By: Sophie Butchers,
on 12/17/2015
As the analysis reaches deeper behind the recent Paris attacks, it has become clear that terrorism today is a widening series of global alliances often assisted and connected via cyber social media, and electronic propaganda.
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By: Dianna Dilworth,
on 7/10/2015
The Author’s Guild has sent a letter to Congress seeking to update the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s Notice and Takedown provisions to make it more manageable for authors to fight book piracy.
As it stands, when a book is pirated, “a copyright owner is required to send a notice for each separate instance (i.e., copy) of infringement, specifying the URL,” explains the Guild. “But as soon as a pirated copy is taken down, it is usually put right back up. Needless to say, copyright owners cannot keep up with this senseless game, and individual authors do not begin to have the resources to send a new notice every time a pirated copy is posted or reposted.”
The Guild is seeking a \"Notice and Stay-Down\" approach instead, which would mean that “once a webhost knows a work is being infringed, it should not continue to receive ‘safe harbor’ immunity from claims of infringement unless it takes reasonable measures to remove all infringing copies of the same work,” explains the Guild.
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By: David Elzey,
on 9/22/2014
by David Massey Chicken House / Scholastic 2014 Teens in peril. That's where you lose me. I try to read books as "blind" as possible, knowing as little as I can going in so I can let the freshness of the story carry me. Sometimes, though, I get a sense early in a book that it's going to piss me off. In the past when I was a younger man and felt like I had a lifetime to read everything I'd
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By: Nicola Morgan,
on 5/21/2014
By: Jason Boog,
on 3/21/2013
Simon & Schuster will now share piracy statistics with authors and agents.
The publisher has worked with Attributor since 2011, a company that searches millions of pages for pirated copies and sends takedown notices every day. Authors can report piracy by using the publisher’s Online Piracy Report Form to report piracy to Attributor. In a letter, Carolyn Reidy explained the new reports:
The reports that you will see provide information about the number of infringements identified and takedown notices sent to infringing sites, success rates in removing infringements, the types of sites where infringement is occurring, the specific urls and geographic distribution of sites where unauthorized copies are offered and more. (We expect that in the future we will expand upon the information currently available.) We have also provided a set of Frequently Asked Questions to increase your understanding of how piracy occurs and how we are combatting it. All the information we are providing is confidential and private, but please note that we are making the same information available to agents at the Simon & Schuster Agent Portal.
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By: Alice,
on 2/20/2013
In 2010, Aaron Swartz, a 26-year-old computer programmer and founder of Reddit, downloaded thousands of scholarly articles from the online journal archive JSTOR. He had legal access to the database through his research fellowship at Harvard University; he also, however, had a history of dramatic activism against pay-for-content online services, having previously downloaded and released roughly 100,000,000 documents from the PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) database, which charges eight cents per page to access public files. Given his status as a prominent “hacktivist” and the sheer quantity of files involved, law enforcement agents concluded that Swartz planned to distribute the cache of articles and indicted him on multiple felony counts carrying a possible sentence of $1 million in fines and 35 years in prison.
Swartz was slated to go to trial this year but committed suicide in early January, prompting a public outcry against the prosecution in his case. Swartz was a prominent voice in the heated debate surrounding modern copyright law and public access and use (see his 2008 “Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto”). New York’s current issue contains a great feature from Wesley Yang discussing Swartz’s activism, his life, and the controversy in which he was embroiled.
In the ongoing debate over Swartz’s prosecution, we’ve pulled together a brief reading list on the issues surrounding American copyright in the digital age from OUP’s stable:
Copyright’s Paradox by Neil Weinstock Netanel
Netanel weighs current IP law against the basic right of freedom of speech. Like Swartz, he finds it unacceptably constricting.
The Oxford Introductions to U.S. Law: Intellectual Property by Dan Hunter
A concise overview of the current state and history of IP law in America from a prominent New York University IP expert.
Copyright and Mass Digitization by Maurizio Borghi and Stavroula Karapapa
Two UK scholars discuss “whether mass digitisation is consistent with existing copyright principles.”
How to Fix Copyright by William Patry
A Senior Copyright Counsel at Google takes a look at the changing economic realities of the globalizing, digitizing world and concludes that our government must “remake our copyright laws to fit our times.”
