software (Duke U.P., 2008). Kelty discusses how changes in technology, law, and structures of power and authority have created a host of issues for people in and beyond the world of software to work through: can free software still be free if it’s built on top of commercial applications, even in part? can collectively-produced software be copyrighted, and if so, by whom? should a single person profit from the sale of software that others have helped to create? and so on.

Analogously, can the use of an e-book to lure eyeballs, and thus ad dollars, be considered “non-commercial?” What about using the volume to market an ad-free experience? More broadly, how do you define the scope of “non-commercial” once book content begins to migrate across diverse digital platforms? I don’t have good answers to any of these questions, although to the first two I intuitively want to say, “no.” Then again, I’m pretty sure we’re dealing with an issue that’s never presented itself in quite this way before, at least in the book world. Consequently, I’ll refrain from making any snap-judgments.

I will say, though, that I recently ported one of my wiki projects, Differences and Repetitions, from Wikidot to its own independent site after Wikidot became inundated with advertising. In general I’m not a fan of my work being used to sell lots of other, unrelated stuff, especially when there are more traditionally non-commercial options available for getting the work out.

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Bye Bye, Big-Box Bookstores

September 8, 2010 Bookselling 8 comments
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After more than a decade of dominance fueled by aggressive expansion, the leading big-box bookstore chains in the United States are hurting.

Borders is barely hanging on by a financial thread, with an almost $38 million loss near the end of 2009 sending the company into a tailspin. 2010 began with a round of layoffs, followed by restructuring and most recently the departure of its CFO, Mark Bierley. The cracks are beginning to show in its retail stores, too. Here in Bloomington, Indiana, where I live, the bookshelves at our local Borders are getting emptier by the month. It’s also now closed on Sunday, presumably as a way to cut operating costs.

Barnes & Noble seems to be faring better, but that’s a relative statement these days. For the better part of a year now it’s been fighting a takeover attempt led by billionaire corporate raider, Ron Burkle. But in some ways that’s not the worst of its worries. In an attempt to counter Burkle, Barnes & Noble CEO Leonard Riggio recently went looking for someone else — someone friendlier — to buy the company. He was met with this grim response by the financial press:

Before news of Barnes & Noble’s plan to explore alternatives, shares had declined about a third this year in the face of concerns that the growing digital-books market and competition from Amazon.com Inc. would squeeze out its 720 bricks-and-mortar stores while also leaving it with little market share in the digital world, where its Nook e-book reader followed in the footsteps of Amazon’s Kindle.

“It’s difficult to envision a buyer of this company given the structural issues it continues to face,” said Credit Suisse analyst Gary Balter.

Realistically, it’s probably an overstatement to say that nobody would want to buy Barnes & Noble. Someone with an interest in revamping the chain might well want to do so. Of course that would most likely mean, sayonara Barnes & Noble as we know it.

This isn’t a surprising development, and both Borders and Barnes & Noble should have seen it coming.

Remember Tower Records? Or all of those Virgin Mega-Stores? With the rise of digital music, most of the big-box music stores were forced to shut their doors. They just couldn’t compete with a business model premised on minimizing infrastructure and abandoning material goods. The same goes for Blockbuster and all of those other national video store chains, whose physical stores have been driven under by the double-whammy of Netflix and video on-demand.

E-books still have limited uptake, of course, which means that Borders and Barnes & Noble have yet to feel the digital squeeze to the degree that music and video stores have. Still, their lackluster forays into online bookselling have put both companies at a major disadvantage. Barnes & Noble used to have a fallback in the education market, with an exclusive lock on hundreds of college bookstores across the United States. Even that’s now being eroded by Amazon.com, however, which is actively courting students on its website.

There’s been some talk lately of how to retool the big-box bookstores to make them more competitive. Unfortunately, as a recent Publishers Weekly article noted, one plan would significantly involve “Taking the ‘Book’ Out of Bookstores.” In place of the physical volumes there would be an increase in what booksellers like to call “non-book product,” including journals, cards, fancy writing paper, reading lights, games, and that type of thing.

