I realize that’s a sensational statement to lead off with, but hear me out for at least the length of this column so you can understand where I’m coming from. The entire concept of Digital Rights Management, or DRM, is to prevent unlicensed copying of copyrighted material. This can be a song, a television show, a movie on DVD, an eBook, and so on and so forth. Taken at face value, without any thought to the consequences, DRM sounds like a good idea in order to make sure copyright owners continue to make money off their product. So far so good, right?

Wrong.

DRM on a file is the digital equivalent of a big red button that must never, ever be pressed. It’s human nature that someone will try cracking your DRM for any number of reasons, even ignoring the “for the hell of it” factor. These reasons can include license limits on an eBook preventing the reader from downloading the book to more than one device, the loss of documentation that says a license is owned, or even wanting to read or listen to something on a device of you the consumer’s choosing instead of the creator’s choosing.

As I revealed last month, I’m an independent publisher of eBook originals. None of those eBooks are restricted by DRM when I put them up for sale in the Kindle store. The reasons for this are numerous, but the primary one is that DRM seems to me a practice whereby the copyright owners of a creative work restrict the way consumers can enjoy their product. This makes precisely zero economic sense to me. As a publisher, I want the products I release to be enjoyed by the purchaser. Why in the world would I restrict how they can enjoy the product I’m selling?

Read the rest at Independent Publisher magazine’s website.

The seemingly backwards release schedule, sending out the eBook prior to the paper version, is something Eisler has advocated for some time. Releasing a paper version of a book and getting it into the hands of readers can take a minimum of four months, according to Eisler, and that’s a lightning-quick pace to go from finished product to being placed in bookstores available for sale.

“My thinking is OK fine, paper takes longer,” Eisler said, “let’s make digital available first.” Eisler equated publishing a digital version of a book to posting a photo on Facebook, commenting that once the book is done and formatted you can have a digital copy available the next day as opposed to four to six months down the line.

Read the rest at Independent Publisher magazine.

This plethora of differences confronts every publisher who wades into the eBook space, and it’s so far been an unfortunate truth of publishing eBooks. Former TIME.com engineer Miral Sattar was amazed at the sheer number of steps involved in eBook conversion, when she turned the TIME travel guides into eBook one-offs. This experience at TIME.com, and her master’s research into diversifying digital media revenue streams, lead Sattar to create a new tool to simplify eBook formatting — BiblioCrunch.

At first blush, one could easily pigeonhole BiblioCrunch as a cloud-based tool to simplify distribution of eBooks, and Sattar would make a good deal of money off that process alone. Sattar didn’t stop with a goal to make eBook distribution simple though. On BiblioCrunch, authors have the ability to write their book, find copy editors and cover designers, and then publish it directly to retailers and on the BiblioCrunch website. Marketing is also made easier with a direct link to social media tools and the ability to create book clubs around any author.

Read the rest of the article here

If you’re reading one of the releases from Booktrack, that’s precisely what you’d be doing at that point. The company began with a simple idea: adding movie quality soundtracks to an eBook version of say Moby Dick, where while you read you hear ambient marine noises and appropriate music, becomes an immersive experience that more fully draws the reader into the world of the book.

eBooks like The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Jane Eyre, The Three Musketeers and more classic and modern tales (such as the YA novel The Power of Six from HarperCollins) either have been or will be released by Booktrack with soundtracks designed to heighten what’s already on the page the same way good music heightens the visuals of a movie.

A good example of what music can do is the movie Halloween. I remember watching a scene from Carpenter’s film without the music attached to it. It was a simple night shot of a house with its second floor windows lit. Without music, the house looked like any old building on any night in America. Add the telltale discordant music however, and it became sinister and foreboding.

The theory behind Booktrack’s product offering is precisely the same. Add a soundtrack to a book like Pride & Prejudice and you heighten the sense of engagement for the reader. “The real world falls away,” states a promotional video on www.Booktrack.com, or at least that’s the idea behind the product.

Read the rest of the article at Independent Publisher’s website

These experiences led Pettitt to found Free Range Content and develop Repost.Us, a new web tool designed to simplify the syndication of articles, blog posts, and the associated stories to the point where content piracy is a thing of the past on the web. Pettit has long experience with content pirates, going back to his days as the head of engineering for BitTorrent.

