Writers and Editors

"As most people know who are following the tribulations of libraries trying to stock ebooks, four of the Big Six publishers are not making any ebooks available to libraries at all (except titles already sold in the past)," writes Mike Shatzkin this week. "Random House continues to supply all their titles to libraries as ebooks with only the 'one loan at a time per copy purchased' limitation, but they have just raised the prices  Read More 

Thanks to Robin Rowlands (The road to serfdom: Use Apple software ) for alerting us to the fact (widely discussed among techies) that deep within the license agreement for the excellent new iBook software is a clause stating that if you use the free software to create an ebook that you plan to sell (not give away) you are bound exclusively to Apple. Read Robin's  Read More 

When Amazon.com and ebook discounts get rock-bottom low, so do returns to publishers, and even more so to authors, writes Michael Jecks in his persuasive blog post, This really is the death knell for publishers (writerlytwitterings, 9-28-11).

In a market rigged against independent bookstores Read More 

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"In the winter of 2010, the cheerfully effervescent romance novelist Nyree Belleville suffered the same fate as many a scribe — she was dropped by her publisher," writes Neely Tucker in Novel rejected? There’s an e-book gold rush! (Washington Post, 5-6-11). The most any of her 12 spicy romances, penned under the name Bella Andre, had earned was $21,000." Read More 

Can authors self-publish eBooks from their own website?
Technically yes. In real life, says Josh Tallent, no. ePub is a great open-source format that several firms use. The problem is DRM (copy protection), for which the bookseller pays a sizable fee. So you can sell your own eBook from your website, but you can’t sell a locked-down copy-controlled version of your eBook.
This is part 1 of a 3-part report on a talk eBook experts Josh Tallent and David Rothman made to the Washington Biography Group, May 2, 2011. Some of the details may now be out of date, but the broad explanation may still be helpful.  <a href="https://www.smashwords.com/about"target="_blank">Smashwords</a>, for example, boasts of "producing DRM-less ebooks" on its About page.

Should you copy-protect your eBook? That depends.

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