No doubt the profit margins on non-book product are attractive, and I suspect they help to create store traffic. But honestly, is this a viable long-term strategy? Does it make sense to save these bookstores by turning them into plus-sized stationery stores?

Here’s a different idea. Bowker, a leading book industry research and information firm, recently reported that women over the age of 40 comprise the largest segment of the US book buying market. Common sense would dictate that Borders and Barnes & Noble ought to pursue that aspect of the market even more actively than they do now, since that’s where the money is.

But it’s clear that now’s not the time for common sense; now’s the time for bold, unconventional thinking. What this means is that the bookstore chains ought to be courting those who aren’t your usual book buyers and working closely with publishers to develop titles that would appeal to them. That way they’d be broadening the market rather than simply reproducing it as it is.

I also wonder if now might be the right time to begin experimenting with smaller, shopping mall-based stores as well. Borders and Barnes & Noble closed most of their Waldenbooks and B. Dalton mall locations in the 1990s, in part to help finance the construction of their superstores. Nevertheless, people still love to shop at the mall, even in the internet age. The experience of being in pubic, hanging out, and poking around is something that online retailers can never hope to duplicate. And so here, again, is another untapped possibility. A suitable print-on-demand system could make mall stores even more attractive to book buyers, moreover, since then they wouldn’t have to wait for titles to be delivered from suppliers or sources online.

Maybe, in the end, it’s time to bid farewell to the big-box bookstore chains. Personally, though, I’d be sad to see them go, especially since they’ve been instrumental in making books available in places where, for the most part, they weren’t abundant — places like my hometown of Goshen, New York, for instance. I also think it’s important for printed books to remain a part of the experiential landscape of people’s everyday lives, both in the form of libraries and retail stores.

Indeed, what would it mean to live in a time when we couldn’t pluck a random volume off of a shelf and start reading, just for the sake of doing so? That’s the question we’re staring at now, not only because of the shakeout that’s been going on for the better part of 15 years in the retail sector, but also because of the cutbacks that are crippling US public libraries. But Instead of staring at this question, isn’t it about time folks started staring it down?

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Cheap E-Reads

July 21, 2010 Electronic Reading One comment
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This week, the big news in the world of e-readers is supposed to be Amazon.com’s announcement about Kindle book sales, which, the company reports, now outpace sales of hardcover books on its website. I won’t get into that claim — at least, not now — but I will direct you to an insightful piece from The Big Money that’s asking all the right questions.

For me, the real news in e-reading is at once more humble and potentially more significant: the launch of the Humane Reader project, which is spearheaded by an organization called Humane Informatics (HI). Its website is unfortunately sparse on information, but here’s what I can tell you. The goal is to improve literacy in developing countries by distributing e-book devices to folks living there. The centerpiece is a cute little nugget of hardware called the Humane Reader. According to HI, it should cost around US$20 in bulk.

That’s right — a e-reader for 20 bucks. I didn’t leave off the last zero.

HI is able to keep the price so low not only by building the Humane Reader out of inexpensive parts but by leaving off what’s traditionally one of the most costly aspects of any digital device, namely, the screen. The organization notes on its website that televisions are prevalent in developing countries, and so it’s designed its e-reader to connect directly with them. What’s more, the Humane Reader can store as many as 5,000 e-books using a tiny SD card. Oh — and did I mention that it’s built significantly around open source technology that can be freely licensed?

This is a brilliant project in so many ways. For months here on The Late Age of Print I’ve been prattling on about commercial e-readers and privacy rights. What I’ve inadvertently downplayed in doing so is the high cost of these devices. Even after the latest price war the cheapest Kindle will cost you $189, while a Nook will set you back between $149 and $199 depending on the model. Don’t even get me started on the price of an iPad. The point is, there are significant economic barriers to entry when it comes to e-books, which, if book reading does indeed go digital, threaten to freeze large swaths of the world’s population out of one of the most important vehicles for literacy. The Humane Reader attempts to address that threat proactively, even preemptively.

