Some news about books and ebooks (and copyright (and parentheticals)) for the seis de mayo. (I ran out of space for a random this week, but I’ll bring twice as many next week.)
- The Wall Street Journal reports that Amazon plans to reveal a 9.7″ Kindle today, and is developing a pilot program that will see students at a few universities using the new device along with etextbooks for science classes. This is clearly an attempt to compete with Plastic Logic’s newspaper experiment in Detroit, but something about this new Kindle raises my hackle. Maybe it’s that Engadget’s leaked pictures don’t show any sign of a touchscreen, and without that, I don’t think the new Kindle will be able to do what students will require of etextbooks. I still think this will be better than reading a textbook off a laptop, but the current state of ereader hardware lends itself better to newspaper reading than textbook reading. More speculation on this at Gadget Lab, Venture Beat, Reuters, TechCrunch, TeleRead, and CrunchGear.
- WSJ also reports about Hearst Corp. (among other newspaper publishers) getting on board with Kindle rivals like the Plastic Logic. The Daily Beast reports that Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has a secret plan to charge for online content. Let me guess—the secret is that they’ll charge for content.
- There’s been much ado about piracy this week. Ars Technica has a great breakdown of the English translation of the verdict from the Pirate Bay trial. Meanwhile, here’s a sadly myopic comment in the Guardian railing against Sweden’s Pirate Party because they want to reduce the length of copyrights and abolish DRM (those bastards!). Here’s a story about how smoothly and easily DRM helps websites (that was sarcasm). Here’s something about Warner Music cutting off its nose with a knife made of copyright protection. Here’s a piece about the MPAA struggling to argue that anti-piracy efforts are necessary, despite the fact that the movie industry had record profits last year, yet again.
- Director Brett Gaylor has released RiP: A Remix Manifesto, a documentary about remixing and copyright, and it looks awesome. Here’s an interview with Gaylor at Wired. And you can set your own price and download the movie here.
- Quick takes: here’s a great piece at Booksquare about the disaster that the Google Book Search settlement has become; Glenn Beck is publishing a bunch of books, including a kids’ book, which, I believe, is the seventh sign; Michael Hyatt on making the leap to ebooks; pictures of BeBook 2.5, the slightly smaller BeBook; and, from ForeignPolicy.com, a piece about not reinventing the book in the age of the Internet, a response to an O’Reilly piece about why we do need to reinvent it.
