crisis in publishing

Why Traditionally Publish? A Response To A Comment

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This post by Chuck Wendig originally appeared on his terribleminds site on 1/19/15.

So, the other day I said something about how in publishing no real debate exists and hey isn’t it super-nifty that we have lots of options and all options are equal and valid in the eyes of WRITING JESUS and I dunno, I probably said something else but I tend to fade out.

One such comment on that post was the following, by addadinsane:

You think that’s just vanity publishing? There’s no difference between how much work you have to do in marketing whether you’re trad published or self-published. The only authors that get a marketing budget nowadays are the huge sellers. (Even my friend who is A-list doesn’t get one – he’s still not big enough.)

It was funny, I was on a panel a couple of months back with a bunch of traditionally published authors and someone in the audience brought this up, said to me “But don’t you have to do all the marketing yourself?” So I turned to the other five panellists and said “Hey guys, how much marketing do you have to do?” Answers ranged from “Loads” to “All of it”.

And trad publishers take a lot more than 50%. One wonders what for.

I’m all in favour of “no debate” but I think people should be accurately informed about the truth of traditional publishing rather than looking through rose-tinted spectacles. Then they can make an informed decision.

Frankly I don’t know why anyone goes trad published to be honest. The only reason I’ve heard recently is that they want to be a “proper” author. And if that isn’t vanity, I don’t know what is.

And I wanted to respond to it. But I started to write up my response and found it too long for a mere paltry comment, and figured, hey, well, I’ll take up some oxygen at the blog, proper.

 

Read the full post on terribleminds.

 

Among The Disrupted

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This essay by Leon Wieseltier originally appeared on The New York Times Sunday Book Review on 1/7/15.

Amid the bacchanal of disruption, let us pause to honor the disrupted. The streets of American cities are haunted by the ghosts of bookstores and record stores, which have been destroyed by the greatest thugs in the history of the culture industry. Writers hover between a decent poverty and an indecent one; they are expected to render the fruits of their labors for little and even for nothing, and all the miracles of electronic dissemination somehow do not suffice for compensation, either of the fiscal or the spiritual kind. Everybody talks frantically about media, a second-order subject if ever there was one, as content disappears into “content.” What does the understanding of media contribute to the understanding of life? Journalistic institutions slowly transform themselves into silent sweatshops in which words cannot wait for thoughts, and first responses are promoted into best responses, and patience is a professional liability. As the frequency of expression grows, the force of expression diminishes: Digital expectations of alacrity and terseness confer the highest prestige upon the twittering cacophony of one-liners and promotional announcements. It was always the case that all things must pass, but this is ridiculous.

Meanwhile the discussion of culture is being steadily absorbed into the discussion of business. There are “metrics” for phenomena that cannot be metrically measured. Numerical values are assigned to things that cannot be captured by numbers. Economic concepts go rampaging through noneconomic realms: Economists are our experts on happiness! Where wisdom once was, quantification will now be. Quantification is the most overwhelming influence upon the contemporary American understanding of, well, everything. It is enabled by the idolatry of data, which has itself been enabled by the almost unimaginable data-generating capabilities of the new technology. The distinction between knowledge and information is a thing of the past, and there is no greater disgrace than to be a thing of the past. Beyond its impact upon culture, the new technology penetrates even deeper levels of identity and experience, to cognition and to consciousness. Such transformations embolden certain high priests in the church of tech to espouse the doctrine of “transhumanism” and to suggest, without any recollection of the bankruptcy of utopia, without any consideration of the cost to human dignity, that our computational ability will carry us magnificently beyond our humanity and “allow us to transcend these limitations of our biological bodies and brains. . . . There will be no distinction, post-Singularity, between human and machine.” (The author of that updated mechanistic nonsense is a director of engineering at Google.)
Read the full essay on The New York Times Sunday Book Review. Note that The New York Times may move this material behind a paywall in the future.

 

How The Strand Bookstore Keeps Going in the Age of Amazon

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This post by Christopher Bonanos originally appeared on Slate on 11/28/14.

Walk into the Strand Book Store, at East 12th and Broadway, and the retail experience you’ll have is unexpectedly contemporary. The walls are white, the lighting bright; crisp red signage is visible at every turn. The main floor is bustling, and the store now employs merchandising experts to refine its traffic flow and make sure that prime display space goes to stuff that’s selling. Whereas you can leave a Barnes & Noble feeling numbed, particularly if a clerk directs you to Gardening when you ask for Leaves of Grass, the Strand is simply a warmer place for readers.

