MIghty Words Closes, Skylarov Free
© Richard Loeffler
"It's one thing to create a title that goes into a digital archive. That we haven't backed off from one iota," he says. "As far as release strategy, that's up to the individual publisher. If they want to be less aggressive in the current environment, we totally understand it," adding "Because there are some incremental costs to releasing and formatting each new title, we can see how individual publishers might adapt their schedule a little bit. But we're not changing the publishing process."
Like Times-Warner, Random House has decided that the time for an electronic only line of books is not yet come. I believe that like most large publishers (and the general public), Random House is confused by the number of different formats and the high costs of reading devices.
MightyWords, one of the first electronic publishers has closed. The company which received a large cash investment from bn.com last year had over 30,000 documents from over 900 content providers. Bn.com currently owns about 53% of the company, which spun off from FatBrain.com in March 2000. The company was more directed towards the business to business model than actually publishing electronic books. At one time it was selling $50,000 worth of content per month with 85% of that being professional topics.
Dmitry Sklyarov, the Russian software security expert who was arrested in August for violating the anti-circumvention provision of the Digital Millienium Copyright Act of 1998 is now a free man. The U.S. attorney's office in San Francisco has agreed to drop charges against the computer programmer who works for ElcomSoft, a Moscow-based software company that produced Advanced eBook Process, a program which allows users to bypass the copyright encryption on Adobe e-books. The case raised questions about whether a programmer was responsible for what his employer does with his creations. Web activists and programmers rallied to Sklyarov's support when he was arrested in Las Vegas in July of this year. His supporters claim that the software allows consumers to make a personal backup copy of an e-book, which they claim is legal under Russian and EU copyright law.
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