As a reader who wants to own e-books for real, I’ve had reason aplenty to loathe DRM. Now, as a first novelist, I have even more justification. The e-bookers at Amazon insist that books in its Mobipocket format be distributed with DRM even when publishers object. And that’s hitting Twili...

I was thrilled to see Books on Board play up The Solomon Scandals, my suspense novel, on the home page and use a nonDRMed version of the ePub standard as the first format. Other leading formats will follow. Scandals is also on sale now in various formats at eReader.com, Fictionwise and the Kindle st...

Hachette Book Group USA, a major source of best-selling e-books from authors such as David Baldacci, is pulling “all of its titles from U.S. distributors” in a dispute over the issue of sales controls based on geographical territory. This “happened without notice over the weekend.&...

Over at Twilight Times Books, publisher Lida Quillen recently came out with “advance promo” editions of The Solomon Scandals in both E and P. I can’t tell you how much of a bother it’s been to get Scandals properly into different formats, such as ePub, HTML and PDF. Imagine h...

Apple once ran a classic TV commercial positioning the Mac against the evil Big Bro-ish types at IBM. But is Steve Jobs’ outfit playing BB now? It’s banned David Carnoy’s detective thriller, the very book about which I just wrote. Here’s yet one more argument for technologica...

Psst! Advance promo copies of The Solomon Scandals are on sale now in e-book format (retail $5.95 USD). Twilight Times Books is also taking advance orders for First Editions in trade paperback (retail $16.95 USD). The paperbacks will ship in early January 2009. These are “pre-release promotion...

In a recession, when thrift is contagious, just why must I pay $18 for the Mobipocket store’s edition of America America , complete with the exceedingly unwanted “feature” of DRM? Believe me, I’d rather see Ethan Canin—whose e-book version costs at least $19.51 at the n...

Jonathan Karp runs Twelve. Topic of a public radio segment earlier this year, it’s an imprint within the Hachette Book Group USA and home to such best-selling writers as Christopher Buckley. Should publishers like Karp bow simultaneously to the gods of commerce and quality? Maybe by spending m...

Did Harry S. Truman really say, "If you want a friend in Washington, get a dog?"—a gem picked up by Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, Bill Clinton and others? Google Book Search led me to The Quote Verifier, which concluded: "An old saw put in Harry Truman’s mouth.&...