By Hannah Johnson

The best of the blogosphere and social media…

Twittered and blogged about from every corner of the internet yesterday, the Kindle version of The Lost Symbol is outselling the hardcover version on Amazon.com despite the retailer’s hardcover discount of nearly 50%. Publishers have been reluctant in the past to release ebook and hardcover versions simultaneously because they predicted that the move would reduce hardcover sales. It seems like they were right. The story was reported in The Telegraph and The Bookseller.

On the subject of ebooks, Kassia Krozser has another blog post about digital publishing business models. One of the founders of Quartet Press, which shut its doors before they were really open, Krozser has some interesting insights about what she learned in the process. She concludes that “starting a small print publisher is far riskier than starting a digital publishing company.”

And yesterday, I ran across the free download of The Pirate’s Dilemma by Matt Mason. On the download page, Mason says, “The problem (to quote Tim O’Reilly) isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity.” By making the book available to as many people as possible, Mason says, physical sales increase. “To be honest, I was flattered that the book got pirated in the first place.”