Dave Winer’s post caught my attention and my curiosity was incited: Tech press misses Google/Amazon name grab
Then I read this post he linked to: Big Brands Trying To Corner Generic Namespaces?
That got me wondering: Who is going for book-related domains? Specifically, the dotBOOK one.
What follows is not the kind of thorough investigation a full staff of trained pros would turn out (like, for instance, the lax CNN-Money team who apparently just take everything at face value). But it’s damned more than anyone else has so far bothered to do. Which is really shocking — because why are they being paid if they can ignore something as big as this?
For those who want spoilers:
1) Annie Callanan, last known as COO of ProQuest — sister company of R.R. Bowker (which are both owned by Cambridge Information Group) — applies as an entity with partners, separately from Bowker’s application. If she is still a ProQuest employee, this is a conflict of interest and could also be seen as double-dipping since both ProQuest and Bowker are owned by the same parent.
2) Amazon wants the entire dotBOOK domain for itself! Really, no one else can use it except Amazon.
3) Bowker has a plan to make a mint off dotBOOK with auctions of certain URLs — which could actually be an infinite list of URLs
4) Everyone else just wants to make a buck off writers and at least one of them openly hates self-publishers — and probably independent small presses too
Mike Cane’s xBlog 