Third edition of The Global Indie Author now available in Canada

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Well, after much trial and tribulation, the third edition of The Global Indie Author is out now in Canada. Readers can find it on Chapters/Indigo and Amazon.ca. By the way, that “Usually delivers in 3-5 weeks” declaration on the Amazon.ca website is nonsense; the book delivers in less than a week. The extended delivery time is just part of Amazon/CreateSpace’s strategy against competitor Lightning Source, which, incidentally, is covered in detail in the book. If you want to avoid supporting Amazon, buy from the Chapters/Indigo website, where the book is Read More …

Third Edition of The Global Indie Author is now available in U.S. and Europe

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The third edition of The Global Indie Author is out now in print on Amazon U.S., UK, Germany, France, Spain, and Italy. All other territories coming soon! eBooks are also on the way. As mentioned in my previous post, the third edition features a new cover, new subtitle — to reflect the truly global phenomenon that self-publishing has become — and a great deal of new content (over 80 pages). The technical chapters have been completely overhauled to deal with the complexities of image handling, the increasing frustrations of font Read More …

Font foundries claiming ebook font embedding is “distribution.” Just another money grab?

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Those who use Adobe InDesign to create ePubs will know you have the option to embed fonts in your ePub document. What you may not know is that Adobe are encrypting most embedded fonts, creating an “encryption.xml” file in the META-INF folder that can cause your ePub to be rejected by some retailers and may make it fail validation. I first discovered this problem when my latest ebook, the second edition of The Global Indie Author, was rejected by Barnes & Noble for containing an encrypted file. Huh? I thought. Read More …

Another war is brewing as libraries seek ebook file ownership

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This is an excerpt from the upcoming second edition of The Global Indie Author, slated for release in October 2012. A new war is brewing over ebooks, this time between libraries and publishers. Libraries want to be able to buy an ebook once and loan it in perpetuity, “just like with print books,” they argue. This is, however, nonsense: physical books deteriorate, get lost or stolen or damaged, and must therefore be replaced. Digital books do not unless the format becomes obsolete, which is unlikely to happen with the open-source Read More …

How to read ePubs on your Kindle Fire — even DRMed ones!

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Today I learned a wonderful trick: a way to put onto a Kindle Fire an ePub ereader that will read PDFs and ePubs — even Adobe DRMed ebooks — purchased from major retailers such as Kobo, Sony, and B&N, and the myriad of smaller ebook retailers worldwide. Apple ebooks, which use a different DRM, are not transferrable. The principle is this: the Kindle Fire works on top of the Android system, and with a simple click in your settings you can tell the Fire to read Android apps purchased outside Read More …

Will Amazon lose indie authors to Apple?

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Following on my recent post about Apple’s EULA, I thought it might be interesting to look at this latest corporate manoeuvre in light of its origins in the Apple–Amazon fight for dominance that has been going on for some time now, and what these new developments might mean down the road for indie authors. Amazon own and use a proprietary format for their ebooks, the azw file. The azw file is a variation of the mobi file, or prc file, first developed by Mobipocket Creator, who licensed their code to Read More …

The hypocrisy of piracy

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Those who promote or facilitate the “sharing” of copyrighted content like to perpetuate an image of themselves as freedom-fighting renegades out “to stick it to the man” — the adage itself pirated from the sixties — “the man” representing those big bad corporations that make a profit off the backs of us artists and consumers alike. It’s an easy sell when you’re selling free, with the masses happy to swallow bullshit disguised as honey and overlook the obvious hypocrisy of the typical pirate site: corporate advertising. Go to any torrent Read More …

Consumer desire: vastly more important than DRM

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On December 14 CNN Money published an article on the success of comedian Louis CK’s experiment selling his comedy special DVD from his website direct to consumers. In just three days CK had gross sales of $500,000, a successful venture that should, as the article notes, make media companies nervous. But what starts out as a fact-based story on disintermediation slips into speculation about the role that selling the units DRM-free had in CK’s success: He was worried about piracy, and he’s been pleading with his fans to not put Read More …