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But content owners also belatedly realize that simply suing consumers who find new, convenient ways to access content online is not as good as finding new business models to profit from customer interest that technology makes possible.

his shift by Google led Peter Osnos, founder of PublicAffairs books, to wonder if the book settlement could have lessons for other owners of content. "Google has now conceded, with a very large payment, that information is not free," Mr. Osnos wrote for the Century Foundation. "This leads to an obvious, critical question: Why aren't newspapers and news magazines demanding payment for use of their stories on Google and other search engines? Why are they not getting a significant slice of the advertising revenues generated by use of their stories via Google?"

"We know digital book customers want a broad selection of content, a choice of reading platforms and devices and the option to get their eBook from their favorite retailer, local public library or directly from the publisher," said Paul Weiskopf, senior vice president, Corporate Development at Adobe. "Adobe Content Server 4 enables the publishing industry to meet all these needs for eBook customers while, at the same time, protecting valuable copyrights."

in my view there is no need for a digital editor as such in a trade publishing house, rather an editor who understands the digital world:

two key issues: accuracy of conversion, which we set at 99.999999%, instead of some competitors’ 99.95%, and attending to the reader experience by providing accurate and appropriate metadata, which is one of the points I want to illustrate later on to show why I believe editors need new knowledge not new skills

Writing that uses new media by incorporating visuals, sound, movies and so on in different delivery platforms such as the new Sony Reader, Alternate Reality Games mixing narrative and interaction by readers and contributors, self-published material, collaborative wikinovels and other kinds of informal, or extra-formal creativity, are exactly the kind of material that a traditional trade publishing house such as Pan Macmillan, however innovative, finds it very difficult to use, or even acknowledge, in a publishing process, and it’s unlikely to be seriously practical in the short term, which means until someone can think of a way to make money out of it, not least because digital projects are typically seen by customers and authors as free or very low-cost, when in fact they’re often more expensive than traditional ones because of the high set-up and development costs

As noted earlier, DRM does nothing to prevent piracy. It’s in place on the Kindle to provide proprietary lock-in for Amazon and a little hand-holding comfort for nervous publishers.  It serves to annoy and alienate potential paying customers. The Kindle has great potential as a device, but as long as Amazon continues to cripple it, readers would be advised to seek alternative e-book solutions.