This article from The Christian Science Monitor by librarian and professor Emily Walshe asks that question, and her answer is a resounding YES. When you use a Kindle, you don’t buy ebooks – or, rather, you don’t actually own what you’ve paid for.

When you buy a book in a store, you aren’t required to buy a pair of secret decoder glasses to read the text. This, in essence, is what the Kindle requires you to do. You cannot read Kindle books without a Kindle (or Kindle app on your iPhone). You can’t read it on a Sony Reader, or BeBook, or your color Fujitsu reader, or even your computer. You cannot share your Kindle book with anyone who does not share your Amazon account (and even then, you’re limited as to the number of people who can connect to the account). If Amazon ceases to exist and your Kindle dies, you have no way of re-downloading the books.

This isn’t good business. Artists’ rights need to be protected, yes. We don’t want anyone to lose money. We’re agents – we only make money when our clients make money. But, if the music industry taught us anything, it’s that consumers will get media in whatever way they please. They don’t seem to care if the way they get it is legal or illegal, they want what’s easy. Being able to read your book on only a proprietary device is not easy. How can those of us in the publishing industry make it easier for consumers to get what they want while also giving them the ownership they deserve?

What I think we need is one agreed-upon, platform-agnostic, DRM-free ebook format. A format that can be used on any computer, on any reader, on any phone, etc. It would certainly save publishers and ebooksellers the headache of converting files from one format to the other in order to preserve the correct formatting of the text. And, despite what many other believe, I don’t think this will lead to more pirating. If someone wants to steal something, they’ll steal it. And you can already find plenty of supposedly DRM-locked books available for free online. For the consumer, getting rid of DRM will mean full ownership and less hassle – a scenario that will make them more likely to actually purchase the book.

The digital revolution is happening all around us, and authors, agents, publishers and booksellers all need to wake up to it. Instead of burying our heads in the sand, let’s follow the lead of publishers like Nelson, whose NelsonFree program provides a free ebook (and audio) download with a hardcover purchase (selling content, not format!). Let’s pay attention to forward-thinkers like Kassia Krozser at Booksquare and Michael Cairns at PersonaNonData. Let’s not get caught up in issues like text-to-speech, the prevention of which actually requires DRM on the Kindle titles. And, most importantly, let’s keep this conversation going.

-Michael

The always helpful Publishers Marketplace Automat points me to the nominees for both the Orange and Booker International prizes. Once again I find myself looking at the lists and realizing I’ve read almost none of the authors. I have read (and love!) Toni Morrison, but not yet the nominated A Mercy. I almost read Peter Carey’s True History of the Kelly Gang once—it’s still in a pile waiting to be read, but I can’t remember what bumped it from first position. I’m about 20 pages into Gilead, not really enough to say I’ve read Robinson, and the Orange nomination is for Home anyway. I read part of a Naipaul book once, but got frustrated with it and never went back. While I’m not sure who to root for for either prize, I do always look forward to both lists as a reminder of what I mean to read. How many of these have you read (because a book list is always grounds for a competition!)? Who are you rooting for? Anyone want to suggest any of these to add to my piles for that magical someday when I need something new to read and haven’t got anything lined up?

-Lauren

And the book/digital publishing dance continues…. Good marketing strategy?

Our friend Jim Donahue points us to a Bookseller.com article announcing the shortlist for the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year. Just as we had stopped snickering about Cooking with Pooh.

— Miriam

Gah! I almost forgot that it was time for The Morning News to run their Tournament of Books. They’ve already done the first three rounds. And I already HATE at least one of their choices.

I predict 2666 will go all the way with this one even though I’m not rooting for it. Though mesmerized by the first three sections, the fourth just sucked me down like quicksand, so I dropped the book a month ago and just can’t bring myself to pick it back up, even if it is brilliant AND I already read 500 pages. I’ll get back to it…someday.

Having read less than half the books in contention, my personal choice for the win would be THE WHITE TIGER. Which was already eliminated!! Of course, someone here at DGLM violently hated that book. They know who they are. And I know how wrong about it they are.

Anyone wanna places bets on this horse race?

–Jim

The reports of publishing’s death are greatly exaggerated (to paraphrase Mark Twain who would undoubtedly have had something snarky to say about all the premature wakes for the industry). Those of us who have to read all the blogs and publishing articles and who have made business gossip into an art form have been nattering on about how bad things are for sometime now. Empirical evidence supports the hearsay, of course. There have been a lot of layoffs by the big trade houses in response to losses on the balance sheets, and the worldwide recession, the fact that no one has quite figured out the role of e-books, and the struggles of the print media in general would lead one to believe that the patient is gasping his last breaths.

But, I think that’s a limited and needlessly dark view to take about a business that’s been around since Gutenberg rolled out his printing press at the 1439 Frankfurt Book Fair. At the risk of sounding hopelessly Candide-like, my feeling is that having survived plagues, revolutions, world wars, and the publication of Moby Dick, publishing should be able to survive the current economic downturn as well. I can’t imagine a world without books and I bet you can’t either.

