My last word on DRM

Trying to change a major publisher’s mind on DRM is a lost cause. That’s why even though I disagree with IDPF’s DRM efforts, I can only hope that their work will result in the wholesale adoption of a completely ineffective and useless DRM technique and bring us into a de facto DRM-free world. (You could argue DRM isn’t a problem for existing consumers. That’s true, but only because we just buy from Amazon.

The various types of readers

(This is the sixth post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.) (Before I start, I’d like to make sure you know this is all speculation and probably wrong.) My guess is you can break book consumers into broadly five different kind of behaviours. Emphasis here is on consumers so this doesn’t cover corporate, institutional, or similar professional purchases at all. Heavy reader. People who buy several books a month, read most of them, and still have a mile-high ‘to read’ list.

The unevenly distributed ebook future

(This is the fifth post in a series on the publishing industry’s new product categories.) Data serves the status quo. Anything new or undiscovered by definition does not have a data footprint. Existing data collection and filtering techniques have biases that do not take the unknown or unfamiliar into account. Unless you have a clear theory and a well-designed experiment to prove or disprove it, the only thing more data will tell you is that your preconceptions and existing biases are correct.

Blogging has trained me to assume you’re stupid

(This is the fourth Stumbling into Publishing post.) One of my biggest regrets with the Knights & Necromancers series is how generic it sounds. Not just the title—if it were just the title I could have fixed that by changing it. No, the problem is that the stories seem impossible to summarise without sounding like generic cookie-cutter sword and sorcery fiction because that was the foundation I built on. I’d like to think I made something more of it but that ‘something’ is a thing too vague to boil down and market.

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