Democracy of Sound by Alex Sayf Cummings
An overview of music piracy stretching back to the advent of recorded sound. The RIAA made headlines throughout the last decade by litigating against users who shared music online, but musicians, record companies, songwriters, and fans were navigating this territory for nearly a century before the Internet became a factor.
Unfair to Genius: The Strange and Litigious Career of Ira B. Arnstein by Gary Rosen
The story of one early 20th century musician who spent decades conducting high-profile lawsuits against the leading pop icons of the day. Though he never won a single case, Ira Arnstein managed to have a significant impact on the shape of music copyright through the decisions in his numerous cases.
Without Copyrights: Piracy, Publishing, and the Public Domain by Robert Spoo
Spoo homes in on the contested publication of Ulysses to reveal the impact on copyright of literary modernism (and vice versa). Characters such as Ezra Pound, the infamous publisher Samuel Roth, and of course James Joyce flesh out a revealing story about artists grappling with free speech and authorship.
Oxford University Press is committed to developing outstanding resources to support students, scholars, and practitioners in all areas of the law. Our practitioner programme continues to grow, with key texts in commercial law, arbitration and private international law, plus the innovative new ebook version of Blackstone’s Criminal Practice. We are also delighted to announce the new edition of the Max Planck Encyclopedia of Public International Law, one of the most trusted reference resources in international law. In addition to the books you can find on this page, OUP publishes a wide range of law journals and online products.
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By: Jessamyn West,
on 2/16/2013
I am aware that I am dreadfully behind the times, but the Kindle I wanted finally hit a price point that I felt was worth it and I got one: a Kindle Keyboard 3G/Wifi model. It’s nice. I’ve been tinkering with it. Here are some initial impressions.
1. Now that the Kindle Fire and other fancier ebook readers are out, the older ones are relatively inexpensive. While you can still buy this model new for low three figures, I got it refurbished from ebay for $50 delivered and was happy about it. Didn’t come in an Amazon box. Just showed up in some bubble wrap with a cable. Fine by me and super cheap for worldwide low-end 3G and an “experimental” browser.
2. I am mostly interested in using this when I travel for the free worldwide-ish internet access as well as being able to carry a lot of books with me on a long trip. I still prefer paper books but am at the point where I need to have more working knowledge of ebook readers than I have. We lend them out at the library that I occasionally work at, but that isn’t enough. I am not interested in buying a lot of new books. I am not interested in creating any more of a relationship with Amazon than I already have. I have a loose relationship with copyright laws but that doesn’t mean that you should, necessarily.
3. First step: hacking it so I can do what I want with it. I do not want their default screen savers. I do not want to pay them to convert things to PDF for me. I do not want to only buy things from the store, I don’t really care about the store. I don’t like the blinky page turning effect. A quick google brings me to this page. I follow a few instructions and I have my own screensavers and a jailbroken Kindle. I also read more about the blinky page flashing effect and why it exists (and that the alternative is often ghosting which would drive me crazy) and I’ve decided to stick with the blinky and learn to live with it, even though it’s nice to have options. I am not messing with the default fonts, for now. I am not installing KIF the Kindle interactive fiction interpreter, for now. I am okay that I will miss out on Amazon-only releases, for now.
4. Second step: get some books. As I said, I wanted to see how much I could do with this without involving Amazon. I’m not anti-Amazon so much as I’m just Amazon-agnostic and don’t want to have my device talking to them about me. There are basically three main ways to get books on to the thing: buy them, steal/borrow them, create them.
As much as I love the DIY Scanner idea, it’s a ways off for me. So I’m going to focus on the middle option.
First option: I went to Listen Up Vermont and gritted my teeth through the terrible interface (which I hear is changing), found a book I wanted to read, went to check it out, tried three different library cards until I got one that worked. Then got to the Amazon page and had to log in there as well. Did not want to register my Kindle. My only option at that point was to read the book in the “cloud reader” [i.e. on their website]. Okay. No way to download a book without becoming an Amazon customer. I’m sure this is not news to anyone who has a Kindle, but I hadn’t really tried this all out yet. This whole process took far too long.
