Charlie Stross

On his blog, Charlie Stross ponders how small the electronics necessary to power computing and wi-fi have become, and wonders if the next great malware frontier might be physical spy devices concealed inside Bluetooth keyboards or other innocuous accessories. If it’s a keyboard, all someone needs to do is swap keyboards with you while you’re [...]

The post In the future, concealed embedded computers might spy on you appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Last week, author Charlie Stross posted his review of the process of writing using Scrivener, a specialized story-based word processor I’ve mentioned a few times. Stross has a good overview of the program’s strengths and weaknesses from the point of view of a professionally-published writer. The program’s biggest weakness, he finds, is that it essentially [...]

John Scalzi won't have to field any tough questions about how digital rights management software (DRM) works at tonight's book signing. The author—out on tour promoting his newest science fiction novel, "Redshirts: A Novel with Three Codas"—says those difficult discussions popped up regularly when he engaged with his tech-savvy fan base in the past. But he doesn't expect any of that negative discourse at tonight's Boston-area signing event—or at any of the other scheduled stops on his current campaign to promote the New York Times bestseller.

Speaking at the Publishers Launch conference at BookExpo America, Charlie Stross, sci-fi writer and noted proponent of abandoning digital rights management for ebooks, laid out the business case for doing so.

Noting that the issue is at the intersection of culture and technology, Stross emphasized that DRM renders ebooks ephemeral as it locks them into devices that the consumer electronics is in business to render obsolete every 12 to 24 months.

Here are a couple more interesting points of view on the DoJ’s anti-trust lawsuit against some publishers and Apple.

On ReadWriteWeb, Joe Brockmeier points out that for all the noise around the suit, it really isn’t going to change the major problems with the e-book industry right now. He points out three such problems: the rampant proliferation of DRM and platform lock-in, the perpetual copyright implemented by Congress and backed by the Supreme Court, and Amazon’s problematic relationships with publishers (including those who aren’t the Big Six).

Companies that have existed for centuries could be gone in a generation unless they make a single radical change. Christopher Mims 04/17/2012 1 Comment Physical books don't have DRM - so why should their digital equivalents? Publishers who want to stay in business are going to have to start selling books without digital rights management, says science fiction author Charlie Stross. DRM locks customers into individual ebookstores and devices, which is the primary way that Amazon perpetuates its stranglehold on this market. For AMZN, the big six insistence on DRM on ebooks was a windfall: it made the huge