The Humane Reader project follows in the wake of initiatives such as One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), which has attempted to bring ultra-low-cost portable computers to kids in need all over the planet. It’s also open to criticisms similar to those levied against OLPC, including the fact that technology alone cannot bring about social transformation, much less secure justice or equality on a truly global scale. Nevertheless, I see the Humane Reader as an important piece in a much larger puzzle, and I’m happy to see HI looking to partner with individuals and groups who might help the project fit into a broader, more multifaceted campaign.

Humane indeed — and an especially intriguing development in light of what Julie Cohen, Richard Stallman, and I have been calling the “right to read.”

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Kindle Smackdown

July 13, 2010 About the Book, Bookselling, Electronic Reading One comment
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First, a few of updates.  I just finished a draft of a new preface for The Late Age of Print, which will be appearing in the (drum roll please!) NEW PAPERBACK EDITION due out in January, 2011.  The piece develops and extends some of the ideas from one of my favorite blog entries, “Books: An ‘Outdated Technology?’” which I posted to this site last September.  More good news about the paperback edition: Columbia University Press has decided to price it at just $18.50.  That’s a bargain as far as I’m concerned — at least, by academic book standards.

Now onto the business at hand: the Kindle smackdown.  A colleague of mine is considering buying an Amazon Kindle e-reader and posted a query to her Facebook site inviting friends to weigh in.  One of her respondents linked to a series of YouTube videos called “The Book vs. The Kindle,” which was produced by the good folks at San Francisco’s Green Apple Books — one of my favorite bookstores in the world.  From the moment I watched one of the videos (which happened to be installment five), I knew I’d have to share it here with you:

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Cute theme, eh? Paper books, it seems, are good for picking up your fellow literati in bookstores. E-books?  Not so much.  Who would have thought print and paper were so hot?

The video actually reminded me quite a bit of an article appearing in the March 31, 2010 edition of The New York Times, which had this to say about the conundrums of owing an e-reader: “Among other changes heralded by the e-book era, digital editions are bumping book covers off the subway, the coffee table and the beach.  That is a loss for publishers and authors, who enjoy some free advertising for their books in printed form.”

It’s intriguing, indeed, to hear just how “all-in” some publishers have become for e-books, now that there are some seemingly viable platforms floating around out there.  I just wonder if they’ve paused long enough to consider how the technology they’re so investing in may be thwarting one of the most prosaic ways in which the book industry goes about hocking its wares.

Update: one possible exception to the “no more covers” rule for e-readers may be something like the dual-display Toshiba Libretto W100, although with this particular device neither of the screens faces outward.  Maybe a triple- or quad-screen e-reader will one day do the trick.

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How to Have Culture in an Algorithmic Age

June 14, 2010 Algorithmic Culture, Electronic Reading 21 comments
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The subtitle of this post ought to be “apparently,” since I have developing doubts about substituting digital surveillance systems and complex computer programs for the considered — humane — work of culture.

Case in point: about six weeks ago, Galley Cat reported on a new Kindle-related initiative called “popular highlights,”which Amazon.com had just rolled out onto the web for beta testing.  In a nutshell, Amazon is now going public with information about which Kindle books are the most popular, as well as which passages within them have been the most consistently highlighted by readers.

How does Amazon determine this?  Using the 3G connection built into your Kindle, the company automatically uploads your highlights, bookmarks, marginal notes, and more to its server array, or computing cloud.  Amazon calls this service “back up,” but the phrase is something of a misnomer.  Sure, there’s goodwill on Amazon’s part in helping to ensure that your Kindle data never gets deleted or corrupted.  By the same token, it’s becoming abundantly clear that “back up” exists as much for the sake of your convenience as it does for Amazon itself, who mines all of your Kindle-related data.  The Galley Cat story only confirms this.