Second option: Open Library. Found a book I wanted to read. “Checked it out” via Open Library’s nifty checkout options. Not even sure which library card I used, maybe it was just me being in the state of Vermont. Checked out the PDF of the book. Downloaded it to my desktop via Adobe Digital Editions which did not require me to register for an account but did have less functionality if I didn’t register which seemed okay to me. Could read it on my desktop. Was prohibited because of DRM from reading it on my Kindle. In the interests of science I tried to figure out how to get this to work anyhow. Spent a lot of time on this website reading about Calibre and the DRM and ebooks generally. Don’t let the post dates fool you, this is a fairly up to date blog. Calibre is a great ebook management tool that follows in the steps of some other open source tools in that it doesn’t break DRM itself, but you can obtain plug-ins that will do the DRM-breaking if you want. It also does a lot of other great things like allowing you to edit ebook metadata and group and organize your ebook collection. You can also use Calibre to format-shift your ebooks to and from various formats. I took the DRM off this ebook and then moved it to my Kindle. It’s not so great to read there because it’s in PDF format but it was good for proof of concept. 500 page PDFs are just not awesome for reading.
Third option: piracy. Most of the time if you search for a reasonably popular book using the title and other words like “mobi” or “epub” you can find forums where people upload pirated copies of these books to filesharing sites like divshare or mediafire. It’s worth noting that the Apprentice Alf website that helps you break DRM explicitly says that breaking DRM to upload books to piracy sites is an explicitly uncool use of DRM end-running which is the position I agree with for the most part. I tried the pirate download options with a book I already had in hard copy and found not just that book but a bundle of five other books by the same author. Downloaded, unrar-ed drag-and-dropped to my Kindle. Started reading. No passwords. No failures.
And as far as the reading experience, I’ve taken to it much more quickly than I thought I would. This is, of course, what everyone but me thought would happen. The Kindle is light, the back-forth buttons are simple and not accidentally clicked. I like being able to look up words in a dictionary without moving more than a few fingers. I like that it knows where I left off. I like getting to toss a book out when I am done with it. All in all my conclusions are much like the ones I was nodding my head with at the In Re: Books conference. Ebooks readers are great and improving all the time. It’s the ebooks themselves–the DRM, the bad user experience, the complicated and wonky checkout procedures, the lack of privacy, the changing restrictions we deal with as libraries, the terrible websites our vendors create–that are not just suboptimal but at the center of a bad user experience that we’re in the awkward position of promoting as if it were our own.
So, mixed feelings of course. I’ve gone to bed and read my Kindle most nights this week and enjoy it. I still can’t look a patron in the eye and explain that they need to go through a bunch of bad websites, log in at least twice and create relationships with multiple vendors who are not the library in order to check out a book from us. Here’s hoping the landscape will change for the better. Here’s suggesting we do what we can to help that happen.
By: Nicola,
on 9/5/2012
The fact that the Internet is so hard to police — and that no single authority is in a position to dictate what it should and should not contain — should be cause for celebration for anyone with an interest in the freedom of speech, expression, and the sharing of ideas. But the Internet has two faces. For every positive exercise of those and other freedoms, there’s an act of fraud, counterfeiting, and copyright infringement. How is the law — in particular the English legal system — attempting to stem the tide of the last problem (online infringement) and take pirates down?
Attacks are being made on two main fronts in the UK. The first is via section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This permits a court to order a service provider — which could be an ISP, a search engine, or a social networking website — to block its users from accessing infringing material. To take ISPs as an example: when there are perhaps millions of infringing users in the UK using the internet access services of only six major ISPs, it’s going to be much easier to pursue those intermediaries than it is the individuals.
Although section 97A has been around since 2003, the first real attempt to use it wasn’t until 2011. The film industry brought a test case against the UK’s largest ISP, BT, seeking a court-ordered block of an infringing service called NewzBin2. BT heavily resisted the attempt, but every ground it raised was dismissed by the High Court and a block was ordered. This year it was the turn of the music industry, which sought blocks from BT and the remaining five major UK ISPs against the celebrity poster-boy of internet piracy: The Pirate Bay (TPB). With none of the ISPs willing to defend such an obviously dubious service, the High Court easily found TPB to be infringing copyright in February of this year. With little to distinguish TPB from NewzBin2, the ISPs then largely gave up the fight and dropped any opposition to a block. This was then ordered in May.
