(Photo: flickr.com/justbecause)

Oh boy, the big six are just going to love this: Geekwire reports that Amazon has secured a patent for a "secondary market for digital objects," meaning anything from ebooks to mp3s.

That means Amazon has hammered out the basics of a system that would, according to the abstract from the patent application, let you transfer the ebooks you don't want anyone into someone else's Kindle library. In short, you can sell 'em.

Well, at least you'd never have to wonder about the origins of that mysterious brown stain anymore.

Of course, God and Bezos only know whether this will ever translate into an actual Amazon feature; it could be simply a strategic gambit of some sort. (PaidContent points out that the patent could conceivably be used as a cudgel against other marketplaces for reselling digital content, like ReDigi.) But it's not quite as bonkers an idea as it seems, either. Think of what you get for your $9.99 as a license to access a piece of content, as opposed to a book per se. Theoretically, you'd be selling the license.

Romantic, it's not.

The patent application also suggests there'd be a limit on the number of times you could transfer or download an object before the proverbial music stops, which presumably would help prevent the market for new digital books from collapsing like a over-cooked souffle. So it's not like the nation's entire population of teenaged girls could simply pass around a single digital copy of The Hunger Games, gutting blockbuster sales.

But the copyright implications are positively migraine-inducing, and it's hard to imagine publishers, music companies or movie studios letting this stand without throwing the kind of shit fit that actually makes a pretty crackerjack read.

(h/t Gizmodo)

Well one sure hopes so. (photo: screencap)

At long last, the publishing industry's much-delayed book discovery platform has finally arrived. Bookish, a collaboration between Simon & Schuster, Hachette and Penguin, went live yesterday.

And just what has a year and a half of work produced? The home page spotlights bestsellers and new releases, alongside exclusive content like an essay from Eat Pray Love author Elizabeth Gilbert tut-tutting Philip Roth. There's the option of receiving updates via newsletter. Browsers can also purchase, let's say, Michael Bolton's new memoir directly through the site.

It's pretty clear the point of all this hullabaloo is to wrest some control away from Amazon. In a statement to the Wall Street Journal, CEO Ardy Khazaei explained:

"Ultimately, we seek to expand the overall marketplace for books, and whether a book gets into a reader's hands via Bookish's e-commerce partner or another retailer, everyone — from the publisher, to the retailer, the author and the reader — wins."

With Borders dead and buried and Barnes and Noble looking shaky, publishers probably should have started trying to "expand the overall marketplace" a little bit sooner. Amazon now owns a disproportionate share of the customer relationships in the business, from email addresses to purchase histories to sheer mindshare. Then there's the practical problem of getting your books spotted, when book reviews are dying, selling on Amazon means competing with millions of other titles and Barnes and Noble's front tables are given over to the Nook.

It's a mystery, though, just what took so damn long. The Journal blames both anti-trust concerns and the problem of amassing all the relevant data. But this isn't exactly the Pandora of books, so the last couple of years weren't spent on some next-level algorithmic magic.

The final product, in fact, looks a lot like any number of outlets that are already out there, from Good Reads to Shelf Awareness. And why should readers looking for something new trust a site built by publishers with the explicit purpose of pushing their books? There's not much incentive to screen out the clunkers, which even the best publisher occasionally has.

Well, Rome wasn't built in a day, and at least it's a start.

Awaiting the future of fiction. (Photo: Plympton, via Instagram)

Still more evidence that Twitter means business about its positioning as a media brand: In an event today at the New York Public Library, head of editorial programming Andrew Fitzgeraldannounced a Twitter Fiction Festival, a wholly virtual event that'll run November 28 to December 2.

The goal, according to Mr. Fitzgerald, is to "push the outward bounds of what people thing of when they think of content on Twitter."

The announcement was made at a panel, in concert with the New Yorker and organized by the serial fictioneers at Plympton, on the future of fiction. (Judging from the tote bags and hashtagged tweets, the crowd was heavy on publishing types.)

Before inviting New Yorker fiction editor Deborah Treisman to the stage to discuss the live-tweeting of Jennifer Egan's "Black Box," Mr. Fitzgerald gave a brief presentation, titled "Twitter is for storytelling." Surely you can guess the theme?

Most of us default to tweets when we think about content on Twitter, but Mr. Fitzgerald wants you to reconsider. He pointed to several examples of experiments that move storytelling beyond the simple 140-character format. There was Teju Cole's seven-part response to Kony 2012, which was essentially an essay. There are characters like @karlthefog, a baleful version of the San Francisco fog, and @MayorEmanuel, which began as a parody account and evolved into a kind of semi-dystopian, parallel-world-skipping science fiction story.

All in all, every day there are over 400 million tweets sent. That amounts to something like 80,000 novels worth of content, daily. (Some of these novels, though, are surely better than others.)

It also makes a nice complement to television programming, he pointed out. He used the illustration of Community, which carried on a kind of parallel Twitterverse plotline, as several characters live-tweeted helping someone move.

More than that, Mr. Fitzgerald argued, Twitter is a "global, realtime broadcast platform in its infancy," and a wide-open frontier for experimentation. He really spun this metaphor out, complete with powerpoint image of the Nebraska frontier and a final call for us to get out there and pioneer some narratives. Twitter wants to "invite people to go out on this frontier and start building some structures--we're asking all of you to go out and stake your claim and begin building the future of storytelling."

And so the festival is an attempt to encourage even more of this. Featured will be a minimum of 10 to 12 stories, though the number might be much larger.  "We think it's important to do this sort of experimentation, to see how far we can go with the tweet and beyond the tweet," he explained.

