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November 25, 2008
15,000 EPUB eBooks from Random House
Random House yesterday announced an expanded eBook program, increasing from 8,000 to over 15,000 titles within the next few months. As noted in the related Publishers Weekly article this initiative is based on EPUB. Given adoption of this magnitude, the PW article may be the last time EPUB is referred to as "the emerging standard format for the industry". Kudos to Matt Shatz and the Random House team!
November 24, 2008
In Defense of eBook DRM
I rashly volunteered to take part in a ' Point - Counterpoint' on digital book DRM, over on ToC. Peter Brantley got to argue the popular side (especially on an O'Reilly blog) - i.e. DRM is "Bad, bad, bad". Peter and I may not see eye to eye on this issue, but I have tremendous respect for him, and think this is a critically important dialog for our industry to have. Hopefully advancing that dialog will be worth all the slamming I'm about to receive for daring to argue the upside of eBook DRM.
November 16, 2008
Office Printing Declining = Digital Reading Increasing
Last month the Economist took note that paper consumption by U.S. office workers has been declining since 2001, after doubling over the 20 years prior (despite much talk about the "paperless office" starting in the 1970s). Ironically, this peak was marked by publication of The Myth of the Paperless Office, and Malcolm Gladwell's seminal review in the New Yorker The Social Life of Paper, a peerless paean to paper. But all that theorizing about the innate superiority and longevity of paper seems to have been dead wrong. As the Economist notes in a related article, it seems to be more of a generational thing: "Older people still prefer a hard copy of most things, but younger workers are increasingly comfortable reading on screens and storing and retrieving information on computers or online."
This was part of a broader look by the Economist at how so-called discredited technologies are often just ahead of their time.
The Economist didn't mention eBooks, but it's a pretty obvious connection. Tellingly, Amazon is selling The Myth of the Paperless Office as a Kindle eBook for $9.99, or in paper for $34.00 plus shipping.