While section 97A has been making waves since its first appearance last year, the second front has been bobbing along in calm waters. Key provisions of the Digital Economy Act 2010 impose obligations upon ISPs to notify their subscribers, once those ISPs have been informed by copyright owners that those subscribers are suspected of infringing copyright, mostly likely via peer-to-peer file sharing (via sites such as TPB). Repeat offenders are put on what is effectively a “naughty list” and copyright owners can use those lists to pick juicy targets for taking further action. Two major ISPs tried to knock the Act out by launching judicial review proceedings, complaining that it offended European and human rights laws. They failed overall, but their actions have delayed the introduction of the Act’s notification regime. A final draft of the Initial Obligations Code (the Code), which sets out the details of the regime’s operation, has now been prepared by Ofcom (the UK’s communications regulator) and was put out for a consultation which ended in July. But there is a lot of work to be done before the regime begins. For example, an independent appeals body is to be created to deal with subscribers who wish to appeal an allegation of infringement. Accordingly, the Government does not expect the first notification letter to be sent until 2014. In the immediate term the Code will not provide for any real sanctions against subscribers beyond receipt of the letter, and accordingly can be criticised as lacking teeth.
While introducing the Digital Economy Act is probably better than doing nothing, the Newzbin2 and TPB cases suggest that section 97A is the far more effective weapon against piracy. Service providers may now be more motivated to assist copyright owners to police their services, if the alternative is to face the cost and bother of a section 97A application that the odds are they’ll lose. There is no direct connection, but in response to industry pressure Google (which may be the next target for a section 97A application) has recently agreed to demote websites from its search results where it has repeatedly received reports of those sites hosting infringing material. It’s a start, but it won’t remove them from its listings altogether.
The UK can’t, of course, solve this problem alone. A number of jurisdictions now have bespoke anti-file-sharing laws in place. These include France (HADOPI); Spain (Ley Sinde); South Korea and New Zealand. Others are in development. As well as being legally challenging, these sorts of measures are also proving politically controversial. Proposed legislation in the USA — SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) and PIPA (PROTECT IP Act) — met with huge public opposition earlier this year and are being reconsidered, but may still come to pass in some form. Before leaving power, President Sarkozy of France hailed HADOPI as hugely successful. The new government in France is reported to be less enthusiastic about the law and its multi-million Euro yearly cost.
It’s worth finishing with a note on circumvention. Very few, if any, of the measures discussed above are foolproof. Many (website blocks for example) are fairly straightforward to get around. Although a large proportion of casually infringing Internet users may not know how, a Google search for “How do I get around The Pirate Bay block?” reveals plenty of results, including several videos on Google’s own YouTube. Ironically, when I clicked on the first video in the list, I was presented with an advert for one of 20th Century Fox’s soon to be released (and no doubt, pirated) movies. Evidently, there’s still a lot of work to be done.
Darren Meale is a Senior Associate and Solicitor-Advocate at SNR Denton, specialising in intellectual property litigation and advice. He has particular expertise and interest in digital rights issues, including the way in which the Internet and new digital technologies interact with and potentially infringe intellectual property rights. His recent paper, ‘Avast, ye file sharers! The Pirate Bay is sunk’, has been made freely available for a limited time by the Journal of Intellectual Property Law and Practice.
JIPLP is a peer-reviewed monthly journal. It is specifically designed for IP lawyers, patent attorneys and trade mark attorneys both in private practice and working in industry. It is also an essential source of reference for academics specialising in IP, members of the judiciary, officials in IP registries and regulatory bodies, and institutional libraries. Subject-matter covered is of global interest, with a particular focus upon IP law and practice in Europe and the US.
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Image credit: Pirate button on computer keyboard. Photo by Sitade, iStockphoto.
By: Nicola Morgan,
on 7/23/2012
Recently, the Guardian reported the story of author Terry Goodkind, who "turned to Facebook to name and shame a fan who pirated a digital version of his latest novel". As usual when a case of theft is revealed, there were arguments on both sides, regarding whether words should be free or authors should be entitled to protect their work and earn from it. Paulo Coelho is quoted as calling on "pirates of the world" to "unite and pirate everything I've ever written". Coelho has every right to say this of his own work - he is exercising the degree of control (or lack of) that he chooses.
However, I do not recall him calling on pirates of the world to pirate steal everything that anyone else has ever written.
And this is what the proponents of the "words should be free" argument so often forget. Surely the choice should be made by the creator of the content? Otherwise it's theft.