In the middle of the room, though, is a big concrete column holding up the building, and it looks … wrong. It’s painted gray, and not a soft designer gray but some dead color like you’d see on a basement floor. Crudely stenciled signs reading BOOKS SHIPPED ANYWHERE are tacked to it. Bookcases surround the column, and they’re beat to hell, their finish nearly black with age.

This tableau was left intact when the store was renovated in 2003. Until then, the Strand had been a beloved, indispensable, and physically grim place. Like a lot of businesses that had hung on through the FORD TO CITY: DROP DEAD years, it looked broken-down and patched-up. The bathroom was even dirtier than the one in the Astor Place subway. You got the feeling that a lot of books had been on the shelves for years. The ceiling was dark with the exhalations from a million Chesterfields. There were mice. People arriving with review copies to sell received an escort to the basement after a guard’s bellow: “Books to go down!” It was an experience that, once you adjusted to its sourness, you might appreciate and even enjoy. Maybe.

That New York is mostly gone, replaced by a cleaner and more efficient city—not to mention a cleaner and more efficient Strand.

 

Read the full post on Slate.

 

The DBW Writers’ Survey

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 11/19/14.

The annual DBW Writers’ Survey is up!

Please consider participating and sharing. The more respondents, the more meaningful the results.

Of course, we’ll have to wait and see how those results are analyzed. In the past, the outcome of publishing paths has been the main focus of this survey, which does not help authors make decisions with their manuscripts. There is an implied assumption in those past results that authors can simply choose whether to traditionally publish or self-publish. And so aspiring authors who have not yet managed to get traditionally published do not have their $0 income factored in, while all self-published authors are counted.

Compounding the problem, hybrid authors (those who have published both ways) have been treated as a special case in the past. This is odd considering that the vast majority of hybrids have either been picked up because of success with self-publishing, or found success self-publishing a backlist that did poorly enough with a traditional publisher for the rights to revert. In both cases, it was the decision to self-publish that was heavily rewarded.

These issues can be handled in the analysis. One way would be to compare hybrids with those who have been traditionally published, as both groups represent the top fraction of two different freely made decisions: the decision to either query an agent/publisher or to self-publish. These two groups also have in common the ability to draw the interest of a publishing house, whether out of a slush pile or out of the pool of self-published titles.

 

Read the full post on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

Ebook Publishing Gets More Difficult from Here – Here's How to Succeed

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This post by Mark Coker originally appeared on the Smashwords Blog on 11/19/14.

First the good news.

For indie (self-published) authors, there’s never been a better time to publish an ebook. Thanks to an ever-growing global market for your ebooks, your books are a couple clicks away from over one billion potential readers on smart phones, tablets and e-readers.

As a Smashwords author, you have access to tools, distribution and best practices knowledge to publish ebooks faster, smarter and less expensively than the large publishers can. In the world of ebooks, the playing field is tilted to the indie author’s advantage.

Now the bad news.

Everything gets more difficult from here. You face an uphill battle. With a couple exceptions – namely Scribd and Oyster – most major ebook retailers have suffered anemic or declining sales over the last 12-18 months.

The gravy train of exponential sales growth is over. Indies have hit a brick wall and are scrambling to make sense of it. In recent weeks, for example, I’ve heard a number of indie authors report that their sales at Amazon dropped significantly since July when Amazon launched Kindle Unlimited (I might write about Kindle Unlimited in a future blog post). Some authors are considering quitting. It’s heartbreaking to hear this, but I’m not surprised either. When authors hit hard times, sometimes the reasons to quit seem to outnumber the reasons to power on. Often these voices come from friends and family who admire our authorship but question the financial sensibility of it all.

The writer’s life is not an easy one, especially when you’re measuring your success in dollars. If you’re relying on your earnings to put food on your family’s table, a career as an indie author feels all the more precarious.

At times like this, it’s important for all writers to take a deep breath, find their grounding, remember why they became an author in the first place, and make important decisions about their future. It’s times like this that test an author.

Don’t fail the test.

Back in December, in my annual publishing predictions for 2014, I speculated that growth in the ebook market would stall out in 2014. I wrote that after a decade of exponential growth in ebooks with indies partying like it was 1999, growth was slowing.