To some extent books have always been a luxury. In the U.S., illiteracy rates are shockingly high and even among the general population of literate citizens only a small group actually read books much less buy them. So, in fact, our business has always had outsize cultural influence despite the relatively small market that buys its product. That’s a good thing. Because, while we always hope that market will continue to grow, we publishing types know that art and ideas will still need to be disseminated in order for societies to progress. The form may be different – maybe you’ll be carrying around a Kindle or one of its cousins or maybe you’ll be reading your “book” on a computer or television screen — but you’ll still need the publishing process to weed out the chaff and point you to what you should be reading, or might want to read because everyone is talking about it, or have to read because it provides information distilled in such a way as to make sense of the nonsensical, or really, really have to read because it’s the most fun you can have without leaving your seat.

In the first three months of the year, our agency has sold about 25 books, a few of those for pretty hefty advances, and even as those sales were going through, we were hearing that last rites had been administered to the dying publishing business. I think that like the Sicilian widow in Moonstruck, publishing will soon (well, as soon as they figure out how to mend their broken business models) get up off the death bed and start cooking again.

But I’m sure a lot of people disagree…

Some book covers are iconic. Some are merely great. And some…well. Here are one person’s choices for the 15 worst covers ever. As a warning, the first one involves nudity (and general ickiness). The second one made me laugh really hard—I am apparently 12 years old.

But more exciting in the long run is this website: http://www.bookcoverarchive.com which offers quite a few amazing cover designs—some witty, some simple, some gorgeous, some controversial. LOTS to talk about. I had never seen the RELIGION EXPLAINED cover before and think it’s a total stunner.

For me, they include some all time faves (LESS THAN ZERO and VALLEY OF THE DOLLS), some recent loves (THE BOOK OF DEAD PHILOSOPHERS and DANGEROUS LAUGHTER, and a few that I personally quite dislike (REMAINDER and SAMEDI THE DEAFNESS).

Anyone else particularly love or loathe any of the covers?

–Jim

Back when I was an editorial assistant living in New York on the princely salary of $17,500 per annum, I noted that although my colleagues and I were laboring to sell books, few of us actually seemed to buy them.

New hardcovers were virtually unaffordable, but assuming one was patient (and with a tote bag laden with manuscripts that needed reading, such patience was an easy-to-cultivate virtue) one could generally lay hands on the desired books gratis, sometimes from a kindly publicist or editorial colleague, sometimes via the inter-house, cold-call assistant swap, or when stars aligned, from the “take shelf,” a magical spot where unwanted books waited to be scooped up by the penurious and/or acquisitive. For a while, I allowed the take shelf to dictate my “for fun” reading; it made for an interesting run. One memorable span included Al Haig’s memoir, A History of the Arab Peoples and Lorrie Moore’s incomparable collection, Self Help–Watergate, Shiites and anagrams make for a heady mix, let me tell you. Although I was awash in books, I am somewhat abashed to say that I acquired an astonishingly small percentage of these in retail bookstores. As a holdover from college and then grad school, I was an inveterate used book buyer, and I also went to the library, something I found few people in publishing ever seemed to do.

These days, I purchase books more frequently than almost never (somewhere around the dot com boom, I stopped thinking that only Croesus and his ilk bought hard covers, and started investing in a few of my own). I buy books, most often as gifts, but nowhere near as often as I imagine that a self-professed bibliophile ought to. I wonder whether the same is true of others connected to the publishing world; writers, agents, editors, scouts, if we help to create it, but don’t always float it. And in this dire time, when few people are buying books at all, I wonder if there is some ethically correct consumer position—a literary equivalent of a locovore or fair-trade-ite—so that a person who cares passionately about books would, for example, endeavor to buy them new, at full price, from an independent bookseller. Is buying from Amazon’s selection of used copies like tucking into a plate of Chilean Sea Bass or Alaskan King Crab? What about buying books at deep discount “big box” stores? How do places like The Strand fit in? I love used and antiquarian book stores, and I can’t quite reconcile myself to the idea that these shrines to reading aren’t good for books, though I know full well that the publisher saw not one penny of revenue on my nearly new copy of Iris Murdoch’s A SEVERED HEAD. And so I wonder, now that I’ve come clean about my own less than exemplary book buying habits, what are yours?

–Jessica

In all the debate about the Kindle and text-to-speech, one thing that certainly came up was that at—at least at present—it’s hard to imagine wanting to listen to a book that way. It’s just not the same thing as an audiobook or any other means of human performance. This fascinating piece in Slate gets into the science behind the technology and just why it’s so tough for a computer to master human speech.

-Lauren

boingboing points us toward this, which might be helpful when face to face with the terrifying blank page.

— Miriam