The issue facing Pettitt was how to make syndicating content simple and effective to the point where anyone, not just those publications with the funds to join syndication services such as the Associated Press, could take quality content and republish it where they chose. In years past, the only other way of doing this short of joining a syndication service was to create a business relationship with the company whose content you wanted to syndicate. Go that route, and your request might be ignored or denied if your publication is too small.

“The cost of (syndicating content) is huge,” admits Pettitt, now the co-founder and CEO of Free Range Content, “and what it means is that you never make an agreement with someone who’s small.” This makes perfect sense under the old syndication model; why would you have a business agreement with someone who only has 1,000 readers over someone with 10,000 or even 1 million readers?

Read the original article at Independent Publisher magazine.

The Vook, launched in 2009, aims to change all that with its combination of text, video, social media tools, and other new technologies to turn reading into an immersive multimedia experience. Essentially an eBook that happens to include multimedia, the aptly named Vook Inc. has partnered most notably with Simon & Schuster to release titles in this blend of video, text, and social media.

A vook is an interesting concept, blending videos with text and the ability to instantly interact via social media. I can definitely see a benefit to having the intersection of media, as this is something that’s been happening in newspapers and magazines for some time now. Log onto websites for publications the likes of Wired, The New York Times, and The Economist and you’ll see videos and social media tools combined into the news and feature stories. One secondary benefit to this convergence is that you might (a rather big might in fact) attract non-readers; someone who’s a fan of movies and doesn’t read very much might enjoy this intersection of books and movies.

These benefits aside, I can’t ignore the format lock that happens with a Vook. It’s not anything related to the DRM issue of Amazon’s Kindle or the Barnes & Noble Nook, but rather the knowledge that in order to read a vook you must be carrying around a separate piece of technology at all times. Whether this is an iPad, iPhone, laptop, other tablet computer, Android smartphone, or what have you doesn’t matter. The simple fact of your eyes needing to be exposed to a glowing screen to read a vook can’t be escaped.

Considering that the Kindle and Nook have tried to do away with a glowing screen, this can be a real problem for readers’ eyes. Blink rate shrinks by half when you’re staring at a computer screen, and the American Optometric Association cautions that people who spend a long amount of time in front of a computer screen run the risk of significant vision problems. The glowing screen of vooks then might compound this danger.

Read the complete article at Independent Publisher magazine’s website.

- By MATTHEW DELMAN

Special to the Maine Sunday Telegram

Rail travel in Maine is an experience you’re not likely to have in other parts of the country. From the two-foot narrow-gauge railroads to the electric trolleys and the picturesque coastline, the state of Maine broadcasts its uncommon rail history as loud as it can.

This is one of only two locations in the entire world where two-foot narrow-gauge railroads had regular passenger service. First conceived in Wales, the narrow railroads in Maine meant owners could save money on their rolling stock. Lucky for visitors today, the history of narrow gauge and other railways is kept alive in Greater Portland and the midcoast by a combination of nonprofits and corporations.

Maine Narrow-Gauge Railroad Company and Museum

After a brief and winding drive through The Portland Company Marine Complex on Fore Street, you reach the main building of the Maine Narrow-Gauge Railroad Company and Museum. The location in the Portland Company complex is apt, as this complex was at one time a foundry where locomotives were built. Opposite the building is the Portland waterfront, along with a variety of sail and powerboats tied up to the marina’s docks.

A mile and a half of two-foot narrow gauge track operated by the museum runs along the waterfront, allowing visitors a fantastic view of Casco Bay while they ride coaches pulled by a restored century-old locomotive. Inside the building are passenger coaches, a Model T adapted to run on rails, and numerous other exhibits to teach the intrepid railroad enthusiast about the operation of a steam engine and the history of the Portland Company’s foray into railroads.

Maine Eastern Railroad

A half-hour drive to Brunswick brings you to the southern terminus of the Maine Eastern Railroad. Though it’s standard instead of narrow gauge, visitors are given the chance to ride in the comfort they might have experienced in the 1950s.

