Apologies: travel kept me slightly out of commission this week—I finally found a pirate hotspot. Anyway, some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
- Studies on DRM are coming out, giving me hope that the debate about it will get some grounding soon. Early results are in the anti-DRM camp. Ars Technica reports on a UK study done by law professor Patricia Akester, which suggests that DRM enrages lawful users more than it stops piracy. TeleRead has a piece about the lecture at BookExpo America about the O’Reilly piracy and free book study, which found that free copies increase sales (this is the study you can buy the ebook of for a cool $99). Also, Galley Cat has a video with William Johnson, the grad student who did the P2P legwork for that O’Reilly study, on how to monitor pirated books.
- A couple followups: Last week, I mentioned a “sequel” to The Catcher in the Rye not written by Salinger. Well, Salilnger’s suing. Seemed like such a good idea for a minute there… Also, I mentioned Tibor Fischer in my part of our Literary Beach Books series. This week, he wrote a guest post at Notes in the Margin (via) about Thomas Pynchon’s new crime novel Inherent Vice, which sounds awesome and comes out August 4th. Fischer also has a novel out: Good To Be God, also a crime story, and also awesome-sounding.
- A few tokens of the evolving publishing landscape. At GalleyCat, the editor of One Story, Hannah Tinti, discusses publishing in a digital world. Also, do book readings sell books? My theory is they won’t if you just get in front of a handful of people and read drily from your novel. Chuck Palahniuk puts on a show and fills auditoriums; although, it probably helps if you read stories that make people faint. On the plus side, John August (screenwriter of Go) released a short story online that made more money in a week than most lit mags would’ve paid. The catch in that system is that you have to be John August.
- Quick takes: great piece in the Millions on giving books post-ereader; the Espresso Book Machine was in effect at BookExpo America; still much kerfuffle about ebook prices, but some companies are heading in the right direction; Google might dip its toes in the ebook water; iRex announces a color ereader for 2011 and the Cool-er is nicely open; finally, the Literary Saloon at BookExpo America.
- Random of the week: Here’s some SFW porno (yes, that’s not a typo, it’s all safe for work). First, here’s a really weird video called Ufoporno. It’s about aliens, and it seems to be in Italian for some reason. Also, here’s Green Porno, wherein Isabella Rossellini bizarrely and theatrically describes the sex lives of animals.
