Jeff Bezos has been hyping the Kindle all over the place, and I make it a point not to buy any hype at all. None. Whatsoever. This guy at the Electronic Frontier Foundation isn’t buying Bezos’s hype, either. But it doesn’t prevent him from speculating about the imminent digital revolution in books suggested by a successful wireless device that stores lots and lots and lots of text.

And he’s got a good list of questions for the folks in the book industry to ponder:

• Will e-book readers be open to content from any source?
  So far, it looks like Amazon’s Kindle is limited in the type of file it can read. PDF files, for example, have to be converted before the Kindle can read them (whereas Sony’s reader can handle any type of file). Worse, books downloaded from Amazon appear in a proprietary .azw file format, which can’t be read on other devices. (The Kindle also bizarrely charges users $1 for each blog or RSS feed they subscribe to.) And if you’re trying to read digitally from Canada, you’re out of luck. Users should be able to seamlessly move content from their e-book reader to their computer to their cell phone. The winner of the format wars to come will be the one that can provides the greatest interoperability.
• Will digital books carry DRM?
  After insisting on dysfunctional copy protection for years, the music industry has finally realized that DRM doesn’t work. By making legitimately paid content harder to use than content downloaded for free, DRM punishes paying customers by locking up their content. And, since DRM is always circumvented eventually, it does nothing to prevent piracy (the Kindle’s DRM has already been cracked). Sellers of digital books and the makers of reading devices can save themselves — and their customers — ongoing headaches by avoiding these attempts to restrict customer rights to their content now.
• Will the first sale doctrine still apply when books are digital?
  Book readers are accustomed to passing their dog-eared copies of books without thinking about it. In the world of physical books, the first sale doctrine says that a book buyer can transfer the book by loaning, re-selling it, or even renting it out if they like, without infringing on the publisher’s rights. What happens when sharing a book with a friend means making an additional, perfect copy? Readers should not be asked to give up their first sale rights, whether their books are digital or made out of paper.
• Will libraries carry digital books?
  Libraries loan out a limited number of copies of new books for free, and publishers don’t complain. But what happens when the number of books on loan is unlimited, and the “loan” makes a perfect copy? Libraries should maintain the right to distribute books, even when books are digital.
• Will bookstores survive the shift in technology?
  Bookstores have always played an important role as community meeting places and as curators of our literary culture. But even great bookstores, such as Berkeley’s Cody’s Books, have been closing or are struggling as more people get their content instantly over the web. Bookstores must find a way to interact with digital content and monetize a broader range of goods and services that come attached to “book culture,” or they may end up suffering the same fate as the music stores that are rapidly going out of business.
• Will publishers be open to new business models?
  The music industry tried putting their heads in the sand and hoping digital music would go away, and it didn’t work. Now, the major labels are (belatedly) experimenting with a number of delivery options for music, from online radio to subscription services to pay-what-you-like downloads. Book publishers should learn from their friends in the music industry and move aggressively to try out new models.

Good questions all, but I doubt that anyone in the industry has the time to ponder them.

And while publishers are getting pummeled by the digital revolutionaries into thinking about what format to deliver their “content” in, Sarah Lacy, writing in BusinessWeek, has ideas for them about how to market their “product” in a Web 2.0 world.

Some of them make sense. But this one is just revolting:

Create stars—don’t just exploit existing ones.
When an author is established, publishers have to do less to make a book sell. So bidding wars start. As a result, even some best-sellers aren’t very profitable.

Instead, publishers should take a page from the handbook of Gawker founder Nick Denton and create stars. Find micro-celebs with a voice, talent, a niche base of readers, and most important—enthusiasm. Then leverage the publisher’s brand (and the techniques I advocate, of course) to blow them out.

Require as part of the contract that the author blog, speak on panels, attend events. Give them incentives for delivering—say, though Web traffic of the number of followers they amass on Twitter.

At the risk of sounding like a lit snob … are you fucking kidding me?

As an atheist I can’t claim familiarity with any aspect of Christianity, which was as good a reason as any to avoiding making too much of the “no cross in the dirt” smear against McCain (though I did make something of it).

My ignorance makes me appreciate Ann Althouse’s nuanced thinking all the more [e.a.].

