A must-read piece from Cory Doc­torow for those inter­ested in the changes in pub­lish­ing, Why the death of DRM would be good news for read­ers, writ­ers and pub­lish­ers.  He’s pre­dict­ing the end of DRM (dig­i­tal rights man­age­ment) and look­ing for­ward to a day when for­mats and read­ers are interchangable:

The cheap-and-cheerful man­u­fac­tur­ers at the low end don’t have a sec­ondary mar­ket they’re try­ing to pro­tect, no app store or cru­cial ven­dor rela­tion­ship with a big dis­trib­u­tor or pub­lisher. They just want a prod­uct that ticks the box for every pos­si­ble cus­tomer. Since mul­ti­for­mat sup­port is just a mat­ter of get­ting the soft­ware right, what tends to hap­pen is that a stan­dard, com­mod­ity firmware emerges for these devices that just works for just about every­thing, and the for­mats van­ish into the background.

Many read­ers and pub­lish­ers have been upset at the recent Depart­ment of Jus­tice accu­sa­tions of price-fixing by major pub­lish­ers. The real bad guy, we’re reminded over and over, is Ama­zon. The pub­lish­ers are so scared of Ama­zon that they devel­oped a pric­ing scheme (the “agency model”) that often nets them less money than they get from Ama­zon. But for all it’s mar­ket share, most of Amazon’s advan­tages come from smart sales­man­ship and a big-picture view that helps it develop an ecosys­tem that “locks in” cus­tomers (e.g., I use Ama­zon video on demand to watch TV, which means I get free ship­ping when I pur­chase from them, I get to “bor­row” an elec­tronic book a month, etc., which means when I wanted to buy an e-reader, it was really only a mat­ter of which model of Kin­dle I would choose). As Doc­torow points out, the most ubiqutious e-reader is the cell­phone and most of us get a new one every two years–Amazon’s dom­i­nance could end rel­a­tively quickly with the right com­pe­ti­tion. Get­ting rid of DRM con­tent lev­els the play­ing field.

I’m not sure I’m as opti­mistic as Doc­torow that DRM is about to sim­ply dis­ap­pear. But I agree it’s what needs to hap­pen. It would make Ama­zon just another seller. Pub­lish­ers could stop focus­ing on it and start tak­ing tak­ing more respons­bil­ity for shap­ing the future of pub­lish­ing. (Where might that be going? Five Rea­sons The Future Will Be Ruled By B.S. is a highly enter­tain­ing read and more cor­rect than incor­rect.) But gloom is not the forecast. A recent arti­cle in The Atlantic (chart right) per­sua­sively argues that we are in a Golden Age of read­er­ship:

Our col­lec­tive mem­ory of past is astound­ingly inac­cu­rate. Not only has the num­ber of peo­ple read­ing not declined pre­cip­i­tously, it’s actu­ally gone up since the per­ceived golden age of Amer­i­can letters. So, then why is there this wide­spread per­cep­tion that we are a fallen lit­er­ary peo­ple? I think, as Mar­shall Kirk­patrick says, that social media acts as a kind of truth serum. Before, only the lit­er­ary peo­ple had plat­forms. Now, all the peo­ple have platforms.

The other thread that’s been run­ning through my head these past few weeks is a G+ post from Tim O’Reilly that pulls a quote from ter­rific quote from Hem­ing­way (“How did you go bankrupt?” “Two ways. Grad­u­ally, then suddenly.”):

I love lines from lit­er­a­ture that crys­tal­lize a notion, and then become tools in your men­tal tool­box. This is one of those. Keep it handy, because you’re going to see “grad­u­ally, then sud­denly” processes hap­pen increas­ingly in the next few decades, not just in tech­nol­ogy and in indus­tries trans­formed by tech­nol­ogy, but in global issues like cli­mate change, and in politics.