Newswatch

Two articles we’re liking, both from the “powerhouse” Inside.com, which will shortly begin its own grave-digging by publishing a money-sapping dead-tree edition:

1. We previously waxed dystopian about E-rights while seeing much to like in E-books. These philosophies, of course, represent Romulus and Remus of rights management and digital publishing. Which will prevail? According to Roger Parloff, neither, because both are too broad and are not supported by legal precedent. (American legal precedent, at any rate.)
2. We note monumental self-assurance in the voice of Richard Curtis, a literary agent who claims to have solved a lot of the practical chicken-and-egg problems of E-book publishing. Of course, he’s cheating: His company, E-Reads (a name we fear will become axiomatic: The rhyme trumps the tired prefix E-), leaves the gate with 1,200 books from B-list name authors. Still, we generally support monumental self-assurance, particularly when you have the stones (more than a thousand of them) and the technical infrastructure to back it up.

Posted on 2000-12-12

(NUblog: Joe Clark)