Cory Doctorow writes for The Guardian: How Amazon is holding Hachette hostage.

In case you did not know, Amazon and the book publisher Hachette are in the middle of a fight over how big is their piece of the pie in ebook sales.

Despite the header, the articule does not really paint Amazon neither Hachette's as the good or the bad in this conflict but instead focuses on the role of DRM in Hachette eBooks and how it could be restricting Hachette options. Short and interesting read.

Hachette aren't having the best of years, PR wise, after pissing off most Worldcon voters by only providing "extended samples" of their three nominated novels for the voter packet (against the authors' wishes, no less). Compare that to Tor, who dished out the entire Wheel of Time. Suffice to say, I'm not enamoured with Hachette lately :/

Now that I'm reading it, this is a rather wonderful story of self-inflicted death by DRM. Hope they're all watching carefully }:-)

This article is great, thanks for posting. I had heard something on NPR but didn't realize how much DRM had to do with it. DRM on books has boggled my mind for some time. But, I am an old school bibliophile and like the real book as opposed to the electronic. I'll be sad when that becomes a thing of the past.

Electronic makes it much nicer for space saving. Have hundreds on my tablet, using the space of only one tablet.

Bah. I want a library. Oh, and one of those ladders on a rail. I have a kindle and get books on there, but I just like having the hard copies. However, when I move, it is a huge pain in the ass. :)

When I lived in a bigger place, it wasn't so much of a deal (Hell I had video arcade machines in that place too) but now I am in a smaller place, space is a big deal and I like the ease of having all of the ones I want in one thing.

I hear you. I just moved to a smaller place and I had to pick which books I wanted to take with me and leave the rest with family. Curling up with a tablet on a comfy chair just isn't the same as a book for me. Something about the feel of the paper and it's smell. it has that certain je ne sais quoi.

Think I only have a few real books anymore, mostly RPG rule books, a star trek novel and do androids dream of electric sheep. Rest are all on my tablet.

For those wanting to go more into the intricacies of the fight, here an article by Wool author Hugh Howey: Big Publishing is the Problem. This one is more one-sided but it reveals interesting information about Hachette.

Incidentally, and not to stray to far away from the DRM topic, I discovered this author offers on his page DRM-Free packages of several of his books with ePub, mobi and PDF versions (Look on the left). Since I have not read Wool I was happy to buy such a package.

I also one day had a hell of an idea while playing the witcher once. Place the strategy guides for both 1 and 2 included on gog, on my tablet so if help is ever needed, I can break out the tablet. Which reminds me, need to do the same thing for pathalogic, I can tell I will need it.

Ah, Philip K Dick, one of the many authors I keep meaning to read. Sigh, so many books, so little time. Actually I think I bought one of his books a while back, but it's boxed up somewhere lol.

Yeah he's definitely one of my favorites. I need to get either a kindle or an epub version for tablet sometime.

Tor's a major fantasy/scifi publisher, right? It figures a publisher backing authors that imagine the future would have a forwardlooking policy of publishing...Otherwise they'd ironically not and we'd all be desperately frustrated (perhaps even more so than usual).

I don't get it. The article basically says Amazon is evil because Hachette likes DRM. It doesn't make sense.

Actually, Tor is a part of Tom Doherty, which is a subsidiary of Holtzbrinck/Macmillan. Hachette owns Orbit, which publishes the books in question. No small fish in any of these, and it's Orbit authors that are dominating the sci-fi scene this year: three of the five Hugo nominees for best novel are theirs, and Ann Leckie's début Ancillary Justice has made every shortlist and already won the Nebula. So yeah, there's a serious disconnect between authors and publishers somewhere there. Hopefully corporate will draw reasonable conclusions about DRM after getting hit in the wallet.