A quick round up of interesting posts, articles and ephemera crossing the if:book radar. Enjoy.

Apple’s behavior is a modern, sophisticated version of the “embrace, extend, and extinguish” behavior that got Microsoft in so much trouble in the 1990s: Enter a product category supporting a widely used standard, extend that standard with proprietary capabilities, and then use those differences to disadvantage competitors. (The strategy is even more effective if you have a dominant market position in another, related category that you can use for leverage. Think Windows in the 1990s, iPad in 2012.) If you read, write, or publish digital books, you should be concerned.

How Apple is sabotaging an open standard for digital books

Then I had an unsettling thought. There comes a time in any Apple demonstration where they begin talking about the value of the thing they’re showing off. It’s a slightly more sophisticated version of the old infomercial schtick: ‘How much would you expect to pay?’ So when that moment arrived for iBooks Author, only one thing came to mind: Please don’t tell me it’s free. I said it over and over: ‘Don’t say it’s free!’

You’ve changed, man

There’s an interesting court case about to erupt into much greater visibility that could ultimately have a big impact on digital book publishing. At its heart are issues involving digital First Sale, Fair Use, and an old friend before the courts, whether copying in RAM constitutes a copyright-infringing reproduction.

Digital media: can’t give it away

Most e-books are just HTML. While this is probably obvious to technical people, most people don’t have a clue and don’t care. I find it interesting that we live in a world where 3 year olds know how to navigate a smart phone, yet most elementary kids have a very rudimentary understanding of computers and how to use them. Still, they can master the basic concepts of XML (or HTML) and CSS relatively quickly.

E-books: It’s Just Text

In short, piracy is certainly one problem in a world filled with problems. But politicians and journalists seem to have been persuaded to take it largely on faith that it’s a uniquely dire and pressing problem that demands dramatic remedies with little time for deliberation. On the data available so far, though, reports of the death of the industry seem much exaggerated.

SOPA, Internet regulation, and the economics of piracy

if:book Manager Simon Groth was recently in San Francisco for the Books In Browsers conference. This is the second of his observations from the conference, reposted from Simon’s blog at simongroth.com.

In Victor Hugo’s Notre Dame, Claude Frollo looks from a book to the cathedral and says, ‘Ceci tuera cela.’ (‘This will kill that’). Apparently we’ve never been all that good with pluralism (witness the seemingly endless moaning that digital is killing print, regardless of how little hard evidence emerges to support such a position).

While visiting the Sharjah International Book Fair in the United Arab Emirates, I was pleased to find a panel in the program titled Between Classic and Electronic Creative Writing. What shape would a discussion on digital writing in the Middle East take?

The panellists were from diverse backgrounds – Ahmed Maaty (Egypt), Ibrahim Jrady (Syria) and Fadhel Thamer (Iraq) – and the discussion broad-ranging. The panel was both enlightening and frustrating. It was fascinating to gain a new cultural perspective on a topic that is so prevalent in the West. But, ultimately, the panel seemed to fetishise the ‘paper book’ overall and pass the buck to the ‘new generation’ to solve the challenges of  new technology.

Simon recently returned from San Francisco and the fabulous Books in Browsers 2011 conference therein. This post originally appeared at his blog.

I tried hard to keep live tweeting from the event (via the @ifbookaus account), but alas I’m no @ebookish (forever now known as The Thumbs of Fury). I was reduced to desperately taking notes and occasionally copy-and-pasting in the Twitter app.

The event itself is organised by the awesome Peter Brantley and hosted at the Internet Archive. Books in Browsers is a small event attended by some of the finest people at the techie end of publishing (and me). Because of its size and the quality of its attendees, there was no need to waste time on discussions of paper versus screen or on the relative merits of digital workflows. It was like a welcome homecoming.

“There were days when the Red Crescent was begging for volunteers to help in taking the bodies of dead people off the city street and bury them properly. The hospital grounds have been turned to burial grounds [sic]…”

It was in 2003 that a fascination with the possibilities of a new contribution to journalism was born for me out of the words of Salam al-Janabi, known to all his readers at the time as Salem Pax. Salam was an English speaking blogger whose blog Where is Raed? became a testament to the limitations of traditional ways of reporting and revealed the possibilities that online publishing tools brought to journalism. Each day, I couldn’t log on to the internet fast enough, dial-up screeching my impatience, to see what had happened overnight. I was fixated. And excited.

Disquiet had begun settling on reports coming out of Iraq; questions were emerging on online forums about US government motives and the information being fed to audiences by The New York Times. And then there was Salam writing a blog for his friend Raed about what was going on during the invasion of Iraq: sometimes eloquent, sometimes observational, sometimes clumsily written, but always compelling. It was an insight into a situation that might have reached a limited audience months later, but online it reached a mass audience as it happened.

Consequently, it was later revealed that reports filed by Judith Miller for The New York Times about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction, often quoting unnamed US officials as sources, appeared to be fabricated. Whether this was deliberate or not has not yet been fully established. It was a front page article of Miller’s that reported Iraq had “stepped up its quest for nuclear weapons and…embarked on a worldwide hunt for materials to make an atomic bomb,” that was cited by Condoleezza Rice, Colin Powell and Donald Rumsfeld as reasons to go to war. It was a report later proven to be false.

In a poetic full-circle Salam eventually landed up writing for The Guardian, which also published a book based on “Where is Raed?” under the title The Baghdad Blog. That’s not to say that his posts were not to be viewed without question; there were many at the time, as there should have been. In the beginning, Salam was writing under a pseudonym and it wasn’t until May 2003 that The Guardian tracked him down and verified his identity.

But this isn’t a story about the death of traditional news organisations or even their perceived political biases, but rather the moment where the impact of a single blogger made a lot of people sit up and notice a powerful shift in news distribution.

I can’t draw.  There was a time when this would have been something of an impediment to the DIY production of a comic book.  I’m also not rich, famous, connected, a creative team, a publishing house or a marketing department.  I do, however, have a camera, a computer, a graphics tablet, an internet connection and the Adobe Creative Suite.  Burger Force comics are brought to you by the democratisation of technology in the digital age.

Burger Force is the story of a pop culture detective agency located beneath a fast food takeaway. To avoid drawing it, I have combined film and photography techniques with sequential art storytelling to bring you the world’s first professionally cast comic.

It’s not many a writer who would admit that comic book companies are the geniuses of our industry.

No seriously. They have the whole demand scale figured out. Not only do they mass produce paperback copies of their stories, but they have television shows, movies, yearly conventions in every major city in the world. They have lunch boxes. They have toy figurines of the hero, the sidekick, the villain, the villain’s hairless cat, and let’s not forget the sidekick’s landlady. And depending on when they’re made, how rare they are, and whether or not the buyer has resisted temptation and left the figure in its original packaging, the villain’s hairless cat may go for several hundred dollars when first sold and several thousand dollars years later. This, my friends, is marketing genius: realising that the money is not in the paper bound book, but in the other entertainment opportunities we can provide the audience based on the story.

Indie publisher Richard Nash talks most eloquently on writers needing to expand their scope from the novel to further interactive opportunities like workshops, Q&A sessions, memorabilia, exclusive dinner parties, your own board game or selection of swim wear (well you never know) and endless other possible endeavours depending on your genre.

Larry Correia, author of the Monster Hunter International Series, encourages the design of military style patches for various teams in his series. He also offers for sale not only signed books from him but patches of his own design as well.

A German art student, Benjamin Harff, made a beautiful hand-illuminated and bound copy of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Silmarillion, an enhanced version of the book that many Tolkien fans would give their pet orc for.