I wrote that the hazard of fast-growing markets – the hazard of the rapid rise of ebooks – is that rapid growth can mask flaws in business models. It can cause players to misinterpret the reasons for their success, and the assumptions upon which they build and execute their publishing strategy. Who are these players? I’m talking about authors, publishers, retailers, distributors and service providers – all of us. It’s easy to succeed when everything’s growing like gangbusters. It’s when things slow down that your beliefs and underlying assumptions are tested.

I urged authors to embrace the coming shakeout rather than fear it. Let it spur you on to become a better, more competitive player in the months and years ahead. Players who survive shakeouts usually emerge stronger out the other end.

 

What’s causing the slowdown?

While every individual author’s results will differ from the aggregate, I think there are several drivers shaping the current environment.

 

Read the full, lengthy post, which includes further analysis and specific action items, on the Smashwords Blog.

 

Why the Amazon–Hachette Deal Is Likely Good for Writers and Publishers

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This article by Vauhini Vara originally appeared on The New Yorker on 11/14/14.

The end of the months-long impasse between Amazon and Hachette over e-book pricing was a bit anticlimactic for those who had been watching the drama unfold. For months, the companies and their supporters had been accusing each other of bad behavior, warped motives, and plain dimwittedness. At one point, Amazon, apparently hoping to put pressure on the publisher, began delaying shipments of hard copies of Hachette-published books ordered through its site, to the ire of those books’ authors. In response, many writers signed an open letter from a group called Authors United, begging Amazon to back off; later, Authors United announced that it would ask the U.S. Department of Justice to investigate whether Amazon’s delays, or other tactics, amounted to antitrust violations.

Journalists covered each of the escalations attentively, and the negative publicity hurt Amazon’s reputation and maybe even its bottom line. The company posted disappointing earnings results in late October, including the slowest growth it had seen for North American media sales (which includes books, movies, and music) in more than five years. But then, on Thursday morning, the companies issued a joint press release announcing that they have agreed to make Hachette responsible for setting e-book prices, as Hachette is thought to have sought. It is believed that Amazon, which has typically favored keeping e-book prices low, had hoped to set those prices itself. Instead, with this agreement, Amazon will, according to David Naggar, Amazon’s vice-president for Kindle, offer “specific financial incentives for Hachette to deliver lower prices.” The agreement will take effect in early 2015.

 

Read the full article on The New Yorker.

 

The War of the Words

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This article by Pete Gessen originally appeared in Vanity Fair‘s December 2014 issue.

Amazon’s war with publishing giant Hachette over e-book pricing has earned it a black eye in the media, with the likes of Philip Roth, James Patterson, and Stephen Colbert demanding that the online mega-store stand down. How did Amazon—which was once seen as the book industry’s savior—end up as Literary Enemy Number One? And how much of this fight is even about money? Keith Gessen reports.

 

I. Discovery

Otis Chandler is a tall, serious, bespectacled man in his mid-30s whose grandfather, also named Otis Chandler, used to own the Los Angeles Times. Chandler grew up in Los Angeles, attended boarding school near Pomona, and then, like his father and grandfather, went to Stanford. Upon graduation he entered the computer field. Because it was the turn of the millennium, that meant working at a start-up: Chandler found a job at Tickle.com, which was an early venture in social networking. At Tickle, Chandler eventually became a project manager, starting a dating site called LoveHappens.com. It did O.K. In 2004, Tickle was acquired by Monster Worldwide, parent company of Monster.com, the huge job-posting site, and about a year and a half later, Chandler left.

He started to think about what he should do with himself. One day, while visiting a bookish friend, he had what he calls an epiphany. “He had one of those bookshelves in his apartment,” Chandler told me when I met him in San Francisco. “You know what I mean, the bookshelf when you walk into someone’s house, the one where they keep all their favorite books. I walked into his living room and started checking out his shelf and just grilling him, like, ‘That looks cool. What’d you think of it? What’d you think of that?’ ” He left his friend’s place with 10 good books. “I was like, if I could go to all my friends’ living rooms and grill them about what books they like, I would never lack for a good book again. But instead of doing that, why don’t I just build a site where everybody puts their shelves in their profiles?”

 

Read the full article on Vanity Fair.

