I did forget to talk about some useful stuff that did happen at the
panel that exploded. Both are about me being wrong, which quite
frankly pleases me. Discussions like this are about getting your
opinions out and hearing about others, not shouting down those that
differ from you. In the first, I made the assertion that I had never
seen a Fictionwise, AlexLit or Palm Digital/Peanut ebook on the
alt.binaries newsgroups, but that I’d seen plenty of books without
electronic releases. John Bartley showed me a copy of Analog that he
had in fact downloaded from one of them, complete with the Fictionwise
copyright statement and everything. This suggests to me that I need to
do that monitoring script that will keep track of what gets posted to
those groups. I’ve been talking about it for a year, but I never have
done it. The second was in response to what I said about DRM, how my
guiding precept was not totally preventing any future incidents, but
making it sufficiently difficult to pirate that it is not worth the
bother, as I called it “making it cheaper to buy than steal.” An
audience member suggested that a better phrasing would be “more
desirable to buy than steal” which I immediately agreed is better than
what I said. The original contains only the economic while the latter
included a moral/ethical dimension as well. I’m glad for both
corrections, as they make it future discussion easier, better and more
accurate. See what happens when you don’t freak out?

I wrote up an entry about the ebook panel that went to hell, but I
don’t think I’m going to put it in here. There’s nothing to be gained
by it, as it wasn’t particularly useful or fun as a panel. Tempers
flared, some unflared, some stayed flared and then we all left. I was
already pissed off by the frustrating nature of the thing, and then
was more pissed off when a certain Big Name Fan gave us a “Five Minute
Warning”, and then came back in 75 seconds later to roust us out, and
then was yelling at us to leave about 2.5 minutes after the original
warning. It all struck me as awfully unnecessary, and after all the
yelling of the previous hour just bugged me that much more.