The Guardian has a story today suggesting as much:

Everyone’s looking at the pattern they’ve seen in music and video - an old medium changed radically by technology - and waiting for it to hit the book world. But the chances of that happening right now are very small indeed. Why? It’s fairly straightforward.

The real reason that the music industry came around to the idea of downloads wasn’t because they had a startling insight into the future, or even because Apple forced the issue by building a clever ecosystem around the iPod (it didn’t launch the iTunes store until 2003). It was because customers were choosing to pirate instead.

Full article here.

Joel Rickett writes:

Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.

The first of the six stories is Charles Cumming’s The 21 Steps, based on John Buchan’s classic thriller The 39 Steps.

It uses Google Maps and Google Earth to follow the trail of a bewildered young Londoner who witnesses a murder and is forced to smuggle a mysterious liquid on to a plane.

The stories - which can be read online at wetellstories.co.uk - will feature clues that point to a seventh story hidden on the internet, culminating in a competition to win a £13,000 Penguin Classics library.

Link to the Guardian article

Matt Buchanan of Gizmodo has a great article up about book-buyers’ rights in the age of ebooks and licensing.

If you buy a regular old book, CD or DVD, you can turn around and loan it to a friend, or sell it again. The right to pass it along is called the “first sale” doctrine. Digital books, music and movies are a different story though. Four students at Columbia Law School’s Science and Technology Law Review looked at the particular issue of reselling and copying e-books downloaded to Amazon’s Kindle or the Sony Reader, and came up with answers to a fundamental question: Are you buying a crippled license to intellectual property when you download, or are you buying an honest-to-God book?

In the fine print that you “agree” to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books—you’re not paying to own ‘em, in spite of the use of the term “buy.” Digital retailers say that the first sale doctrine—which would let you hawk your old Harry Potter hardcovers on eBay—no longer applies. Your license to read the book is unlimited, though—so even if Amazon or Sony changed technologies, dropped the biz or just got mad at you, they legally couldn’t take away your purchases. Still, it’s a license you can’t sell.

But is this claim legal?

Link (via BoingBoing)

HarperCollins announced Wednesday that it had set up a special link, http://mobile.harpercollins.com, that will allow browsers to view excerpts from more than a dozen new releases, including Michael C. White’s “Soul Catcher” and Michael Korda’s “Ike,” a biography of President Eisenhower.

“Reaching consumers on mobile devices and the Internet is increasingly important for publishers,” Brian Murray, president of HarperCollins Publishers Worldwide, said in a statement that noted the publisher has some 10,000 titles already digitized.

Several publishers have been offering content for cell phone use and the iPhone, which already allows consumers to watch videos, take pictures, listen to music and surf the Web, is an obvious outlet for an industry anxious to boost sales and keep up with the latest technology.

Link to the Yahoo News article

The Espresso Book Machine, which allows users to print copies of books on demand, has just been installed in the New York public library.  The library’s offering free copies of any book out of a list of 20 available on the machine (see below) to anyone who goes to try it out.

The Espresso Book Machine will be available to the public at SIBL through August, and will operate Monday- Saturday from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m. The New York Public Library’s Science, Industry and Business Library is located at 188 Madison Avenue (at 34th Street).

Library users will have the opportunity to print free copies of such public domain classics as “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” by Mark Twain, “Moby Dick” by Herman Melville, “A Christmas Carol” by Charles Dickens and “Songs of Innocence” by William Blake, as well as appropriately themed in-copyright titles as Chris Anderson’s “The Long Tail” and Jason Epstein’s own “Book Business.” The public domain titles were provided by the Open Content Alliance (“OCA”), a non-profit organization with a database of over 200,000 titles. The OCA and ODB are working closely to offer this digital content free of charge to libraries across the country. Both organizations have received partial funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.

The EBM, now available for sale to libraries and retailers, can potentially allow readers anywhere to obtain within minutes, almost any book title in any language, whether or not the book is in print. The EBM’s proprietary software transmits a digital file to the book machine, which automatically prints, binds, and trims the reader’s selection within minutes as a single, library-quality, paperback book, indistinguishable from the factory-made title.

The direct-to-consumer model of the EBM eliminates shipping and warehousing costs for books (thereby also eliminating returns and pulping of unsold books) and allows simultaneous global availability of millions of new and backlist titles in all categories and languages. These savings permit potentially lower prices to consumers and libraries, and greater royalties and profits to authors and publishers. Also, titles will never have to go out of print again.

Link to press release (via BoingBoing).

The Guardian writes:

The American writer Norman Mailer is to use a “remote pen” to do a book-signing from the other side of the Atlantic, after age and ill-health forced him to cancel a rare public appearance in the UK.

…Mailer will use an internet-based technique devised by the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood for remotely signing books called LongPen.

Mailer will be at his home in Provincetown on the east coast near New York, while his audience will be in the tented city which is built in a Georgian square in Edinburgh’s New Town each year for the festival.

According to an older Guardian article on the subject of the LongPen’s launch last year (via Neil Gaiman’s blog archives):

LongPen allows an author to see the reader she is signing for, and vice-versa, using a videoconferencing system, and an image of the page to be signed.

She then writes her inscription on a touch-sensitive LCD screen and presses a button. That sends a signal to the remote bookstore, where the robot arm, clutching an ordinary ballpoint pen, copies out the message on to the book.

A signing through the LongPen is certainly better than a complete cancellation, though in my opinion it leaves something to be desired over an in-person encounter with a favorite author. Still, if the alternative is a tired/grouchy/sick author, a signing through the LongPen might actually allow better “quality time” with them.

It’ll be interesting to see whether more authors will begin to take advantage of technology like the LongPen to make appearances at signings they wouldn’t otherwise have been able to attend. Though authors have been slower than members of other employment sectors to take advantage of virtual interaction, there’s been a recent push to take advantage of technology to interact with readers: commonplace videoconferencing at events and George R. R. Martin’s appearance in Second Life are only a couple examples.

From Reuters:

The dusty world of book publishing has taken a step into cyberspace as Random House and HarperCollins letting customers browse books online.

Random House, whose writers include Danielle Steel and Norman Mailer, said on Tuesday it will let consumers search and browse through more than 5,000 of its titles on the Internet through a new service called Insight.

Continue reading on Reuters.co.uk. 

To satisfy the U.S. demand for popular Japanese anime, manga publisher Viz Media has licensed the digital download rights for the hit Japanese TV anime series Death Note, which is based on the bestselling manga series published by Viz in the U.S. It appears to be the first time a U.S. manga publisher has been able to secure the digital rights to a Japanese TV anime series while it is still popular and running in Japan.

Thanks to the Internet, U.S. fans want the most popular Japanese manga and anime right away. Marks said offering downloads is an effort to “satisfy fan demand” and beat digital pirates at their own game. “It’s up on YouTube anyway,” said Marks. “We’d like to have an official version available. It’s an experiment to figure out a way to get material to fans as fast as we can.”

According to the article, the episodes will probably sell for about $1.99 each.
Link to the Publishers Weekly article