 

The Perks, Pitfalls, and Paradoxes of Amazon Publishing

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This article by Nina Shapiro originally appeared on Seattle Weekly on 11/4/14.

Amid a boycott and bicoastal culture clash, Amazon has created a new model of publishing. Where does that leave authors?

One day in 2012, Megan Chance, a historical-fiction writer from the Kitsap Peninsula, arrived at Amazon.com’s South Lake Union headquarters for a meeting. The retail giant’s sleek new campus was bustling with software engineers of various nationalities, marketing mavens, and MBAs. The floor Chance visited, though, was practically empty. “There were, like, four people there,” Chance recalls. “It was bizarre.”

The two-decade-old online retailer was still getting a relatively new and little-understood division going—one devoted not only to selling books on the vast digital platform it had created, but also to publishing them. With the frenetic speed of a start-up, Amazon Publishing had in a few years launched a series of imprints devoted to different niches: mystery, romance, historical fiction, science fiction, and more. Now, the company’s fledgling imprint devoted to her genre, Lake Union Publishing, wanted to publish Chance’s latest work, Bone River, a novel about a 19th-century ethnologist who develops a mystical connection to a mummy.

Chance, in her early 50s, was at a low point in her career. She had spent two decades writing books that languished on bookstore shelves, caught in what she believed was a “vicious cycle” common to the publishing world. She had sold her first book to Hachette, which saw enough promise in the work to give her a big advance. The book sold poorly, though, and the publisher paid for a smaller print run the next time around, according to Chance. Those numbers weren’t great either. After that, she says, Hachette “was done.” She moved on to another publisher, where the downward spiral continued.

She was ready again for a new publisher with Bone River, but the New York publishers she approached didn’t bite. “Come back to us when you have better numbers,” she recalls being told.

 

Read the full article on Seattle Weekly.

 

The Amazon/Hachette Battle and Why It’s Great to Be a Self-Published Author

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This post by Miral Sattar originally appeared on PBS Mediashift on 6/3/14.

After a fantastic BEA (Book Expo America), I’ve been digesting the whole Amazon/Hachette battle. I’ve basically come to the conclusion that it’s an incredible time to be a self-published author.

The first thing that surprised me is that so much has been misreported about the Amazon/Hachette battle. Amazon and Hachette are negotiating their contract terms, and what normally should have been behind-the-door talks is turning into an all-out flame war in the media.

 
Myths:

a) Amazon increased publisher prices.

Amazon can’t increase prices. Amazon acts as a retailer of books. The publisher always sets the price of the books. Amazon only changes the amount of the discount similar to the way Walmart, Target or anyone else would.

b) Amazon removed buy buttons from Hachette titles.

No, Amazon didn’t remove any buy buttons. They just removed pre-order buttons from Hachette titles. Amazon doesn’t make pre-order buttons available to everyone and negotiates with each publisher individually. Readers can still buy their books albeit with delays as posted in the Amazon forums.

 

Read the full post on PBS Mediashift.

 

Two Important Publishing Facts Everyone Gets Wrong

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This post by Hugh Howey originally appeared on his site on 10/27/14.

Almost everything being said about publishing today is predicated on two facts that are dead wrong. The first is that publishers are somehow being hurt by ebook sales. The second is that independent bookstores are being crushed. The opposite is true in both cases, and without understanding this, most of what everyone says about publishing is complete bollocks.

Let’s take the health of publishers first. Below you will see that profit margins at the major publishers are either flat or improving. For three of the top publishers, margins have improved quite a bit:

 

Read the full post, which includes numerous infographics and much further analysis, on Hugh Howey’s site.

 

What Seth Godin Can Teach Us About Book Publishing

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This post by Jennifer Tribe originally appeared on clearprose communications on 5/14/14.

If you’ve ever read anything by Seth Godin, you know he’s not a man who’s content to just go with the flow. He’s been questioning and analyzing the business world — “poking the box,” as he calls it — for decades.

He applies that same inquisitive nature to publishing, too. Godin is the author of 17 bestselling books that have been translated into dozens of languages. He’s worked with a traditional publisher and he’s experimented with self-publishing. In other words, he’s been around the book block quite a few times.

Godin’s commentary on the book publishing industry is some of the sharpest I’ve read, and his techniques for crafting and promoting a book are often ingenious.

If you’re a non-fiction author, you’d do well to tear a page from Godin’s playbook — here’s how.