Hi Nicola
I wanted to say thanks for paying for AdBlock at http://chromeadblock.com/pay. I wrote AdBlock hoping to make people's lives better, and you just told me that I managed to do it :) Thank you very, very much! &nbs10 Comments on Caught read-handed... by Nicola Morgan, last added: 7/24/2012Display Comments Add a Comment
By: Jason Boog,
on 7/10/2012
We shared five ways to fight book pirates over at AppNewser, but a few readers suggested that authors engage with pirates instead of taking legal action.
Reader MaxEd had a different strategy: “you can stop worrying about piracy. Join those sites you’ve found in step 1&2, start a polite conversation in comments, get free publicity, sell more copies, make people feel good.” Reader P. Bradley Robb added: “I like how you leave out the part about engaging with pirates, asking them if they liked the book and using the initial experience to foster future business relationships.”
What do you think? Should authors fight eBook pirates online or should they engage with these readers? If you choose to take legal action, we outlined the steps in this post. (Photo via fdecomite)
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By: Jason Boog,
on 7/5/2012
Federal judge William Pauley has ruled that one reader should pay John Wiley and Sons $7,000 in statutory damages for pirating a copy of WordPress All-in-One for Dummies on a torrent file-sharing site.
According to the court filing, the fine includes $5,000 for copyright infringement and $2,000 for the “counterfeiting of Wiley’s Trademarks.” The publisher had sued a number of BitTorrent users for pirating books, and the plaintiff was the last defendant in the legal action.
TorrentFreak has more details: “This means that aside from the $7,000 in damages from Carpenter, the book publisher may have raked in more than a million dollars though private settlements. Private settlements are usually around $3,000 per person, which quickly adds up with hundreds of defendants.”
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By: Dianna Dilworth,
on 2/15/2012
A group of 17 publishers from around the world–including HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, The McGraw-Hill Companies and Oxford University Press–have taken legal action to shut down two file sharing sites.
eBookNewser has more: “Yesterday, the Irish-based operators of www.library.nu and www.ifile.it were served with court orders. In the complaint, the publishers claim that www.library.nu illegally acquired more than 400,000 copyrighted eBooks and made them available for free. In addition, the site owners allegedly earned more than $10 million in advertising from the site.”
Tom Allen, president/CEO of Association of American Publishers stated: “For every rogue site that is taken down, there are hundreds more demanding similar effort. I can’t think of a more timely example of the need for additional tools to expedite such action.”
Currently, library.nu redirects to Google Books and ifile.it has an error message that says “No upload servers currently available, try uploading at a later time.”
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Signing a blog post as “Pirate Coelho,” bestselling author Paulo Coelho has joined a promotional program at the infamous file sharing site, The Pirate Bay.
Coelho praised the piracy site and urged his readers to download his work on peer-to-peer file sharing sites. The decision has already generated hundreds of comments–what do you think?
Check it out: “The Pirate Bay starts today a new and interesting system to promote arts. Do you have a band? Are you an aspiring movie producer? A comedian? A cartoon artist? They will replace the front page logo with a link to your work. As soon as I learned about it, I decided to participate. Several of my books are there, and as I said in a previous post, ‘My thoughts on SOPA,’ the physical sales of my books are growing since my readers post them in P2P sites. Welcome to download my books for free and, if you enjoy them, buy a hard copy – the way we have to tell to the industry that greed leads to nowhere.” (Image via)
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By: Aaron Polson,
on 1/28/2012
Remember last week's post about plagiarism and pirating in the modern "wild west" internet/digital publishing world?
Well...this happened. I'll let Robert Swartwood explain it all. I'm too tired. Too frustrated. I've been sorting this mess out since the mid-afternoon.
The thing which boggles me the most? The pirate can't be making (much) on his/her/its knock off of Echoes of the Dead. It's not exactly flying off the virtual shelves for me, either. Robert might not have noticed it if said pirate hadn't listed the book as a free promo.
It's not like it was erotica or something. I hear that stuff sells.
Sheesh.
I have some history with plagiarists and pirates.
One of my classmates at K-State plagiarized a term paper in Psych 350: Experimental Methods. Not a pretty sight. A few of my stories were nabbed and rebooted a few years ago (remember this?). This Christmas, some brave soul "published" an anthology of Christmas horror without rights from the authors. (Um... the antho included Stephen King, Ramsey Campbell, and many more big names.)
eBookr has quite a selection of my stuff for "free". (All you can read, folks!)
