E-Publishing The Chinese Way: Very Fast And Very Cheap

Increasingly, publishers are joining the music and film industries in bemoaning the effects of piracy on the sales of digital products – and some are even starting to sue people for alleged copyright infringement (because that has worked so well elsewhere.) Perhaps they should take a look at what is happening in China: instead of whining about e-book sales "lost" to piracy, publishers there have come up with a business model that embraces the possibilities of the Internet: 

On Techdirt.

Kindling a Conflagration

There's one of Steven Levy's finer big pieces in Newsweek about Amazon's new Kindle e-book device. It all sounds pretty cool, but for me the real showstopper is the following:

Publishers are resisting the idea of charging less for e-books. "I'm not going along with it," says Penguin's Peter Shanks of Amazon's low price for best sellers. (He seemed startled when I told him that the Alan Greenspan book he publishes is for sale at that price, since he offered no special discount.) Amazon is clearly taking a loss on such books. But Bezos says that he can sustain this scheme indefinitely. "We have a lot of experience in low-margin and high-volume sale—you just have to make sure the mix [between discounted and higher-priced items] works." Nonetheless the major publishers (all of whom are on the Kindle bandwagon) should loosen up. If you're about to get on a plane, you may buy the new Eric Clapton biography on a whim for $10—certainly for $5!—but if it costs more than $20, you may wind up scanning the magazine racks.

What planet are these people on? Amazon is shipping electrons - well known for being rather cheap (here, take a few trillion for free). When you buy a book, you're buying mashed-up trees that cost something (which in fact cost rather more than you pay). E-books will never take off until publishers are prepared to throw their analogue business models on the fire.

Update: Almost needless to say, Kindle is powered by GNU/Linux.

Sony Reads the e-Leaves

I have to admit that I hate Sony computers. I bought a Vaio portable once, and it was awful in just about every respect - overpriced, weird backup discs, and a battery that soon died on me, with no sensibly-priced option of getting a replacement. So I don't come with many positive feelings towards its new e-book device, the PRS-505. But apparently it does a couple of things right:

the Reader is powered by Montavista Linux and uses code from projects like OpenSSL and Freetype

There again, you'd be mad not to use GNU/Linux on a system like this. Now all Sony needs to do is reduce the price by a factor of about ten and I might be vaguely interested.

Or maybe not.

Do Your SELF a Favour

Interesting:

The SELF Platform aims to be the central platform with high quality educational and training materials about Free Software and Open Standards. It is based on world-class Free Software technologies that permit both reading and publishing free materials, and is driven by a worldwide community.

The SELF Platform will have two main functions. It will be simultaneously a knowledge base and a collaborative production facility: On the one hand, it will provide information, educational and training materials that can be presented in different languages and forms: from course texts, presentations, e-learning programmes and platforms to tutor software, e-books, instructional and educational videos and manuals. On the other hand, it will offer a platform for the evaluation, adaptation, creation and translation of these materials. The production process of such materials will be based on the organisational model of Wikipedia.

(Via Creative Commons.)

DRM Causes Piracy

So far from being an impediment to so-called "online piracy," it's DRM itself that keeps fueling it and driving it forward.

Yup. (Via Slashdot.)