Amazon owned CustomFlix changed their name to CreateSpace and offers a comprehensive self-publishing service in Books, DVD, CD, Video Downloads, and HD-DVD. Perfect for the artist who wants to self-publish and retain all their rights.

Quoted: Make your media available to millions of customers on Amazon.com, CreateSpace, and your own site with our inventory-free self-publishing platform. No set-up fees. No minimum orders. You keep the rights.

A new company trying their hand at reducing the overhead in running a blog and making posts. They call it a tumblelog. Dumb name,

A great essay on why piracy is not harming legitimate sales of books but DRM is...

Quoted: Electronic copyright infringement is something that can only become an "economic epidemic" under certain conditions. Any one of the following:

Quoted: 1) The products they want—electronic texts—are hard to find, and thus valuable.

Quoted: 2) The products they want are high-priced, so there's a fair amount of money to be saved by stealing them.

Quoted: 3) The legal products come with so many added-on nuisances that the illegal version is better to begin with.

Quoted: Those are the three conditions that will create widespread electronic copyright infringement, especially in combination. Why? Because they're the same three general conditions that create all large-scale smuggling enterprises.

An older post from Tim O'Reilly on the lifecycle from self-publisher to aggregate publisher. An interesting exploration of the transition from "free" to "not free" and the balancing act the transition requires.

Quoted: What this evolution illustrates is that publishers will not go away, but that they cannot be complacent. Publishers must serve the values of both authors and readers. If they try to enforce an artificial scarcity, charge prices that are too high or otherwise violate the norms of their target community, they will encourage that community to self-organize, or new competitors will emerge who are better attuned to the values of the community.