This isn’t really news.  For months I’ve been writing here and elsewhere about the back up/surveillance issue, and I even have an academic journal article appearing on the topic this fall.  Now, don’t get me wrong — this is an important issue.  But the focus on surveillance has obscured another pressing matter: the way in which Amazon, and indeed other tech companies, are altering the idea of culture through these types of services.  Hence my concern with what I’m calling, following Alex Galloway, “algorithmic culture.”

In the old paradigm of culture — you might call it “elite culture,” although I find the term “elite” to be so overused these days as to be almost meaningless — a small group of well-trained, trusted authorities determined not only what was worth reading, but also what within a given reading selection were the most important aspects to focus on.  The basic principle is similar with algorithmic culture, which is also concerned with sorting, classifying, and hierarchizing cultural artifacts.

Here’s the twist, however, which is apparent from the “About” page on the Amazon Popular Highlights site:

We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people.

Using its computing cloud, Amazon aggregates all of the information it’s gathered from its customers’ Kindles to produce a statistical determination of what’s culturally relevant. In other words, significance and meaningfulness are decided by a massive — and massively distributed — group of readers, whose responses to texts are measured, quantified, and processed by Amazon.

I realize that in raising doubts about this type of cultural work, I’m opening myself to charges of elitism.  So be it.  Anytime you question what used to be called “the popular,” and what is now increasingly referred to as “the crowd,” you open yourself to those types of accusations. Honestly, though, I’m not out to impugn the crowd.

To my mind, the whole elites-versus-crowd debate is little more than a red-herring, one that distracts from a much deeper issue: Amazon’s algorithm and the mysterious ways in which it renders culture.

When people read, on a Kindle or elsewhere, there’s context.  For example, I may highlight a passage because I find it to be provocative or insightful.  By the same token, I may find it to be objectionable, or boring, or grammatically troublesome, or confusing, or…you get the point.  When Amazon uploads your passages and begins aggregating them with those of other readers, this sense of context is lost.  What this means is that algorithmic culture, in its obsession with metrics and quantification, exists at least one level of abstraction beyond the acts of reading that first produced the data.

I’m not against the crowd, and let me add that I’m not even against this type of cultural work per se.  I don’t fear the machine.  What I do fear, though, is the black box of algorithmic culture.  We have virtually no idea of how Amazon’s Popular Highlights algorithm works, let alone who made it.  All that information is proprietary, and given Amazon’s penchant for secrecy, the company is unlikely to open up about it anytime soon.

In the old cultural paradigm, you could question authorities about their reasons for selecting particular cultural artifacts as worthy, while dismissing or neglecting others.  Not so with algorithmic culture, which wraps abstraction inside of secrecy and sells it back to you as, “the people have spoken.”

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A Little Break

May 14, 2010 About the Book, Electronic Reading, Site Info No comments
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Sorry for all the quiet around here, especially after such an exciting spring at The Late Age of Print blog.  I’ve been under the weather for the last week, and the fog that is/was my head kept me from writing anything intelligible.

Anyway, I’m on the mend and writing to let you know that I’m going to take a short break — probably for a couple of weeks.  I’m in the midst of composing the preface to the paperback edition of The Late Age of Print, but since I was ill I’ve fallen behind in my writing.  FYI, the paperback should be released sometime early next year, and the preface will elaborate on some issues I’ve been developing here over the last year.  Mostly it will focus on e-books  and the future of reading.

Apropos of the theme, I thought I’d leave you with this great Radio Shack ad from 1986, which I discovered yesterday on BoingBoing.

Talk about taking the idea of an e-book literally!  I love it — plus the nerdy little kid kinda reminds me of someone who was about the same age in 1986, wore glasses, and was a little too into computers…

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The Late Age of Print Open Source Audiobook

April 6, 2010 About the Book, Electronic Reading 9 comments
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I’ve been hinting for the last few weeks that I had a big announcement brewing.  Well, at long last, here it is: together we’re going to make a free, Creative Commons-licensed audiobook of The Late Age of Print! First, some background on what inspired the project, and then a word or two on how you can help.

