links for 2009-3-14

“But we also heard from a marketing director at an imprint of one of the New York-based conglomerates who explained to us why we shouldn’t expect full-scale conversion just yet. “It’s not a matter of trusting reviewers,” he emailed us. “The real issue is that once you introduce unencrypted files into the chain, and you scale that up to several thousand files a month, mistakes will happen. As publishers we have a responsibility not to release something digitally, even if accidentally, in advance of publication. I think the solution, if there is one, is going to have to happen on the device side—with either Sony or Amazon offering some kind of encryption method to publishers—or at least allowing third party encrypted files to run on their devices.” “