The Maine Eastern parlor and coach cars are all restored stainless steel Art Deco coaches from the 1940s and ’50s, and so are the diesel locomotives that pull the train. Restored to modern ideals of comfort, riders on the Maine Eastern are treated to Art Deco luxury while witnessing some of the prettiest coastline in the state outside their windows.

A ticket price of $58 per person will get you a round-trip ticket for the Reserve Parlor Class car, called the Alexander Hamilton, which originally ran on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s “Congressional Limited” service. Take care though, as the parlor car’s only available if you include Rockland as part of your trip on the line. Riders excluding Rockland only have the option for the coach class car. Expect to spend a full day with the Maine Eastern, as there’s a layover in Rockland after the morning train from Brunswick.

Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum

Farther up the coastline are the town of Wiscasset and the Sheepscot River; a short drive out of Wiscasset center brings you to the small town of Alna and the Wiscasset, Waterville & Farmington Railway Museum. Here you’ll ride a century-old locomotive along the same right-of-way that hosted the WW&F Railway during its 1894 to 1933 heyday.

Pay close attention to road signs if you decide to take a visit, as it’s easy to drive past Cross Road where the museum is located. Another thing to watch for is that your GPS device might tell you to take a right turn onto Cross from Alna Road, when in reality the museum is located to the left.

There’s a small collection of historical objects inside the station at Sheepscot, but it’s really the rolling museum of the train that’s of interest. Kids are fascinated by the century-old locomotive, and according to volunteer Stewart Rhine, “It’s neat to see the look on kids’ faces when they first see a steam locomotive.”

Boothbay Railway Village

Boothbay Railway Village is the next stop on any railway enthusiast’s tour of Greater Portland and the midcoast. A short drive to the Boothbay Harbor Region will bring you to the village of 20-plus buildings taken almost out of time. The large sign on Wiscasset Road proclaims the village’s location, and you park your car in front of the 1911-built Freeport Station. Like every other building on the village’s property, Freeport Station was moved to this location to preserve it.

Trains run every hour while the village is open, with the first train leaving at 10 a.m. and the last steaming out at 4 p.m. each day. A restored Henschel steam locomotive pulls a train of two historic passenger coaches along the narrow-gauge railroad track that runs through the village, including up to Thorndike Station at the top of a hill near the classic automobile exhibit. Thorndike Station originally sat in Thorndike, Maine, the same way that Freeport Station at one time sat in Freeport.

Seashore Trolley Museum

Founded in 1939, the Seashore Trolley Museum in Kennebunkport preserves the legacy of the electric railway that spanned 87 miles of York County in the early years of the 20th Century. The idea for the museum came up when the Biddeford & Saco Railroad was replacing its trolleys with buses; since that long ago day the museum has amassed more than 250 transit vehicles from all over the world.

A portion of the old Atlantic Shore Line, which stretched to Cape Porpoise, is now part of the museum property. Visitors are encouraged to ride the trolley that runs on the old line, and while doing so are educated on what York County farmers would’ve used the trolleys for.

The railways of Maine offer a trip to the past for not just the dedicated railroad enthusiast, but also the visitor interested in seeing how people lived a century ago. Whether you’re riding the narrow gauge, taking the Maine Eastern to Rockland, or experiencing the streetcars, there’s something for you to enjoy.

Matthew Delman is a freelance writer who lives in Beverly, Mass.

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From the Tech Desk
This Month: The Worrisome Nature of Spam in the Kindle Store
by Matthew Delman

The eBook revolution has made it possible for authors and publishers to easily get digital copies of new releases to the masses. As a result, sales of eBooks have skyrocketed 202.3% year-to-date between February 2010 and February 2011. This proliferation of digital copies isn’t only attractive to legitimate publishers though; scam artists have watched the popularity of eBooks rise, and have entered the eBook market in a similar way to the “content farms” that exist on the Internet consisting of so-called How To articles meant to lead the average reader astray.

The end result of these unscrupulous folks wading into the eBook game is in some cases the wholesale copying of another book, changing a few details, and then posting it back into the Amazon Kindle Store for sale at 99 cents a download. This undercuts the sales of the original work, which may be priced significantly higher. The bigger culprit by far however is the concept of Private Label Rights, or PLR, which allows you to purchase content for a low fee and then re-use that content any way you want. In many cases, these PLR works are no better than the hastily written articles you’d find on content farm websites.

