But what of digital books? E-books vary in definition from an unsecured PDF on a website to a DRM-protected work on Amazon’s Kindle. In between is a myriad of proprietary licensing models and content management solutions, the most prominent of which are Adobe and Mobipocket. Neither offer a solution solid enough to bet on in five years. Publishers must step in, says Bill Rosenblatt in Copyright and Technology:

If publishers don’t act quickly, they face two alternatives, neither of which is very pleasant.  In one, Amazon succeeds in emulating Apple’s success in music and takes control of e-book business models.  In the other, excessive fragmentation leads to confusion, frustration, angry pieces from the blogosphere about the evils of DRM, and a limited market.

But is DRM even worth pursuing? Imagine downloading a PDF from an emerging author’s website. You pay a modest fee and are given a password to access the content. Excited about the read, you share it with friends. You bought a paperback before and did that–why not do it with a PDF? What’s stopping a friend from buying his own copy if he likes what he read? On the flip side, though, what’s stopping him from emailing it to all his friends?

Rob Beschizza, of Wired.com, predicted this dilemma way back in 2007:

Book publishers, scared of the ease of cut, paste, send, demanded it. Understandable. But few customers wanted locked-down devices, or bizarre file formats that offered nothing over plain text, Word documents or Adobe’s PDF.

In short, free copies are acceptable risks. As an emerging author, unless you’ve got enough cash to sink into publishing hard-copy books or setting up sales through Amazon.com, you’re probably going to post an E-book on your website. Be prepared to take the loss. Readers of new authors aren’t going to pay big bucks for someone they’ve never read before, so your first e-book on the market should probably be considered a free sample. If you get paid for a few copies, fine. Just promote your site and e-book until you are blue in the face and get your readers hooked. Then move to a more secure sales solution.

If you don’t bend a little, you may wind up killing your potential sales before they’ve had a chance to start. Eric Lai of Computerworld has a solid analogy, from the perspective of the potential consumer:

Imagine bringing home a music CD from Best Buy and discovering that it will only play on some of your stereo equipment. Moreover, you’re limited in the number of times you can switch the CD from one stereo to another.

Bottom line? In the interest of building a reader base, don’t get bogged down with DRM. Be snobby with your e-books when you can afford it.

        

Those ads are often met with counter-ads that point out how rude and insulting it is to expect folks to do such work for absolutely nothing. While I’ve thought about doing that myself, I realized that it would be a waste of space (no better than the fluff ads themselves, right?). No, my blog is a better place to deal with this.

I’ll be blunt. If you’re going to ask someone to edit a two-page journal entry for you, that’s one thing. But to ask someone to edit a 100,000 word manuscript “for credit in the book” is absolutely insulting. Yes, writers & editors have an appreciation for the written word, but we are fond of money just the same. More importantly, to ask someone to perform a service without due compensation is a flat-out scam. I wouldn’t ask an upstart plumber to fix a leaky pipe in my house and expect him to want to do it “for the experience.”

        

A few posts ago, I wondered if the new iPod Shuffle would become Apple’s own version of the MemoryStick. Proprietary technology has its place, but when you’re dealing with memory or headphones, it’s best to play nice. In the last issue of MacWorld, Dan Moren has similar misgivings:

Alas, no more. The decision to put the controls on the headphones means that unless Apple opens up the controls to third parties, you can’t even play music on the iPod without using Apple’s own earbuds. What happens if, as is also not unheard of, Apple’s stock earbuds break? Your iPod is completely useless until you get another pair of approved headphones. This is not Sparta, this is madness.

        

When facebook did the first major redesign, I was pleased. That put me in an initial minority. Others complained until they finally accepted it, and life went on. This time around, though, I am definitely in the majority. My objections started in the previous version, wherein “applications” multiplied exponentially. The clean interface was increasingly marred with requests for apps ranging from vampires to sports waves. My notification area gathered so many requests, one day I simply wiped them all out without even looking to see what they were about.

Why the hard feelings against apps? Personally, I find them counter-intuitive. Having seen friends’ MySpace pages, I appreciated facebook’s almost minimalist approach. Applications came along and began the slow morphing of facebooks’ clean interface into the visual hell that is MySpace. The core facebook features seemed to get less and less attention (and screen real estate) as the applications multiplied.

This most recent redesign has put the applications to the forefront and hidden more of the basic functions. Did the developers consult any usability experts in this process? Petitions have gone up, groups have been formed, and all the developers did was throw a bone (in the form of new preferences) to the users. This, from a “service” that would have us believe that the end users and our online experience are dearly important. If you believe that, I’m sure you still think that those posted photos of you drunk and half-naked in the front lawn of a frat house are private.

        

I financed our back yard work through Prosper and got an outstanding rate, far below even the local credit unions. I’m considering dropping some money into LendingClub and earning a nice return when the time is right. In either case, I’ve saved (or earned) myself the difference in what the banks would charge (or yield) by borrowing (or lending) directly.

Given the current worries over bank instability, I’m curious to see which way these P2P lending sites go. Will individuals be less likely to trust other individuals, in fear of loans that will default, or will the distrust in banks fuel a rise in P2P lending? Only time will tell.