I’ll admit that I wasn’t very surprsied when I read Declining Sales Cast Gloom at an Expo on the New York Times website yesterday. Unless you’ve been living in a cave, cut off from all civilization and news, then it’s hard to ignore the news about how this deep recession we are in is hurting a lot of industries – publishing included.

This weekend BookExpo America, the book industry’s annual convention, is taking place in New York City. Also not surprising is that attendance at the convention is down as well.

Normally I’m not a numbers guy. I don’t like math and I failed remedial math in college (embarrassing, I know). But sometimes you have to let the numbers speak for themselves.

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The publishing world is at a crossroads when it comes to ebooks: Publishers/authors can either embrace ebooks, trash all this DRM non-sense and reap the rewards (i.e. profits), or they can take the route of the music industry and fight against the rising tide of ebooks, slap draconian DRM on everything and watch the industry get taken over by pirates. If the latter happens, then it’s only a matter of time before we start seeing RIAA-style lawsuits.

Surprisingly, even among authors, digital distribution is a point of contention. Here are 2 authors that represent two opposite sides of the digital spectrum:

The author who sues his own readers

First is Harlan Ellison who, according to this NYT article, doesn’t take lightly to pirates of his work:

Nine years ago, Mr. Ellison sued Internet service providers for failing to stop a user from posting four of his stories to an online newsgroup. Since settling that suit, he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. "If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump," he said.

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The Kindle DX has officially "been out" for a few hours now (though not shipping until summer), which has been just enough time for me to think about it a little since writing this previous post. I’ll start off by saying that, despite all my criticism, I do like the Kindle and I even like Amazon. My beef with both is when it comes to DRM.

As for the Kindle DX, I think it is definitely taking a step in the right direction. Amazon is spot on to develop and release a device that can be very well suited to help college students lighten their loads, maybe help a struggling newspaper industry, and even give those with vision problems the ability to enjoy reading.

Let’s break it down one item at a time!

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Amazon.com is rolling out the Kindle DX today. This isn’t an upgrade/update to the Kindle 2, which was released in February. Rather, the DX is designed for reading newspapers and textbooks. The device is larger than the Kindle 2, with a screen a little larger than an 8 1/2 by 11 sheet of paper.

The Kindle DX also sports some interesting features not found on the Kindle 2:

- 9.7" diagnol display

- Auto-rotating screen

- 3G wireless

- Built-in PDF reader

Those are actually some cool features. I’ll be giving my own analysis of the device a little later (for what it’s worth), but I like what I see as a textbook reader for college students. But for a whopping $489, who knows?

In the meantime, you can view the Kindle DX on Amazon here (aff link), and read more about it here, here and here.

More to come later…

The novel hasn’t changed much in the last few hundred years. When most people buy a novel today, they read the story, and it ends up on their bookshelf. And aside from the story, there’s really not much else to read in a novel. Maybe the author bio at the end. If you’re lucky, you might get a sneak peak at the first chapter of an upcoming novel by the same author.

Then I stumbled across this post from The Elegant Variation. Where Mark Sarvas, the author of Harry, Revised (which I reviewed here) is giving away a brand new paperback of the book (just released). But what really got my attention is the list of "goodies" he’s giving away at his website, which you can find here.

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A Publishers Weekly article today painted a disturbing picture of a Wisconsin library board that saw four of its members dismissed over refusal to remove ‘controversial’ books from the library:

The controversy began in February when two patrons complained that the library’s YA section included fiction and nonfiction books about gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender issues. The patrons accused the library of promoting "the overt indoctrination of the gay agenda in our community" and demanded that the library add books "affirming traditional heterosexual perspectives."

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I was working on a different blog post when the news caught my eye in my Google Reader account. I first came across this post from Teleread – Amazon.com has bought Lexcycle, the makers of the popular Stanza ebook reading app for iPhone/iPod Touch.

Then I had to see for myself and found this short article in the New York Times. Yep, the news is true. And continuing to browse through my Google Reader posts, I then read Teleread’s first post about the news. I share Paul’s sentiment – wow!

But I also share Paul’s worry as well:

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The New York Times website is probably where I get most of my news on a daily basis. I like their style and their articles are informative and well-written. So you can imagine my surprise when I read this article entitled: ‘With Kindle, can you tell it’s Proust?’

The NYT really stooped to a new low with this article. It’s nothing more than a fluff piece with superficial arguments on why the Kindle, or any ebook reader for that matter, won’t catch on. But first we get a quote from an author who actually does not want people buying her book on the Kindle:

Anne Fadiman, the author, was relieved to learn that her essay collection, “Ex Libris,” was not available on Kindle. “It would really be ironic if it were,” she said of the book, which evokes her abiding passion for books as objects.

“There’s a little box on Amazon that reads ‘Tell the publisher I’d like to read this book on Kindle,’” she said. “I hope no one tells the publisher.”

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It has been a while since I’ve written about DailyLit – the site that lets you read full-length novels in increments via email or RSS feed. Back in February 2008 I posted this review, but haven’t really followed up since. Luckily for me, I continue to subscribe to their email newsletter.

When I read today’s newsletter, I was pleasantly surprised at some cool things happening over at DailyLit. Here’s a quick rundown:

1. The 6 Word Autobiography! And you thought drabbles were hard! But hey, I give DailyLit a lot of credit for keeping their customers engaged by keeping those creative juices flowing! You can read some current entries here and maybe even add your own.

2. Offering best-selling author books! You can read Nicholas Sparks’ The Lucky One and get the first 5 installments free. Not a Sparks fan? Then you can read Seth Godin’s Unleashing the ideavirus absolutely free!

3. New DailyLit Affiliate Program! I’m pretty excited about this one. Here’s what the email message said about the program:

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The glitch that caused Amazon’s website to pull many ‘adult oriented’ books (mostly gay & lesbian titles) from its sales rankings, causing the books to be harder to find, caused quite a controversy last week. I detailed it in this post Amazon ‘glitch’ stirs rumors of alleged censorship (April 14).

While the question of whether or not Amazon engaged in deliberate censorship because of homophobic tendencies is still up in the air, the fierce and harsh response to the incident on blogs and Twitter brings up other questions. Were people too quick to judge? Was there a ‘mob mentality’ in the online community?

These questions, and more, were brought up in this NYT article:

Although the way messages speed across social networks makes today’s digital world ripe for mob-fueled conspiracy theories, the controversy over Amazon was striking both for its ferocity and for the velocity with which it spread.

And at least one blogger, Clay Shirky, a professor at New York University, backtracked on his criticism of Amazon:

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"I was wrong, because I believed things that weren’t true," Mr. Shirky wrote, noting that "the idea that this was an event of mainly technological propagation, rather than a coordinated bit of anti-gay bias, simply escaped me."
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