People have been known to publish and republish dozens of iterations of these PLR works, all with the aim to make a quick buck off eBooks in the wake of Google cracking down on content farms. You’d expect that eBook retailers would be aware of these scammers and work hard to counteract the effects. In certain cases you’d be right, as self-publishing service Smashwords has both human and automated processes designed to catch substandard content. However what about Amazon, that massive monolith of online retailing? Surely they have a stringent content check, right?

Well, not exactly. Amazon doesn’t do its own checks on eBook content to ensure it hasn’t been copied from somewhere else. The onus lies on authors skimming through the Kindle Store and seeing if there’s been any naughty folk copying their work and reselling it at a price undercutting the original.

The most insidious part of this practice is that it’s the simplicity of the Kindle Store, and their monthly pay periods, that makes the practice so attractive to spammers. Well, that and the 30 percent royalties paid out on 99-cent eBooks. The Nook self-publishing avenue offered through Barnes & Noble doesn’t have nearly the same market penetration as Amazon, which insulates the other e-reader’s audience somewhat from spam eBooks. Smashwords, another favorite for eBooks, has two factors that insulate it — a quarterly payment cycle and the practice of offering some eBooks for free. The longer pay cycle allows for Smashwords to catch spammers before any money changes hands, and offering eBooks for free means there’s not as much profit potential.

To their credit, Amazon has exhibited some stronger oversight in their Amazon Singles area consisting of short stories, long-form journalism, and opinion pieces. However the existence of spam in the main Kindle Store, sometimes with the same content over and over again, has the extraordinarily high potential to irreparably damage the perception of the Kindle as a e-publishing platform.

Why is this? Imagine if you will that you’re a small press who publishes its releases via the Kindle Store and a POD service such as Ingram’s Lightning Source. Your book does very well in the Kindle Store, say it’s at a sales rank of 55,000 and only growing. Then all of a sudden a cursory search of your release on Amazon reveals that someone released an eBook priced at 99 cents with the same title as yours, but a different cover and a different author name. Then you open the book and realize that it’s your exact release.

So you complain to Amazon about the spurious eBook up on their site. However, by the time you manage to get them to take it down your sales have already suffered because people are purchasing the cheap copy at 99 cents rather than yours at $4.99. This is despite the fact that your copy is the real one. Thousands of sales could’ve been lost, and you now might think a little bit harder about how you sell your next eBook.

This is even ignoring the problem of PLR, which can result in poorly written texts being published over and over again for someone to make a quick buck off eBooks. Having Amazon’s Kindle store overrun by illegal and/or substandard eBooks can only harm the legitimate publishers looking to offer their eBooks for sale on the Kindle. Mind you, the argument exists that consumers should also exercise caution when purchasing books through the Kindle Store. There’s some validity to this, but when a retailer such as Amazon is allowing copyright infringement one has to wonder if there’s going to be any lawsuits forthcoming.

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Matthew Delman has ten years of experience editing and writing for newspapers. He has penned articles on travel, business, education, and health, which have appeared in publications such as The Gloucester Daily Times(Gloucester, Mass.), The Salem News(Salem, Mass.), and websites owned by Hello Metro. Matthew’s short fiction has been published in FISSURE Magazine (November 2010) and by Nevermet Press (April 2011).

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Previous From the Tech Desk articles:

Has the eBook Agency Model Harmed Sales?

Is Print-on-Demand really a game changer?

June 13, 2011

My View: ‘Dark’ themes help teens learn how to cope in the real world

My View
Matthew Delman

Prognosticators have been saying for a few years now that there will be POD machines in libraries and bookstores across the country. I know of precisely one such machine in the Boston area, and that’s the Harvard Book Store on Massachusetts Avenue. Paige M. Gutenborg, as the machine was dubbed after a naming contest, prints POD volumes of public-domain works from online databases including Google Books in a perfect-bound acid-free paperback style.

