Macmillan Parent Company Holtzbrinck Abandons DRM in Germany (The Digital Reader)
Holtzbrinck is the parent company of Macmillan (which operates in the US, UK, and Australia), and in Germany it owns a number of publishers, including Droemer Knaur, Argon, Kiepenheuer & Witsch, Rowohlt and S. Fischer. According to my sources, all of Holtzbrinck’s German publishers will stop using "hard" or encryption DRM in August. They will replace it with digital watermarks, or what is often called a soft or "social" DRM.
The TeleRead Take: Well, Macmillan subsidiary Tor has been DRM-free for three years now, and experienced no apparent drawbacks from the decision. It’s about time its parent company started to follow up. I’d certainly rather see them take this route toward reducing vendor lock-in than the form of agency pricing advocacy they’ve done in the past. Even though I doubt it will do much to knock Amazon off the top of the hill, it’s still nice to see from a consumer-friendliness point of view.
Pebble Time availability extends to Best Buy, Target (The Verge)
Pebble’s latest smartwatch, the $199 Time, has been shipping to Kickstarter backers and direct from Pebble itself for a few weeks. Today, the company is expanding availability to Best Buy and Target’s physical stores in the US. Best Buy has offered preorders of the Time for about a month, but starting today, customers can walk in to either Best Buy and walk out with a Time of their own. Target’s availability will begin the week of August 17th.
The TeleRead Take: I have the first-generation Pebble and it’s a neat little gizmo. I have to say, the company seems to know how to do smartwatches right. It will be interesting to see how well it sells.
UK pirates could soon face 10 years behind bars (Business Insider)
The UK’s Intellectual Property Office released the proposal as part of a consultation soliciting feedback on the change, and is intended to "equalise" the penalties for physical and online infringement. As it currently stands, someone selling fake DVDs could face a decade’s imprisonment, while a website operator — no matter how popular their site or prolific the infringement — has the maximum penalty capped at two years in prison.
The TeleRead Take: It’s another one of those cases where “piracy” means multiple things. This one’s talking about commercial piracy—making works available on a massive scale—not the ordinary everyday-Internet-user type. Maybe this change is necessary to prosecute Pirate Bay equivalents…though I can’t help thinking most of those are run by people in countries with less harsh piracy laws.
Google’s Ingress and AXA Redefine Mobile Game Ads ([a]listdaily)
In an effort to reach the digitally-connected generation, AXA partnered with Niantic Labs to turn AXA retail agencies in the real world into Ingress “Portals,” which are sites that players visit and battle to control for their in-game faction. In just five months, the success of the partnership saw over 600,000 Ingress players visit AXA Insurance locations to find, collect and deploy more than 5 million AXA Shields, unique and powerful branded virtual items. AXA agencies generated over 3 million in-game actions in Ingress and AXA representatives interacted with over 55,000 Ingress players during live player events called ‘Anomalies.’
The TeleRead Take: As I’ve noted before, I play Ingress myself, and think it’s a great game. They’ve made no secret of the fact that they were planning to use sponsorship deals, and this is one of the first major instances of it. My fellow players have noticed other instances of it pop up, too, such as special in-game power-up items branded for other businesses.
This is a unique way to engage people with your brand while completely bypassing the flawed (and often blocked) banner and web advertising methods. The one problem is, it’s not the sort of thing every business can do, so it seems to me like its overall utility is going to be limited. Still, it shows there are other methods—and if there’s one other method, there will be others.
Gawker’s Denton: ‘This is not the company I built’ (Capital)
At times, the meeting got heated. Gawker’s editorial staff is upset with Denton and the company’s six-person managing partnership for removing the post on Friday, over the objections of Gawker’s editorial leadership. Many see the removal as an example of the company’s business side interfering in editorial decision-making, and both Gawker Media executive editor Tommy Craggs and Gawker editor in chief Max Read resigned in protest of the decision on Monday. Denton said that the managing partnership, which includes business-side employees, does not make editorial decisions. As founder and C.E.O., he does make editorial decisions, but only on rare occasions.
The TeleRead Take: This is a follow-up to the story I posted the other day, about Gawker’s editorial staff being upset after a scandal story was pulled over their objections. All I can say is, it’s a very strange world indeed when Nick Denton is arguing for editorial restraint.
Part 2: Confessions from the Scammy, Underground World of Kindle eBooks (The Hustle)
Rather than pass immediate judgment, I set out to answer the question everyone was thinking: Is becoming a best-selling author really that easy?
So, because this was too good to pass up, I decided to see if I could go from having no idea to creating a #1 ranking Kindle book in one week, using (most of) the instructions outlined in the previous post.
And not just any type of book, but a full blown Fabio-on-the-cover romance novel.
The TeleRead Take: Another follow-up piece, this one to a story that everyone agrees in retrospect was most likely completely fabricated, on account of the numbers not matching up and it reusing a name from a famous publishing hoax. This piece takes the prior one completely seriously, and follows the reporter’s adventures as he repurposes a pirated romance novel (which he confuses for “public domain” since it’s available on a website for free) and makes about $9 from it. It leads me to wonder whether the fabrication was on the part of The Hustle, or on the part of the putative “Kindle Gold Rusher” and The Hustle got, well, hustled, too. Either way, it’s somewhere between kind of amusing and kind of embarrassing to watch the writer be so incompetent.
Don’t believe the hyperbole, there’s no orphan works law before Congress (Graphic Policy)
The first sign to me that the above was crap was the fact the post references that this is a law before Congress, but has you contact the US Copyright Office, instead of Congress. The video referenced admits there’s actually no legislation before Congress, there’s no text to actually see. The Copyright Office is doing their job, writing a report, and they are asking for input from individuals. There is no legislation, this is akin to a brainstorming project. This happens every day in government, there’s nothing unusual here and also nothing to get whipped up about. Reports go nowhere every day.
The TeleRead Take: I probably should have been more clear myself when I covered this story that the panic posts were claiming this was an actual law before Congress rather than that people should just be scared about the proposal. On the one hand, it probably doesn’t make a whole lot of difference given that the Copyright Office does indeed plan to put the legislation in front of Congress once it’s finished writing it. On the other hand, this piece does a good job of going into detail about some of the prior attempts at orphan works legislation that have come up in the last decade or so.
The post TeleRead Links: Holtzbrinck goes DRM-free, Pebble Time hits stores, UK may get tough on pirates, and more appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.