 

1] Understand that the idea is the thing

In Godin’s world, a book is a vehicle for an idea — the idea is the product — which means that right now, the traditional publishing industry is focused on the wrong thing.

[Publishers] will only thrive if they understand that an entirely new business model will have to be built and understood. And it will have nothing whatsoever to do with paper. It will be about ideas.Which is what book publishing was supposed to be about all along, right?

 

Click here to read the full post on clearprose communications.

 

Is the NYT Coverage of Amazon vs. Hachette Really Propaganda?

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This post by J.A. Konrath originally appeared on his A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing on 10/6/14.

By now you’ve seen the NYT Public Editor’s piece criticizing her own newspaper’s coverage of the Amazon/Hachette situation.

Note to David Streitfeld: see what Margaret Sullivan did? Being a competent reporter, she researched the situation and presented both sides of the story. That means quotes from authors representing both sides, and quotes from the very source (you) she was critical of.

She’s an excellent, smart, fair journalist, Mr. Streitfeld. Put your hat in your hand and go thank her. After you have, ask her for some pointers.

As well done as the piece was, Ms. Sullivan did write something that I didn’t agree with.

“A pro-Amazon author (Barry Eisler) charges that the paper is spewing propaganda…“propaganda” is a stretch…”

Is it really a stretch? Let’s dig a little deeper.

According to Wikipedia:

Propaganda is information that is not impartial and used primarily to influence an audience and further an agenda, often by presenting facts selectively (thus possibly lying by omission) to encourage a particular synthesis, or using loaded messages to produce an emotional rather than rational response to the information presented.

Hyperlinked in that definition is “impartial” which leads to a wiki about journalistic objectivity:

Journalistic objectivity can refer to fairness, disinterestedness, factuality, and nonpartisanship, but most often encompasses all of these qualities.

Also linked is “lying by omission”:

Also known as a continuing misrepresentation, a lie by omission occurs when an important fact is left out in order to foster a misconception. Lying by omission includes failures to correct pre-existing misconceptions.

And “loaded messages”:

In rhetoric, loaded language (also known as loaded terms or emotive language) is wording that attempts to influence an audience by using appeal to emotion or stereotypes.

Mr. Streitfeld says his stories have been driven by one value: “newsworthiness”. Back to Wikipedia:

Newsworthiness does not only depend on the topic, but also the presentation of the topic and the selection of information from that topic.

Is Streitfeld presenting his topics well? What information is he selecting about the topic? Does it err to the side of journalistic objectivity?

Let’s go back to May when the Amazon/Hachette story broke and Streitfeld wrote this piece. Looking at the definitions above, do these quotes from Streitfeld’s piece qualify as propaganda?

Streitfeld: Among Amazon’s tactics against Hachette, some of which it has been employing for months, are charging more for its books and suggesting that readers might enjoy instead a book from another author.

Joe sez: Amazon “charging more for its books” actually means Amazon is charging Hachette’s suggested retail price. Amazon suggesting that readers might enjoy a book from another author “instead” is unproven. Amazon advertises other authors’ books on every book page. This isn’t unique to Hachette. Amazon also offers used books for considerably less than the price of the new version, on the very same page. (buy Whiskey Sour for only $0.01!) But where has Amazon said “Buy this instead of this”? The word “instead” is loaded.

 

Click here to read the full, lengthy deconstruction of Streitfeld’s piece with Konrath’s commentary on A Newbie’s Guide To Publishing.

 

The Self-Publishing Revolution Is Only Just Beginning.

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This post by Joanna Penn originally appeared on her The Creative Penn site on 9/21/14.

Reflections On My Stockholm Trip

I spent a couple of days in Stockholm last week, and did three events in just over 24 hours for Lava Forlag, meeting authors at all stages of the journey. Here are my reflections on my time there.

The indie revolution is expanding…and it is incredibly exciting to see the light dawning in people’s eyes.

The Swedish publishing industry is still in the old traditional, print dominated way of doing things right now. Ebooks haven’t taken off yet, Amazon hasn’t opened its .se store and authors are still focused on the route of agents and publishers to reach readers.

I was told that the biggest publishers are integrated with the media companies – in the same way as Rupert Murdoch’s NewsCorp owning Harper Collins, the Fox Network, The Times and the Wall Street Journal.

