“For every book you send to 1DollarScan, you’ll also have to send along a signed waiver stating that you understand you’re having a copy of your books made under the company’s Fair Use Policy. The waiver also frees the company from any liability that they might have incurred for making a copy of a book that you don’t own. Once the contracts are signed, just pop them into the box with your books and ship them off to the company’s offices in California. When the books are received by 1DollarScan, the workers cut the spines off of them. This ensures that the pages of the book lay flat on the scanner, and makes it impossible to resell the hard copy of the book after it’s been scanned. When the scanning’s complete, the pages are shredded and recycled, ensuring that the owner only has access to one copy of their book: the freshly minted digital version, which can be downloaded as a PDF from the company’s website via the user’s password-protected account.”

“I just wish that we could talk about books as if they are for use, not as symbols of enduring knowledge that must be preserved against the ravages of digital barbarians or as emblems of obdurate and blinkered resistance to inevitable change.”

“Apple now holds about 20 percent of the U.S. ebook market, director Keith Moerer said in court Tuesday… Most estimates had placed Apple’s U.S. ebook market share at around 10 percent, with Amazon’s Kindle at 50 to 60 percent and Barnes & Noble’s Nook at 25 percent. But Moerer said the iBookstore’s market share was 20 percent in the first few months after the iBookstore’s launch, Publishers Weekly reports, and is about 20 percent now. (If this is true, the other retailers’ market shares would need to be adjusted downward, since Google and Kobo likely hold 1 to 2 percent of the U.S. ebook market.) From PW:”

“Our wealthy and sophisticated kids go to schools where books are still taken seriously (and sometimes very seriously), if only as the only way to become academically accomplished enough to be admitted to an elite college. Meanwhile, in ordinary or worse public schools—especially in our secondary schools—“real” books have been slowly disappearing. And the new Common Core Standards seem to be somewhat about taking out what books are left. Fiction is to be mostly replaced by informational nonfiction, and apparently even To Kill a Mockingbird may not have much of an educational future.”

“the New York auction house Sotheby’s announced Wednesday the sale of seven books from George Washington’s Mount Vernon library for $1.2 million. It was part of a sale of books described as being from “The Library of a Distinguished American Collector,” which sold for a total of $4.8 million. One book in the auction broke a record: a first-edition copy of Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense” from 1776 that sold for $545,000. A first edition of Charles Darwin’s “On the Origin of Species” (1859) and Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” (1855) sold for $209,000 and $149,000, respectively.”

“Everywhere I turned I came across industry members who are way too focused on current channels and products. They’re happy that 20-30% of their revenues are coming from “digital”; of course, by “digital” they mean quick-and-dirty print-to-e conversions, print-under-glass, or any one of a number of other descriptions of today’s ebook marketplace. Many of them will tell you privately that “the ebook revolution” was overblown, they’ve wasted way too many resources on speculative e-projects and now see no reason to throw more good money after bad on this front. The Digital Discovery Zone was a quaint little area set off by green carpeting and featuring about a dozen of the usual suspects, many of which are sponsors of the various industry conferences. It felt like walking through a petting zoo at your local state fair. I half expected someone to say, “wash your hands if you touch one of those animals, honey, you don’t want to spread any germs.” Isn’t it amazing that we still separate the “digital” players from the rest of the exhibitors at a major trade show?”

“Users will hate DRM because it will be a hassle, it will depress sales, in a few years publishers will begin to have technological and public relations headaches associated with maintaining it, and some time around 2018 or so they will realize (as some of their more enlightened peers already do) that the best solution is to keep it off everything. It would be nice if we could just save everyone the trouble and fast forward to the happy ending right now.”