More Tools of Change reports & developments
Some catchup from the Tools of Change conference.
Lexcycle licenses Adobe PDF, ePub, & DRM technologies
First of all, Lexcycle has announced another coup for Stanza: they have licensed Adobe’s PDF and ePub rendering technologies and DRM, and Stanza will be able to read DRM-locked e-books from any retailer or library that uses Adobe Content Server 4.
While many of us would much rather have no DRM at all, this is good news for all the iPhone/iPod Touch users who have felt locked out of digital libraries that only dealt in locked PDFs. How well it will render a PDF on an iPhone-sized screen remains to be seen, however.
Tools of Change Blogs
Moving on to Tools of Change events, here is Edward Champion’s rundown on what went on at the "Rise of the E-Book" panel yesterday, in which our very own David Rothman was a panelist. It is well worth reading for the interesting summary of what was discussed—and is also probably the only time you will ever see David Rothman described metaphorically as "Ah-nuld."
Champion has written summaries of other panels as well, collected in the "tools of change" category of his blog.
Sarah Weinman has an interesting column that touches on the "Rise" panel, and puts it in context with some other panels—as well as bringing up the limitations of using Twitter to follow the conference.
Here is a blog post with notes from Gavin Bell’s "The Long Tail Needs Community" panel, and here are Gavin Bell’s slides from the panel.
Cory Doctorow
"Dude gives @doctorow his card, & he responds with, "I’m out of cards, but I’m the first Cory in Google." Ha." —cmaisannes on Twitter
To the surprise of many and consternation of some of his Twitter followers, Cory Doctorow suddenly exploded into action after months of Twitter inactivity, livetweeting the morning panels. His comments were frequently insightful. If you were to choose to see the TOC through the eyes of just one tweeter, you could certainly do worse than Cory.
Some other surprises came out this morning, as well: the twitterer who originated the report of the Audible team walking out on Cory Doctorow’s anti-DRM keynote (which subsequently became one of the most-tweeted-about "events" of the conference) came forward to reveal it was a joke. (Notes have been added to my prior TOC stories mentioning this incident to clarify it.)
Speaking of that panel, which railed against Amazon forcing publishers to use their DRM, multiple people including David Rothman have tweeted that the representative from publisher Wiley, Peter Balis, stated that it was Wiley who insisted Amazon publish its books with DRM, and that other publishers have made the same insistence.
This is not too surprising—we already know from Steve Pendergrast at Fictionwise that they would love to release all their books DRM-free but the publishers won’t let them—but it does, perhaps, steal a little of Doctorow’s thunder.
And speaking of Cory Doctorow, here is a 40-second video clip in which he rails against the Authors Guild’s claims that the Kindle’s read-aloud feature violates copyright.
Economics of Free
"Publishers, word of the day: LAGNIAPPE. Learn it, live it, love it." —MoriahJovan on Twitter
One of the more tweeted-about panels was the "Economics of Free" panel. It is not easy to reconstruct what was said from tweets, but apparently Random House and O’Reilly presented some research they had done into piracy and its effects.
Among other things, they found that the threat of peer-to-peer piracy was overstated for books, which had a low incident of piracy and a time lag of 20 weeks. Random House found that the free downloads it had offered correlated with a slight increase in sales, though that may not actually have been caused by the free downloads.
O’Reilly further stated that piracy was a zero-sum, "win some, lose some" game, and that publishers should devote their energy into developing good digital platforms rather than anti-piracy efforts. Furthermore, most piracy of e-books (which are, after all, much smaller files than music or movies) takes place on Rapidshare, rather than BitTorrent.
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