Macmillan's TOR Imprint Removing DRM From All eBook Titles

J. K. Rowling’s Pottermore site recently opened their shop to allow the sale of Digital Rights Management (DRM)-free eBooks of Harry Potter’s adventures, and now she’s being joined in the DRM-free world by Macmillan’s TOR and Forge imprints.

This signals a big change in the eBook industry, and it’s one we’ve seen before. The music industry went through a similar change when iTunes signaled the end of audio DRM in the iTunes store.

While this move does run the risk of increasing piracy, if that is indeed an actual risk, it also means that paying customers don’t get penalized for being honest as they do right now. I have an extensive collection of Amazon Kinde eBooks for instance, and so I’m effectively locked into Amazon’s ecosystem. If I buy an eReader from a different manufacturer, I can’t bring my Amazon library over to it; they won’t work because of the DRM. When all my TOR titles go DRM-free, that restriction vanishes; I’ll be able to freely convert those TOR books into any other eBook format I want and read them on any device I want, now or in the future.

This is a huge win for many consumers, and has already gained Macmillan an awful lot of attention and praise just today. I can’t wait to see which imprints and which publishers are going to be the next to wade into these more open waters?

(via John Scalzi)

2011 is Dead. Long Live 2012.

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As I write this, 2011 is drawing to a close and none too soon. A lot of things about this year have been pretty fantastic, most notably the founding of this site, but in many other ways this has been a year I’ll be happy to forget.

2012 is 45 minutes away, so I’m taking this chance to think about what I want to accomplish in the year ahead with some resolutions.

Reading

Photo by Adokos/Flickr (Creative Commons)

The first of my resolutions for 2012 is reading. I will once again participate in the Goodreads Reading Challenge, but I will not be setting a goal of 100 books this time. 30 books will be fine to start, and I can update that higher if I finish too early. It’s been months since I dared read a long book, and I miss them.

On the positive side, I DID finish my 100 book challenge for 2011! I had to read 9 books over the 30th and 31st of December to do it, and obviously they were very short books, but I did it legitimately and it feels pretty awesome.

Writing

Photo by Adokos/Flickr (Creative Commons)

I have two writing resolutions.

The first: I will take part in National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) again come November. And I will win again.

The second: I will take part in WIP500, a new challenge to write 183,000 words over the course of the year by writing a minimum of 500 words every day. (2012 is a leap year, for those who did the math and wondered how 500 times 365 equals 183,000.)

The nice thing about doing both is that WIP500 counts any words you write for NaNoWriMo, so if you manage to stick to at least 500 words a day on average right up to November and then go on to do your 1,667 a day for NaNoWriMo, you’ll finish WIP500 before you even finish NaNoWriMo, let alone before year’s end.

I have a bonus third not-quite-resolution that I need to investigate but hope to implement, which I’m stealing from Judith Graves, who in turn got it from Scott Myers. It’s a progress chart that will probably help a whole lot with my progress on finishing Prices.

Speaking of finishing Prices:

Publishing

My final resolution is to publish 4 things in the Amazon Kindle store and hopefully other fine eBook vendors like the Nook store and the Apple iBooks store.

Happy New Year everyone! Hope 2012 is far better than 2011 was regardless of how well 2011 went for you.