Ethics and Publishing

Cringe: A staffer at the New Yorker makes up facts for his recent popular book, lies about it, apologizes, and resigns from the magazine. The publisher of his book is halting shipment of print books and taking the e-book off the market.

A review of the 2012 Conference on Ethics and Publishing.

An interesting solution for dealing with DRM issues. 

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Okay, sure, I understand feeling the need to self-publish, and yeah, I can see how even big publishers could have bad marketing, but to take the advance and run? That just seems wrong wrong wrong to me on all levels.

Another factor in the pricing of ebooks--Amazon's ranking algorithms, which may result in price increases to indie books so that they will be noticed. Indie author Edward W. Robertson is a stats junkie who's been studying the e-seller's algorithms for a while.

One publisher is giving away the ebook when a print book is purchased. Is that good for the industry?

Twitter follows Google in issuing a report on governments requests for user account information.

"Google said it was alarmed by the number of government requests to censor political speech, particularly from Western democracies like the United States, Spain and Poland."

U.S. censorship piece is not so suprising to me in this post 9/11 and tube car bombing era. It is becoming difficult to site what is hampering my rights a company that wants to Know all(Google) infringing on my privacy, or a government that wants to keep people from knowledge to stamp out terror; and in doing so is impeding my privacy and speech. But what is terrifying to me is that my speech will not be free in a bit, so it seems. Democracy flaw is not the letter of law, but the people that implement it.

I got this from Bo Sacks daily email. It will be interesting to follow their success or failure.

Interesting piece by one of the speakers at this year's Ethics and Publishing Conference.

Greed, greed, greed to supersede the voice of the public. There has to be and needs to be and open eformat. Collusion of any kind by any companies to monopolize is wrong. Why be mad at the government actually doing its job by trying to stamp unfairness. Is this not the land of the free and home of the brave where we are afforded the right to compete on fair terms, or are we just capitalist to the harshest degree, with no wiggle room? Uncle Sam will always be the ref in these battles of monopoly. Does Amazon, Apple, and Goggle with there wholesale pillaging scan scam holding the lions share of the ePub tech and licenses make it a safe place for upstart like I would like to have in the future? I say "NO"!!! Change the game Uncle Sam for the consumer, loyalist, and publisher in this ePub wild west.

Spotted by Meredith.

"I would love to go [home] with the Kindle during the holidays." This brings into mind the joy in the winter spent here in the states on Christmas with my family and electronic gizmos. With the day to day hustle we sometimes forget about the "have nots." This young man Eperence Uwera, a 13-year-old student is thankful for what some take for granted as just another toy for fun. The poignant thought of this article is that the digital the divide is hampering growth in poor or remote areas globally. An E-Book Revolution for Africa? duly notes that Amazon is lending a hand to bridge the digital gap in Africa, also prompting technological literacy; if there is such a term. The problem raised in this article is that programs such as Worldreader sometimes get neglected, because of maintenance delays or high overhead cost to keep operations afloat in poverty stricken areas. This program brings hope to the less fortune children of African to see the wealth of knowledge gained from ePub. Quickly disseminated information at 1,000 young minds access gives a decent outlook for Africa's future. Though the program touches a small fraction, the fact is this Kindle program is tripling the libraries of these impoverished provinces; and is a milestone for further development. Hopefully, Worldreader and programs like it can be sustained through the digital era and beyond. Publishing can change the world!!!

Submitted by Meredith Hurt

Update: This post is part of a series. If you find this topic interesting, I recommend you read the two follow-ups as well: Apple has built its iBooks platform on the back of an open standard. With last week's introduction of iBooks 2.0 and the free iBooks Author software for Mac OS X, Apple is deliberately locking out that popular open standard.

From Meredith "Another interesting article to share about the digital divide in America. What I thought was interesting in this wasn't that there was a gap in technology tools but that there is a gap in technology support once those tools/gadgets arrive at the school."

Very interesting article. Though internet access can be a huge problem in rural areas, this article didn't mention its rather large costs. Often times, rural areas pay significantly more for internet than in a city. For some of these kids the problem is not just having the phone company improve access, but the cost of it, too.