But this Amazon trick? This sh*t is just out of hand.
Welcome to the digital future.
We're just getting started...
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By: LAURIE WALLMARK,
on 11/30/2011
What can you do about it?
http://www.rachellegardner.com/2011/11/authors-and-book-piracy/
By: Anastasia Goodstein,
on 11/16/2011
In case you need yet another social network to keep up with (Microsoft has just launched Socl. We think this one’s gonna go a lot like Google+, though with fewer people signing up for accounts because it’s the cool thing to do. Can you... Read the rest of this post
By: Maryann Yin,
on 8/31/2011
The Curtis Agency and E-Reads will tackle eBook piracy as a team, making it easier for authors to find pirated material and send take-down letters.
They have enlisted the technological assistance of Muso TNT, a company that targets piracy for other media industry clients. Muso developed a system that targets popular file sharing sites like RapidShare and Megaupload.
Here’s more from the article: “Using the Muso technology, legitimate content providers authorize the antipiracy service to launch search engine ‘spiders’ to crawl over the Internet and detect unauthorized files. A significant feature is that the search criterion is by author, not by title. As the spiders locate pirated files, they store the results on a password-protected login page for review.”
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By: Anastasia Goodstein,
on 8/23/2011
Plenty of shoppers stalk the Gilt Groupe website (to get the best deals, and now the company’s children’s division is encouraging shoppers to do the same on its Facebook page, where it will offer exclusive products and deals. First up?... Read the rest of this post
A legal case ruling that an internet service provider (ISP) must block access to a copyright-infringing website has been hailed by the Publishers Association as setting a legal precent to protect copyright.
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By: Aaron Polson,
on 5/17/2011
...is a damn good movie. But I'm talking about one of my books.
I killed We are the Monsters last week. It was a hard choice to make because it had already received one nice 5-star rating at Amazon.
I planned on changing the cover (and I do like the new cover much better than the old), but I wouldn't have needed to kill the book without the digital rights management (DRM) debacle.
See, I accidentally selected "enable DRM" when I first published the book. (Don't know what DRM is? Read this.) I don't believe DRM is good for authors. The debate rages on, of course, but in my opinion, it hurts.
If I want people to read my stories (which I've decided is goal #1), why would I put roadblocks in their way? Some writers get all kerfluffled about pirates giving away their books. I say go for it--as long as you don't start selling those pirated books under a different name. Just give me credit, and we're good. Go ahead. Steal my books. Give them away. Grow my audience.
The only way to free We are the Monsters from the DRM monster was to kill it and publish it again from scratch. So I did. It has a brand new, completely linked table of contents, new cover art, and freedom from DRM. None of my other books have DRM, either. It just doesn't make much sense.
And you can download it at Smashwords for free (for the time being). The Amazon Kindle edition is only 99 cents.
How do you feel about DRM? Piracy?
(And if you've read We are the Monsters, I'd love to hear what you think--good or bad. Amazon reviews are a writer's friend.)
By: Jason Boog,
on 5/9/2011
Today the file-sharers at The Pirate Bay attacked a European Union proposal that could set up a digital firewall blocking off file-sharing sites around Europe.
The Pirate Bay posted this message on the site: “the Battle of Internets is about to begin. Upon this battle depends the survival of an Uncensored civilization! Upon it depends our own free life, and the long continuity of our sites and our trackers. The whole fury and might of the enemy will very soon be turned on us … if we fail, then the whole world, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science.”
We continue to track the most popular single title eBooks (using the site’s “Top 100″ list for eBooks) on the file sharing site. As you can see by the list below (titles, but no links!), the most popular books aren’t the titles you might expect…
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By: Jason Boog,
on 4/20/2011
At the Publishing Business Conference & Expo, Copyright Clearance Center business development director Christopher Kenneally lead a panel discussion about digital book piracy.
During the long interview, attorney Devereux Chatillon shared a story about working as general counsel at Scholastic during the release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hollows–revealing the lengths that the publisher went throgh to keep the seventh book in the series offline. What do you think?