When big media owns all the publishing channels, there is little chance for the independent voice against such established behemoths. But change is coming…

I was asked to Stockholm by the lovely Kristina Svensson, an indie author who sees the digital future coming to Sweden in the next few years. I spoke to the audience of authors about my reality, the world I live in, where authors are writing what they want, publishing what they want, and in many cases, making a decent living from their words.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Creative Penn.

 

What's The Big Idea?

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This post by Nick Green originally appeared on Do Authors Dream of Electric Books? on 10/3/14.

I shelved the blog post I was going to write, because something caught my eye and made it pop out in anger. You may or may not have noticed that last month was the deadline for The Big Idea Competition, an apparent bid to find the ‘next big thing’ (you’re not yawning already?).

This is the brainchild of Barry Cunningham, well-known as the editor who discovered Harry Potter, which was the biggest Big Thing in publishing history, and also Tunnels, which… wasn’t. The premise is simple. As in, simply infuriating.

‘Have you got an idea for a story that children will love?’ the website asked. ‘Then tell us in 500 words! Win the chance of seeing your idea transformed into a book, movie, TV or theatre production!’

There is so much wrong with this premise – in fact the whole concept is so breathtakingly cynical and disingenuous – that I hardly know where to begin. The supposed rationale, as explained in its publicity materials, sounds reasonable enough: there are lots of people out there who might have a great idea for a story, but who lack the skill / patience / masochism to actually sit down and write it. But don’t worry! the organisers assure us. We’ve got stacks of authors and playwrights and impresarios right here! You come up with a good idea, and we’ll do the rest. Simples.

 

Click here to read the full post on Do Authors Dream of Electric Books?

 

Big Publisher Bashing Again With Fictional Facts

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Today we present two opposing viewpoints from industry professionals regarding the Amazon/Hachette dispute. This post by Mike Shatzkin originally appeared on The Shatzkin Files on 9/14/14, and was written in rebuttal to the Clay Shirky piece we are also sharing today (link to the full Shirky’s post included immediately below).

The estimable Clay Shirky has written a lengthy piece called “Amazon, Publishers, and Readers” on medium.com saying, essentially, that an Amazon-dominated world would be an improvement over the Big Five “cartel”-dominated world of publishing we have today. This is an apples to oranges comparison. The Big Five are not nearly as broad a cartel as Amazon — which reaches way beyond the consumer books they publish — is a monopsony. Amazon touches much more of the book business than the Big Five publishers do. To make his case, Shirky recounts some very questionable history and employs some selective interpretation to get from his own impression of the current Hachette-Amazon dispute (about which he says “Amazon’s tactics are awful, the worst possible in fact”) to a completely different conclusion.

My complaint with the facts and logic start at the top: with the two paragraphs Shirky uses to set up his argument and establishes the “holier-than” context for his position. He says:

Back in 2007, when publishers began selling large numbers of books in digital format, they used digital rights management (DRM) to lock their books to a particular piece of hardware, Amazon’s new Kindle. DRM is designed to transfer pricing power from content owners to hardware vendors. The publishers clearly assumed they could hand Amazon consolidated control without ever having to conspire with one another, and that Amazon would reward them by passing cost-savings back as inflated profits. When Amazon instead decided to side with the customer, passing the savings on as reduced price, they panicked, and started looking around for an alternative conspirator.

Starting in 2009, five of the six biggest publishers colluded with Apple to re-inflate ebook prices. The model they worked out netted them less revenue per digital sale, because of Apple’s cut, but ebooks were not their immediate worry. They wanted (and want) to protect first editions; as long as ebook prices remained high, hardback sales could be protected. No one had any trouble seeing the big record companies as unscrupulous rentiers when they tried to keep prices for digital downloads as high as they had been for CDs; the book industry went further, violating anti-trust law as they attempted to protect their more profitable product.

Almost every sentence of this is subtly or blatantly wrong.

1. Publishers did not begin selling large numbers of books in digital format in 2007. Amazon started Kindle in late November 2007. Significant sales of ebooks didn’t start to occur until after Christmas and continued to grow rapidly thereafter.

2. Although an uninformed person would be led to infer from reading this that DRM was somehow created for Amazon, in fact DRM was routinely used for ebooks for their entire existence before Kindle. DRM on Kindle continued current practice; DRM was not created for Kindle or at Kindle’s behest.

 

Click here to read the full post on The Shatzkin Files.