As Editor, I have come across a few reviews on our eBooks that indicate some of you would like to see some of our eBooks set to Hollywood. This has made me wonder what it is you think makes for a good candidate for a movie-making story.
I am biased, as I am sure regular readers of this blog may have been able to determine already, towards the thrilling, action-packed, whodunit type of stories. I like a movie that keeps me guessing and surprises me at the end with a heroic win. This makes my inclinations towards stories that are mysteries, murder-mysteries, and so on.
This isn’t about me, however, this is about you, our readers.
Suzanne Coleman writes: “This kept me on the edge of my seat! I could see it turned into a hit movie someday” on Ken Merrell’s The Landlord.
David Swinders states: “A very sad story. Excellant [sic] read, but upsetting, a must read book. This Author has had a very sad but interesting childhood in the care system. Would make a brilliant movie.” on Kevin Slater’s autobiographical story more ]
You may have noticed that there is a lot going on in the eBook industry lately.
For one, back in April, the U.S. Department of Justice filed a suit against Apple and five of the top U.S. publishing houses for what they term “colluding to set eBook prices and sales models”. This was in response to an agreement formed between Apple and those 5 publishers to set eBook prices as per what is known as “the agency model”. This enabled the publishers to set their prices at the level they wanted to set, and dictate to the eBook distributors what the price ought to be. The U.S. department of justice think this is behavior that violates the antitrust laws. Apple and the “big five” maintain that their decision to sign such an agreement was to prevent Amazon.com from building and strengthening a monopolistic hold on the eBook sales market.
While I agree that a retailer shouldn’t have the autonomous decision to set eBook prices, I have to maintain my objection to the trend that publishers have taken in pricing eBooks over and above the [ more ]
Last week, the world’s biggest science fiction publisher – Tor – announced that they were going to be dropping DRM from their entire list of books published. This is big news because ever since eBooks made an appearance on the market, most notably on the Kindle Store, Digital Rights Management has been part of the process.
Digital Rights Management – DRM – is how publishers ensure that the book you buy from them is only readable on the eReader it is bought for. The Kindle and Nook platforms are the biggest users of DRM since Amazon and Barnes and Noble can tie a particular copy of a book directly to a specific eReader.
The idea behind DRM was to ensure that eBooks bought were not easily reproducible on other platforms for sale and was a stringent measure against piracy. The problem with DRM is that it is easily removable with the right know-how and tools. The most dedicated of pirates found no stumbling block in DRM.
According to the Guardian Books article, one science fiction author John Scalzi, made one of the most [ more ]