Proving that lots of brick-and-mortar book retailers don’t get the new realities of publishing any more than the publishers do  James Daunt, the managing director of Waterstone’s a British book chain had this to say about Amazon.com in the London Telegraph: They never struck me as being a sort of business in the consumer’s interest. They’re a ruthless, money-making devil. The computer screen is a terrible environment in which to select books. All that ‘If you read this, you’ll like that’ – it’s a dismal way to recommend books. A physical bookshop in which you browse, see, hold, touch and feel books is the environment you want. Which is of course why Amazon is the largest single book seller in the world and sales of e-books have gone through the roof since … Read entire article »

I had a bit of an epiphany the other day (no Charlie, it didn’t hurt) and realized there are some striking similarities between the open source software movement and the indy/self publishing movement. In my mind open source really started with the free/shareware movement some years back where a developer would write a game, say, and give it away free, asking you to pay for it if you liked it. After a while it became clear that if you gave the full version, no one would pay for it so ways to limit the time or functionality of the software became standard and you then bought a license code to unlock the full software. From that sprang, at least in my opinion, open source. Open source software is very simple in concept. It’s … Read entire article »