According to information on the Harvard Book Store website, the Paige M. Gutenborg (manufactured by Espresso Book Machine) can print a 300-page paperback in about four minutes. Forty-five such machines are currently in use around the world, with a majority in independent bookstores, universities, and libraries. The Library of Alexandria in Egypt in fact owns three of the Espresso machines.

POD machines are only part of the story though. There are also outlets like Lightning Source, a business unit of Ingram Content Group, and sister firm to one of the two largest book distributors in the world — Ingram Book Company. Lightning Source is a web-based POD service that allows registered users to list their POD titles through Ingram. Lightning Source, Amazon’s own CreateSpace POD service, and other programs use the power of the web to list books as Print-on-Demand. This isn’t the same thing as the Espresso Book Machine in stores and libraries, but having a book listed with these POD services (particular with Ingram’s Lightning Source) may allow your book to get into the hands of shoppers at Barnes & Noble or other major booksellers. So long as the store uses the Ingram database, consumers are able to special-order it for purchase; assuming of course that the book isn’t actually on the shelves.

Using POD, a small press such as Dagan Books has the opportunity to provide copies of its books to consumers the same way that Macmillan does via the internet and brick-and-mortar stores. This assumes of course that said POD house goes through Ingram’s Lightning Source for their publishing. If they go through CreateSpace, then the book is only listed on Amazon and so on.

POD has seen an explosive growth in recent years as more and more outlets arise that take advantage of the technology. A Bowker survey released May 18 showed print production of non-traditional presses (what the survey calls POD services) rose 169% between 2009 and 2010.

Many of these presses market almost exclusively on the web, such as Amazon’s CreateSpace POD service and LuLu Enterprises. Most intriguing is that a handful of the companies listed on the Bowker survey as the top POD presses are what could be considered “vanity presses” as opposed to a company that offers editorial control but chose to go the POD route instead of the traditional offset one. These “vanity presses” include Xlibris among others.

Whether the top POD printer is a vanity press or not isn’t the point, though. Rather let’s go back to the Bowker survey again. Looking at those numbers, you can fairly well see how much of an impact POD has had on the print marketplace. I’m well aware that 169% growth doesn’t mean all that much to the more hard-numbers folks among the readership, so here’s some raw figures: new titles printed by offset press rose from 302,410 in 2009 to 316,480 in 2010 compared to POD titles of 1,033,065 in 2009 to 2,776,260 in 2010. Mind you, this is based off Bowker’s “Books in Print®” database, so the data is only as accurate as that resource.

Regardless of that caveat though, you can easily see how much of a difference there is between offset press titles and POD ones. Another point of caution is that Bowker’s methodology only tracks ISBNs of books in print. It doesn’t even begin to ask the question of how many of those “titles” are making appreciable sales. By appreciable, I mean more than a copy or two a year. Sure, that’s an arbitrary requirement, but the simple fact that a title is offered via a POD services doesn’t mean anyone’s actually purchasing it.

Using my logic of “appreciable sales” one can perhaps reach the conclusion that the 2.8 million titles offered via POD services in 2010 is about as valuable an indicator as saying that M&M Mars shipped 3,000 crates of peanut M&Ms in 2010. (I honestly have no idea how many crates of M&Ms were shipped in 2010, but I needed a comparison so there you go.) However, before POD came around you’d have to spend thousands of dollars on printing costs to do an offset run, and I can almost guarantee that you’d be left with some extremely high number of copies of a book sitting somewhere in your garage. Unless of course you’re someone like Seth Godin or Stephen King, who I’ve said before can publish books written in green crayon on toilet paper and have it sell a million copies.

With POD today, you can upload your work to CreateSpace or any of the other services, such as Lightning Source, and be assured that you don’t have unsold inventory sitting around anywhere. More than anything, that’s how POD has changed the game of publishing: by saving warehousing costs for those companies and individuals who choose that route.

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Matthew Delman has ten years of experience editing and writing for newspapers. He has penned articles on travel, business, education, and health, which have appeared in publications such as The Gloucester Daily Times,(Gloucester, Mass.), The Salem News(Salem, Mass.), and websites owned by Hello Metro. Matthew’s short fiction has been published in FISSURE Magazine (November 2010) and by Nevermet Press (April 2011).