My latest Publishers Weekly column, “Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship?” looks at the competitive risks of selling books, articles and other copyrighted works for iPad-like devices that use DRM to prevent your readers from switching to competing platforms.

Apple will tell you that it needs its DRM lock-in to preserve the iPad’s “elegance.” But if somewhere in the iPad’s system settings there was a button that said, “I am a grownup and would like to choose for myself which apps I run,” and clicking on that button would allow you to buy e-books from competing stores, where exactly is the reduction in elegance there?

Apple will also tell you that there’s competition for apps—that anyone can write an HTML5 app (the powerful, flexible next generation of the HTML language that Web pages are presently made from. That may be true, but not if developers want their app to access the iPad’s sensors that allow you to control it by moving it around and making noises, or to the payment system that allows apps to be bought and sold with a single click. It’s an enormous competitive setback if your customers have to laboriously tap their credit card details into the screen keyboard every time they buy one of your products. And here’s a fun experiment for the code writers among you: write an app and stick a “buy in one click with Google Checkout” button on the screen. Watch how long it takes for Apple to reject it. For bonus fun, send the rejection letter to the FTC’s competition bureau.

There’s an easy way to change this, of course. Just tell Apple it can’t license your copyrights—that is, your books—unless the company gives you the freedom to give your readers the freedom to take their products with them to any vendor’s system. You’d never put up with these lockdown shenanigans from a hardcopy retailer or distributor, and you shouldn’t take it from Apple, either, and that goes for Amazon and the Kindle, too.

Can You Survive a Benevolent Dictatorship?

Hey, Bostonians! I’ll be dropping by the Harvard Coop bookstore in Cambridge on April 30 from 1900h-2000h. I’ll be signing books and reading a little from my next one, For the Win. Hope to see you then!

Kotaku’s Brian Ashcraft reviewed my upcoming YA novel For the Win today, and had lots of nice things to say about it:

Forget Doctorow’s outspoken politics, this guy can tell a story. The pacing keeps things moving, and for a book about unions (and virtual unions at that!), it zips by page after page. What really makes the book work is that so much of the action is externalized in the real world. They don’t just battle with keyboards, but with their fists. The stakes are high, and there is so much more to win and lose — it’s not just video game lives they are fighting for, but their very own existence! And since they are fighting against such brutal conditions, organizing and striking can cost them not just their livelihoods, but their lives. There are the occasional sidetracks Doctorow takes to explain things like gold farming, virtual economics and even inflation and deflation. While interesting, these were not my favorite parts of the book. I kept wanting to get back to the story and the characters.

I’m delighted to announce that Little Brother is a finalist for the Pacific Northwest Library Association Young Reader’s Choice Award, “the oldest children’s choice award in the U.S. and Canada.” Not only that, it’s in stupendous company — be sure to follow the link and check out the list of nominees!

Hey, Londoners! I’m giving a talk on May 8 at 7PM at the Nettlefold Hall in West Norwood (SE27). The library there has asked me to come in and talk about how I use technology to write and publish my work. It’s free, but seats are limited, so they’re asking you to RSVP. Hope to see you there!

Nettlefold Hall: CORY DOCTOROW TALK – Readers And Writers Festival, 8th May 2010, 7pm

Sandy works with the Ice Owls, a team of blind and low-vision hockey players. In the course of making the team’s website, Sandy had need of some sample text with which to test the site with a screen-reader. Instead of opting for the boring, non-representative “lorem ipsum” text, Sandy used text from my novel Makers. What a cool place to find myself — more testament to the awesome power of ubiquitous, pluripotent Creative Commons text!

Update: David Jordan sez, “I just saw your post about Makers as Lorem Ipsum and was reminded about my use of Little Brother in the Google Summer of Code proposal, which is to turn the freedom-loving, debian-based Nokia n900 into an accessibility device that reads printed text. At any rate I made a demo video using Little Brother as an example. I’ll bet this could read a Kindle to a blind person, no matter what Amazon/the publisher says.”