Fungible Convictions

Link.

In a letter sent to its industry partners last month, Random House, the world’s largest publisher, announced it would offer all of its audio books as unprotected MP3 files beginning this month, unless retail partners or authors specified otherwise.

Publishers are getting knowledgeable about how the digital world works. I figured that would happen sooner or later, since they can actually commission research and have had wings of their companies experimenting in online delivery for years. It’s the authors I’m worried about. Fiction authors mostly. Creative writers are so often enamored with the trappings of writerlyness—drafting on legal pads (okay, maybe not so much younger writers), getting their thinking done in the back corner of a cafe—that I’m not sure they’ll be as open to online, DRM-less audio versions of their writing. It’s a different attitude, by and large, than that held by writers of the various non-fiction genres. It’s an irony not lost on the publishing industry, that non-fiction writers are the ones more eager to get their “story” out there any way possible, whereas fiction writers are more protective. I’ll be curious to see if/how different writers react differently to DRM-less downloads of their books.

Tin House: “This Girl Needs a Spanking”, a reflection on The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer—yes, the Twin Peaks Laura Palmer.

A literary festival in Newburyport, Mass., has been announced. Set aside April 28 and 29 for what will be a cathartic couple of days—the Boston area has long been ripe for a literary festival, but no one had put one together until now.

One of the attendees for the Newburyport Literary Festival is friend and poet Bill Coyle, who just won The New Criterion Poetry Prize. Congratulations, Bill. His manuscript The God of This World to His Prophet will be published this fall.

I just discovered The Institute for the Future of the Book. Should be a good fellow traveler.

The full research paper on the Sony DRM debacle was published. It deserves time to be digested but will certainly be a key reference for the digital rights debate in the coming months.

Yahoo has created a developer network, giving anyone quick access to code Yahoo employs every day. This will be unbelievably valuable to green-horned and experienced developers alike.

BoingBoing continues to argue that Google Book Search is good for publishers. I continue to agree. A quote:

[Publishers] argue that GBS should pay some money to publishers because anyone who makes money off a book should kick some back — but no one comes after carpenters for a slice of bookshelf revenue. Ford doesn’t get money from Nokia every time they sell a cigarette-lighter phone-charger. The mere fact of making money isn’t enough to warrant owing something to the company that made the product you’re improving.

Rick Moody in A Public Space: “But one can’t excuse inflating three hours in jail into 87 days in jail. Such license is too much. When I wrote my own memoir, I worked my ass off to make sure that everything I included was true to the best of my knowledge.”

How to write good e-mails. While some of the tips are now well known bits of e-mail etiquette—like avoiding all caps—tips like #8 (Don’t Fabricate Unanswerable Questions) are new, valuable, and right-on.

AGNI: The Waterwheel. AGNI again publishes a great piece of translated, near-forgotten poetry.

N+1: Review of Bernard Herni-Levi’s do-over of Tocqueville’s travels. It’s not a positive review of American Vertigo, and, in fact, I haven’t seen a positive review of it yet. If indeed it’s so bad, my guess is because a Frenchman nowadays doesn’t have an interesting perspective for looking at America, not like Tocqueville did. To replicate his trip, you’d need to send an aristocratic American to travel India or China. Can we resurrect George Plimpton already?

Ploughshares, “The Heiress from Horn Lake” by Katherine Taylor: “I have never, but for that first night with Vivienne, vomited in the back of a taxi.”

The rollout of digital rights management (DRM) software has been an unmitigated disaster for media companies. Whether or not companies find a negotiated line with customers between protecting rights and protecting fuctionality is to be seen, but the cacophonous backlash to rights management of CDs has ruined whatever credibility music companies may have had left.

This week introduced another irony to the DRM debacle: the BBC reports that rights-managed eBooks don’t ever stop their rights management, even after the copyright has expired and allowed the book to be in the public domain. So in addition to crippling individual computers with unsafe software, media publishers flaunt copyright law on fair-use in favor of defending copyright law pre-expiry.

What’s worse:

“It is probable that no key would still exist to unlock the DRMs,” Laca said. “For libraries this is serious.”

“As custodians of human memory, a number would keep digital works in perpetuity and may need to be able to transfer them to other formats in order to preserve them and make the content fully accessible and usable once out of copyright.”

In other words, DRM for digital books completely undermines the mission of libraries and archives. Works can’t be kept, salvaged, or shared. And under laws being considered in certain jurisdictions, it would be illegal to attempt to hack the DRM software.

Seems like a great time to get a degree in copyright law!

I’d love to get my hands on one of these Sony Readers due out this spring. Sony claims a radical leap in screen-based readability. Mainly because this isn’t a screen as we’ve known it. There’s no refreshing of the image, no frames-per-second, no eye-strain from being bombarded by screen-generated light. In fact, it’s reflective, like paper. Sony’s “E-Ink” technology uses a single battery burst to change tiny parts of the screen from neutral to black. When you “turn” the page, there’s another battery burst and another generation of dots.

This is the first wide-release electronic paper eBook reader. I mean no disrespect when I say, technologically, it’s basically a high-tech Etch-a-Sketch. I think that’s awfully cool. And since it will be really hard to explain to people how this is different from reading off an LCD screen, I’m going to try the Etch-a-Sketch analogy for a while to see if that has any traction.

Of course the really fun part is guessing what a truly readable, portable reader capabable of storing tens of thousands of pages will mean for publishers. What role will DRM have for printed matter? Would publishers sell the eBook version of a title along with the print title, so that people can have both something tangible for their shelves and something portable for the subway . . . and quickly searchable?

And what might it mean for writers? What if you could download a “bookcast” of new short stories and not have to pay much (if anything) or be at your computer to read them?