Charlie Stross: More on DRM and ebooks
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SF author Charlie Stross. Last week’s blog entry on Amazon’s ebook strategy went around the net like a dose of rotavirus. And, as we can now see from Tor’s ground-breaking announcement I was only just ahead of the curve: people at executive level inside Macmillan were already asking whether dropping DRM would be a good [...]
Tor Books Goes DRM Free
Yesterday, Tor Books announced that they were going to go entirely DRM-free, by early July, 2012. This is huge news and I’m excited to hear it. “Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen.” Digital Rights Management (DRM) is the name for a software lock that publishers apply to movies and e-books that you’ve purchased. When [...]
Robert Caro’s Big Dig
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Caro began “The Years of Lyndon Johnson,” his multivolume biography of the 36th president, in 1976, not long after finishing “The Power Broker,” his immense, Pulitzer Prize-winning biography of Moses, and figured he could do Johnson’s life in three volumes, which would take him six years or so. Next month, a fourth installment, “The Passage [...]
OWS’s Account of the “Trashed” Brooklyn House
About 2 weeks ago, I posted about Occupy Wall Street and Mr. Ahadzi. A few days ago, I received an email from an anonymous OWS supporter, offering OWS’s side of the story.
U.S. oil gusher blows out projections
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I knew things were getting better, but this is unexpected. The United States’ rapidly declining crude oil supply has made a stunning about-face, shredding federal oil projections and putting energy independence in sight of some analyst forecasts. After declining to levels not seen since the 1940s, U.S. crude production began rising again in 2009. Drilling [...]
Welcome to North Korea, Part I
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You could easily tell who the North Korean citizens were. Each had a pin on his or her shirt, right over the heart, featuring either the beaming smile of Kim Il Sung, the Great Leader and Eternal President of Korea—the only official head of state who is dead—or a more innocuous pin with the North Korean flag on it.
Could Amazon’s Lending Library End in Court?
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This explains so many questions about the new Amazon Kindle Lending Library: why it has so few books, why you can only browse the books from your Kindle, and why you can only check out one title per month.
PW has learned that the overwhelming majority of publishers with titles featured in the program …
Sugar, and candy, do not make kids hyper
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In my favorite of these studies, children were divided into two groups. All of them were given a sugar-free beverage to drink. But half the parents were told that their child had just had a drink with sugar. Then, all of the parents were told to grade their children’s behavior. …
Stay the Troy Davis Execution
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Georgia absolutely should not execute Troy Davis next week. No one should ever be executed when there is this much doubt in the case record. This is very disturbing and scary.
In an extraordinary hearing in June 2010 ordered by the U.S. Supreme Court, Davis’ attorneys were finally allowed to present evidence of his …
In Detroit, Two Wage Levels Are the New Way of Work
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Interesting. Companies that have the freedom to set their own pay and benefit scales are able to create more new jobs than they would otherwise be able to. That’s certainly unexpected.
They are a cornerstone of Chrysler’s unlikely comeback: 900 employees turning out a Jeep Grand Cherokee sport utility vehicle every 48 seconds of …