Listening to Chris Anderson’s Free: The Future of a Radical Price on a long car trip got me thinking: why not make an audiobook out of The Late Age of Print? And why not, like Anderson, give the digital recording away for free? The thought had barely crossed my mind when reality started to sink in. “You’re no Chris Anderson,” I told myself. “You don’t have the time or the resources to make an audiobook out of Late Age. Just forget about it.”

Well, I didn’t forget about it. I figured if I couldn’t make an audiobook myself, then I’d do the next best thing: let the computer do it for me, using a text-to-speech (T-T-S) synthesizer. The more I thought about the project, the more convinced I became that it was a good idea. It wouldn’t just be cool to be able to listen to Late Age on an iPod; an audio edition would finally make the book accessible to vision impaired people, too.

And so I got down to work. I extracted all of the text from the free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of Late Age and proceeded to text-to-speech-ify it, one chapter at a time. I played back my first recording — the Introduction — but it was disaster! The raw text had all sorts of remnants from the original book layout (footnotes, page headers/numbers, words hyphenated due to line breaks, and whole lot more). They seriously messed up the recording, and so I knew they needed to go. I began combing through the text, only to discover that the cleanup would take me, working alone, many more hours than I could spare, especially with a newborn baby in my life. Frustrated, I nearly abandoned the project for a second time.

Then it dawned on me: if I’m planning on giving away the audiobook for free, then why not get people who might be interested in hearing Late Age in on it, too?  Thus was born the Late Age of Print wiki, the host site for The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project.  The plan is for all of us, using the wiki, to create a Creative Commons-licensed text-to-speech version of the book, which will be available for free online.

There’s a good deal of work for us to do, but don’t be daunted! If you choose to donate a large chunk of your time to help out the cause, then that’s just super. But don’t forget that projects like this one also succeed when a large number of people invest tiny amounts of their time as well. Your five or ten minutes of editing, combined with the work of scores of other collaborators, will yield a top-notch product in the end.  I’ve posted some guidelines on the wiki site to help get you started.

I doubt that I have a large enough network of my own to pull off this project, so if your blog, Tweet, contribute to listservs, or otherwise maintain a presence online, please, please, please spread the word!

Thank you in advance for your contributions, whatever they may be.  In the meantime, if you have any questions about The Late Age of Print open source audiobook project, don’t hesitate to email me.  I’d love to hear from you!

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Cory Doctorow on the E-book Price Wars

March 29, 2010 Bookselling, Distribution, Electronic Reading 2 comments
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I’ve been within Cory Doctorow’s “orbit” for awhile now, mostly as a follower of his personal blog, Craphound, and his collective endeavor, BoingBoing.  Only recently have I begun reading his novels and published non-fiction works.  (Little Brother was my go-to for the first few weeks of my infant son’s life, when I couldn’t fall back to sleep after late-night feedings and diaper changes.)

Well, anyway, this video came to my attention as something that Late Age of Print readers might be interested in.  It’s a recording of a talk Doctorow recently gave at Bloomsbury, the UK publisher of the Harry Potter novels, in which he discusses the vexed matter of e-book pricing.

What I admire about Doctorow is the fact that he’s a successful print author as well as someone who’s unafraid to experiment with publishing’s longstanding economic and technological paradigms. It’s hardly a stretch to say that his success in print owes a great deal to his willingness to push the bounds online.  I should acknowledge, moreover, that the free, Creative Commons-licensed PDF of Late Age wouldn’t have been possible had it not been for him and others who are similarly committed to the belief that book publishing is at its best when it refuses to rest on its laurels.

Anyway, enjoy the video.  I’d be curious to hear how you would weigh in on his proposals.

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