If the “cross in the dirt” story were true, wouldn’t a good Christian have “witnessed” to it early on?

Watching this now and comparing Bob’s take on Christianity to mine, I have a theory about why McCain shifted from not talking about the cross to talking about it.

McCain was initially an Episcopalian, and only fairly recently identified himself as a Baptist. My Christian upbringing was Episcopalian, and Bob Wright was raised as a Southern Baptist. Bob thought of Christianity as something to witness at every opportunity, and I thought Jesus’s admonition to keep one’s religion private. …

Could it be that McCain, as an Episcopalian, thought more like I did, and then later, after becoming a Baptist, saw the matter more the way Bob did?

Could be!

any of the commenters at Gawker, as is their style, prefer to snark about the detention of graffiti artist James Powderly (along with many other protesters of all stripes) by the Chinese authorities for the display he mounted in Beijing:

But others understand that it’s no joke to be jailed in China,

I think this is awesome and courageous.

Really? Tiananmen Square was awesome and courageous. This is just self-aggrandizing and pointless.

Really? Going to prison in China is no joke. It gets a message out there for people to see and that is important. Would you do it?

how is this self-aggrandizing, exactly? He’s in prison, and I’m sitting on my ass in a (somewhat) comfy office chair reading about thinking “shit, I feel bad for the Muslims and non-Kool aid drinking Chinese when the Olympics are finished

There’s a lot of other reporting about this worrisome incident too, as you can see at this Google News link. But there’s nothing about this incident on Memeorandum.

Why is that? I thought the blogosphere is supposed to be much more informative than the TV newsbiz. The internet and TV are sharing news-viewer eyeballs, according to Pew.

I was hoping that the internet would be an improvement on the MSM. Right now, it’s Moe at Gawker—yep, Gawker—who’s reporting news that people should be aware of (because it’s a head-on collision between Western political culture [and freedom of expression] and Chinese “authoritarian” political culture [no freedom of expression].

So kudos to Moe at Gawker for going where the newsbiz doesn’t go.

Not that, say, the New York Times isn’t trying to cover China soberly–it most certainly seems to be.

[T]he Beijing police still sentenced the two women [in their 70s] to an
extrajudicial term of “re-education through labor” this week for
applying to hold a legal protest in a designated area in Beijing, where
officials promised that Chinese could hold demonstrations during the
Olympic Games.

Then the NYT goes and ruins its coverage with an almost incomprehensible level of naivete about the Chinese regime [e.a.]:

It is unclear why the police have detained people who sought permission to protest. [Really? Which part of the maniacally controlling Chinese government's motives is unclear? Huh? ---ed.]
Some political analysts say the police may be refusing to enforce the government’s order, announced last month, to allow protest zones. Chinese lawyers and human rights advocates also suggested a more cynical motivation — that the authorities were using the possibility of legal demonstrations as a ploy to lure restive citizens into declaring their intention to protest, allowing the police to take action against them. [You don't say! Fancy that! ---ed.]

When it comes to a Communist (or formerly Communist) or an “authoritarian” regime, there’s no use in wondering why it does what it does. It does it (whatever outrage “it” is) because it can, because it holds total power over the people it rules. Once upon a time, the people who wrote for the New York Times assumed that their readers knew this. Now it’s unclear whether even the journalists writing these stories know these things or if they’re just playing dumb. Oh well!

But even if the NYT were to give it to us straight up, the paper just doesn’t have a big enough megaphone among those who live online. Which, these days, is a lot of us. And the appetite for news doesn’t seem to be too large either.

Here are some more findings from that Pew survey:

• In spite of the increasing variety of ways to get the news, the
  proportion of young people getting no news on a typical day has
  increased substantially over the past decade. About a third of those
  younger than 25 (34%) say they get no news on a typical day, up from
  25% in 1998.
• A slim majority of Americans (51%) now say they check in on the
  news from time to time during the day, rather than get the news at
  regular times. This marks the first time since the question was first
  asked in 2002 that most Americans consider themselves “news grazers.”
• Social networking sites are very popular with young people, but
  they have not become a major source of news. Just 10% of those with
  social networking profiles say they regularly get news from these sites.