Cory Doctorow, the sci-fi author and ebook pioneer (at least when it comes to DRM and pricing), announced this month in his new Publishers Weekly column that he’s about to embark on a bold publishing experiment. He says he’s going to publish his next book on his own, or at least without a publisher’s help, as he’ll be calling in favors from professionals to help with artwork, editing, and printing. He’s going to use all the unconventional distribution formats he’s now familiar with, and he’s going to make a profit.

Best of all for the rest of us, he says he will document the process and share the results, which means any writer or publisher curious about digital distribution will be able to benefit from whatever happens. I’m rooting for ya, Doctorow.

I also think it might be interesting to look at this experiment in the context of three other online distribution experiments.

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Of all people to be emotional to a fault about digital publishing, I wouldn’t expect it of David Pogue, the technology writer for the New York Times–and yet this week he published an anti-ebook column where he said that because his books can be pirated at all, they should never be available in digital format. What?

Because it’s his own hard work at stake, suddenly everything we know about digital piracy–that its effects on sales are complicated and not always negative, and that it doesn’t always cannibalize existing markets–is thrown out the window by Pogue as he obsesses over raising his family and making enough money to put his kid through school.

At one point, he writes that his current DRM–the printed page–is virtual unbreakable. This is obviously untrue, and in fact the printed page is among the easiest formats to repurpose, requiring little more than some off-the-shelf hardware and software (a scanner, an OCR program) and lots and lots of hours of laborious scanning, converting, and assembling. The fact that nobody has done it, or that I don’t care to do it at any rate, has more to do with how much I value the content than with the “difficulty” of the format. (By contrast, I am seriously considering scanning in some of my Cynthia Ozick and Isak Dinesen books so that I can enjoy them on my Kindle, since their publishers haven’t made them available.)

Publishers are at the rear of the various media facing a digital revolution. I keep hoping this means they’ll learn from the mistakes of others, but most of the noise out there so far–from publishers and authors–seems to indicate a fresh new wave of resistance and FUD.

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