Jon Bruner interviews Tim O’Reilly for Forbes Magazine. O’Reilly Media doesn’t put DRM on any of its books, he explains why:
People who don’t pay you generally wouldn’t have paid you anyway. We’re delighted when people who can’t afford our books don’t pay us for them, if they go out and do something useful with that information.
I think having faith in that basic logic of the market is important. Besides, DRM interferes with the user experience. It makes it much harder to have people adopt your product.
The lack of DRM is one of the reasons I purchase books from O’Reilly directly. It feels like you’re actually buying something — they’ll also give it to you in whatever format you want and will email when there’s an update. If you keep an eye on their twitter feed, they offer decent discounts.
A set of photos from Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes.
Dallas Clayton created An Awesome Book! for his son. The story is about dreaming big and never giving up. The book is self-published and is currently in its twentieth printing. Dallas started a foundation to give away a copy of his book for every copy that he sold. It’s not limited to schools and stores, he’ll walk up to random parents and give them a copy. You can read the book in its entirety and then buy a copy.
Popular Science has made their entire archive available for browsing. That’s more than a hundred years of the magazine, visible in its original format, advertising and all.
Google Books teamed up with LIFE, to scan full issues of LIFE magazine from the 1930s-1970s and provide them for public viewing.
Update: A Year in Pictures is a particularly interesting artifact for the type nerds out there.
Six Projects That Could Change Publishing for the Better is Michael Tamblyn’s presentation from the BookNet TechForum outlining projects, changes and initiatives that could help change the industry. It’s forward thinking and funny to boot, definitely worth watching if you’re at all interested in the book industry.
How to publish without perishing:
You won’t win on quick distribution, and you won’t win on price. Cyberspace has that covered.
Go back to an old-fashioned idea: that a book, printed in ink on durable paper, acid-free for longevity, is a thing of beauty. Make it as well as you can. People want to cherish it.
Internet book piracy will drive authors to stop writing. This article just made me laugh. It almost makes me want to go out and pirate their books, just so they’ll cease writing and stop polluting the world with stupid ideas.
