My mother just asked what i thought about WikiLeaks, and finally I had an answer. My gut reaction from the beginning has been to support WikiLeaks, but i haven't articulated that support till now:

1. There is nothing you can do about it.

The internet is designed to support...

When we started building our new audiobook publishing company, iambik, we made an early decision: no digital rights management (DRM). (*See below for a definition of DRM). We were worried that our partner publishers from the print side would demand DRM on our audiobooks, and so we tried to...

I've done a few interviews with publishing people wrestling with the business and technology of "books." I was curious about things from another angle: what a new author thinks of the publishing climate. So I asked Catherine McKenzie. She published her first novel,...

Don Linn's seen most angles of the book business as a publisher and distributor. He's also been an investment banker, and explored briefly a promising digital publishing start-up venture, before pulling out. We are at an inflection point in this business - we all...

In the New York Times, Michiko Kakutani takes on the Internet, remix culture, post-modernism and the technology-induced Decline of Western Civilization. She quotes the usual suspects: Jaron Lanier, Andrew Keen, Nicholas Carr as well as Cass Sunstein, Farhad Manjoo....

When I first started closely following the big changes in the publishing industry, James Bridle's blog BookTwo was one of my first stops. And since then I've continued to watch with great appreciation as James has pushed and poked at "publishing."...

I've started a bi-weekly interview series with leaders and innovators in the book industry. My first interviewee is Liza Daly, of ThreePress Consulting, and the woman who knows all about ePub. Liza, along with Keith Fahlgren, recently launched the Ibis Reader, a cross-platform mobile reading app built...

There have been a host of complaints about the iPad - it doesn't do this, it doesn't have that, why can't it, I wish it would, it's closed ... Even Hitler was disappointed.

All this misses the point.

The iPad represents a fundamental shift in the metaphors and language...

CBC Radio show Spark, hosted by the lovely Nora Young, has an interesting segment with indie game designer Cliff Harris, who asked "pirates" why they were pirating his games.

One of the top answers is: "Because of Digital Rights Management (DRM)..."

It's not scientific by...

If the object of writing is to deliver to readers a text that is engaging and enlightens, or entertains them in some way or other, then the idea of maintaining a fixed form of a book needs to be reexamined. Writers will probably always want to keep control of their...

Ebooks are the fastest growing sector of the book business, by a long-shot, and there's this lingering question out there:

What is a book?

Text on pages, between covers, okay; and I think we can all agree that the electronic version of that thing is a book too,...

Here's a bit of a confession, in the world of the web that I have been exploring with great excitement since 2004: the thing that has interested me least is marketing. Blogging, podcasting, wikis, Twitter, Idenit.ca, community filtering and big online datasets, and many other things have been thrilling to...

This was going to be a short post. It's turned into a manifesto of sorts! Ah, well ...

I don't like the term "self-publishing."

Cloud-Publishing

In the emerging world of "cloud-publishing," it's meaningless, and does not reflect what's coming, what we're already seeing signs of. Cloud-publishing -- what we're doing...

Danah Boyd points to a study of Twitter usage by PearAnalytics, that concludes:

40.55% of the tweets they coded are pointless babble; 37.55% are conversational; 8.7% have "pass along value"; 5.85% are self-promotional; 3.75% are spam; and ::gasp:: only 3.6% are news."

On July 9, Ian Shapira, staff writer for the Washington Post wrote a 1,500 word fluff piece about consultant Anne Loehr, who explains GenY to their cohabitants in the workplace. Then Gawker's Hamilton Nolan blogged the story, reprinting some of Anne Loehr quotations from the Post piece.

Ian...

A Parable of the Past

A friend of mine heard an interview on Fresh Air with Scottish director Armando Iannucci about his new film In the Loop (IMDB). He'd never heard of Iannucci, or the movie, or the TV show upon which the movie is...

You've no doubt read about the big Amazon rank kerfluffle last week, put in the public eye by the Twitter tag: #amazonfail. A huge number of sexually-themed and lesbian/gay/bisexual books got categorized as "adult", and hence deranked, removed from best seller lists, and buried in Amazon's search results....

Can we all agree that the web will increase in importance as the place where people find things, find out about things, talk about things, and then buy them? If you need convincing on this point, take a look at four of the universe's most successful web sites: Google,...

The real challenge for the book business is a simple, difficult fact: people are reading fewer print books, and this trend will continue.

By most standards I am an relatively avid reader, and I always have been. I finish probably 25-35 books a year. But I can see in myself...

Wealth ought to come from the creation of value. That is, by designing and selling a better shovel, you make it easier for farmers to dig irrigation trenches which increases their yield. With your shovel, their output goes from 100 to 200 units a year, and so you, as shovel-maker...