If you haven't heard, in an Orwellian faux pas Amazon recently deleted (and refunded) purchased copies of 1984 and Animal Farm from its customers' Kindle e-readers. It was the wake-up call the anti-DRM lobby was probably hoping for, and it's raised a...
Do you earn a salary? Salaries are like love and hot water. You only miss them when they're missing. This is a little shout-out to all you salaried folk, especially those who have anything, anything at all to do with making payments to small business...
This week Americans have been rocked, according to the New York Times, by Governor Eliot Spitzer's patronage of a high-end prostitution ring. Just for my own entertainment, I've made a few simple changes to the paper's report, imagining what it might...
This morning a colleague of mine saw a man killed at Retreat Station. Trying to force the door of a moving train, my colleague tells me, he slipped onto the rails and was cut in half by the train's wheels. This is all I know at this stage, and this f...
When you watch sport, are you watching news or entertainment? Well, both, of course. But the distinction is becoming rather important, in one regard at least: for sport fans, cricket books may soon have far fewer photos in them. It's like the melting...
My friend Mike and I have been working on a plan for a new product. Mike likes to look me in the eye and say: "Arthur, we are not geniuses." This is his way of reminding me that we need to get a move on, because somewhere, someone else has already th...
Every time I hear the term "Web 2.0", I throw up a little. The man behind the phrase, Tim O'Reilly, is a legend, sure. His publishing company, O'Reilly, is a thousand-megawatt leading light whose ideas I filch regularly. But, oh, what a turdy little ...
For many of us small-business owners, marketing is the hardest part of the job. At EBW, we've learned the hard way that none of our four members are much good at it. We've taken to hiring freelance publicists project by project, which is fine, though...
In a telling op-ed piece in the New York Times, legal-lingo expert Adam Freedman cuts to the chase on the debate about the "right to bear arms" mentioned in the US Constitution's Second Amendment: it's all about a comma that means everything to us no...
Arthur Attwell is co-founder and managing director of Electric Book Works, a company specialising in digital book publishing. Follow him on Twitter at @electricbook and @arthurattwell.