Submissions open today.

(Photo: Penguin)

In the old days, back before single-serving Tumblrs and pithy Twitter accounts, you had to be talented or rich or well-connected to nab a book deal. Now, with the democratization power of the Internet, you need a wifi connection and a slightly unhinged obsession with raunchy BDSM sex or a boy band. Welcome to 2012, you guys. Aren't you just so proud of how far we've come?

The Daily Mail reports that a 16-year-old fan of the British boy band One Direction has landed a publishing deal with Penguin after a piece of her fan fiction went viral. Emily Baker penned the story "Loving the Band" on Movellas, and a Penguin editor--who apparently was so desperate for new clients that she just decided to trawl a teen fiction site?--spotted the piece. The book will be published as an ebook on November 1st, and Penguin can tap into the massive amount of fans Ms. Baker already accrued on Movellas.

Since Penguin now owns the rights to "Loving the Band," you can no longer read it online as it's been removed from Movellas. But if you're desperate for your boy band fan fiction fix, there are still plenty of One Direction-themed fan fiction stories to sate your desires. "Only You" is about a girl with a dead mother and mysterious scar on her shoulder who two band members fall in love with. "Stole My Heart" is about One Direction taking a break from touring when Harry, the curly-haired one, finds love in the least expected of places.

Go ahead, bookmark them--we won't tell. Can't be any worse than the latest book Sophie Kinsella crapped out.

Yup, sounds like a teenager to us. (Photo: Screencap)

We tend to think of Pinterest as being pretty straightforward: See pretty picture/thing we want, pin it, repeat ad infinitum. Hence the free-and-clear path to monetization.

But the Daily Dot reports that a particularly aggressive "transmedia" publisher, BeActive, wants to use the platform as a storytelling medium. The company is taking Beat Girl, a novel, and turning it into:

a Pinterest profile that tells the story of fictional DJ Heather Jennings in a method that’s not quite TV show, not quite in-person character sketch, and not quite graphic novel. With 160 pins and counting, viewers can catch new glimpses of Jennings’ life added daily. The interactive drama is presented as a prequel to an upcoming multi-platform video series.

So far, the imaginary Ms. Jennings has a respectable 3175 followers.

The results (including a board titled "My Big Dream," full of pics anticipating her hoped-for life in New York City) remind us of an on-the-up-and-up Lonelygirl15. It does feel a little like a webisode, though, in that it strikes us as more of a marketing technique than a fully-realized narrative. But the project does make us excited for the day someone uses Pinterest to pull an @MayorEmanuel. Fake Mitt Romney, we're looking at you.

Laughing on the inside

Ever since the advent of the agency model for ebook pricing--the oh-so-valuable wedge publishers needed to fight Amazon’s $9.99 price point--it’s been the big question: Are they actually going to get away with this? Today we have our answer: Not if the Department of Justice has anything to say about it! Alleging collusion to fix prices the agency has filed an antitrust suit against Hachette, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin, Simon & Schuster and Apple itself.

The allegations are awfully cloak-and-dagger. If true, they suggest the publishing industry has carried over a certain old-world stylishness into the digital age. From the filing (courtesy of the Verge):

Starting no later than September of 2008 and continuing for at least one year, the Publisher Defendants' CEOs (at times joined by one non-defendant publisher' s CEO) met privately as a group approximately once per quarter. These meetings took place in private dining rooms of upscale Manhattan restaurants and were used to discuss confidential business and competitive matters, including Amazon's e-book retailing practices.

Emphasis most definitely ours. We like to imagine these meetings looked a little something like this.

Cut to Cupertino:

On February 19, 2009, Apple Vice President of Internet Services Eddy Cue explained to Apple CEO Steve Jobs in an e-mail, "[a]t this point, it would be very easy for us to compete and I think trounce Amazon by opening up our own ebook store."

As of this moment, Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster have already settled. Apple and MacMillan, on the other hand, may well fight: Bloomberg reports they'll argue that, by pushing back against Amazon's overwhelming dominance, the agreements actually increased competition in the space.

Amazon, meanwhile, called the move a “big win for Kindle owners” and promised, “We look forward to being allowed to lower prices on more Kindle books."

Where’s a GIF of that laugh when we need it?

Last week the service launched its iPad app, and within a few days had broken into the top ten list. "We may just end up killing the website altogether," said Qwiki co-founder Doug Imbruce, only half joking, during a visit to Betabeat's offices on Friday.

Like the news reading app Pulse, which stopped by earlier in the week, Qwiki was in town to meet with New York's blue chip publishers. "A lot of them are looking for more compelling ways to present their content on the tablet and we are looking for great ways to build out our database of topics," said Imbruce. "Different forms of discovery are going to drive visitors in the future, way beyond Google's ten blue links."

Right now most of the entries on Qwiki feel like broad, zoomed out takes on big topics, so integration with major news publishers could add more rich and timely detail. Imbruce says the company is also considering ways to partner with less traditional publishers. "A real estate firm could publish their listings, and our stories on specific cities could start to integrate that data on price and location."It would be interesting to see Qwiki put information like that to work building a deeper dive within a more generic entry like "Denver".

The iPad app already asks users to share their location so it can provide a map featuring Qwikis on local landmarks and neighborhoods. "Qwiki wouldn't have been created if I had not been living in New York," says Imbruce. "I felt like we had to leave for the west coast to grow the company, but man, if Stanford would just hurry up and open that University here I could come home."

Qwiki iPad App Demo from Qwiki on Vimeo.