Here’s an excerpt from the PDF: “Someone took photographs digitally and put them up on the Internet. And there were a number of things that were interesting about that. One is, we had a few of those pop up. I could be on the phone with their father within literally hours of when it appeared on the Internet, and we could have a private investigator or a lawyer in their driveway, which we did, knocking on the door saying, hi, I’m from Scholastic. And again, we didn’t want to sue people. It wasn’t about the market. It wasn’t about lost sales. It was about we wanted to keep the basically audience for the children together and out of the mainstream so that they could get to that midnight moment, which everyone really loved.”
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By: Cinda Williams Chima,
on 1/26/2011
By: Aaron Polson,
on 1/26/2011
Yeah, I'm writing a short story. I've always been writing something for the last five years. There's your "WIP Wednesday". Haha.
I love the discussion which started yesterday. Book piracy is a hot topic. It's a relatively new topic for books, too. Bootlegging movies and music has been a pretty easy task for years, long before digital copies and the 'net have made it even easier. Some bands built their reputation on bootlegged tapes (um, how about some Metallica irony, folks?). But books were harder to steal and mass produce--you needed a printing press or a really reliable photocopier and a boatload of patience.
Now we have e-books. Now we have Creative Commons licenses. Now we have pirates trading books.
At McLouth High School, we have a rule in the student handbook stating "all electronic devices will remain in student lockers during the school day". Right. Seen any cell phones lately? Out of 22 students in first period, 20 had a cell phone, MP3 player, or both (I surveyed them). How do you police a rule like that? Is it worth the time to try? My point: some people will do what they want regardless of laws or rules or moral order. They just will. It doesn't make it right. It just is.
I know piracy has hurt music sales. I used to download pirated music (before I saw the light), a practice I've given up because cheap, reliable, and convenient alternatives now exist. I know the music industry's lack of foresight and willingness to change has also hurt music sales. We can't blame the pirates for the whole mess.
So, when I tongue-in-cheek told people to steal my book, I'm acknowledging the reality of electronic piracy. I can't live in fear of it, just like I won't spend my teaching day seeking out every contraband electronic device I can find. I'm an English teacher. We read literature and write. We think. We don't have time for cat and mouse.
Students have always found a way to "goof off" in class. When I was younger, we did it with pencil and paper and passed notes. Now they text. Who knows what comes next?
I don't.
But I'm curious...
By: Nathan Bransford,
on 1/14/2011
This week! The books!
I don't know if it's the new year or the chilly weather or the fact that everyone is dusting off their shiny new e-reader for a little "Holy cow I'm not reading on paper anymore," but there were quite a few Future of Publishing articles this week, so let's get right to them, hmmm?
First off, agent Mary Kole has a really interesting article about the future of agenting, in which agents offer up some visions of what's to come. And though I'm of course no longer an agent, I chimed in with a shorter version of what I said yesterday. The future, it is most definitely coming.
Meanwhile, industry sage Mike Shatzkin has a characteristically insigutful post about differentiating the purpose of Digital Rights Management (DRM) between stopping piracy (hint: not very good at it) vs. stopping casual sharing (hint: actually pretty good at it). Probably a large part of why you're not going to see it go away any time soon.
And further to this whole future business, my good friend Eric from Pimp My Novel has a great post on brand management and how publishers are not adapting quickly enough to the new landscape and are still continuing to muddle their own brands with imprints that only matter to insiders. It's been two months since I left agenting and I already am forgetting basically all imprints, but just off the top of my head, Random House alone contains: Random House, Knopf, Crown, Crown Forum, Broadway, Nan A. Talese, Spiegel & Grau, Three Rivers Press, Doubleday, Dial Press, Bantam, Doubleday Religion, Harmony, Waterbrook, Ballantine, Clarkson Potter, Vintage, Anchor, Dell, Del Rey, Triumph, Pantheon, Knopf Children's, Random House Children's, Delacorte, Schwartz & Wade, Wendy Lamb, and I'm sure I'm forgetting plenty. And that is just Random House!!!
And finally in the future of publishing, if you want one of those newfangled Kindle thingamajigs, reader Steve Fuller is happily giving one away! Stop by to find out how to win.
On Wednesday we discussed the balance between writing and life, and there were two pretty moving posts this week about that tenuous balance between grief and books and writing. Stephen Parrish received permission to reprint a transcript of David Foster Wallace's funeral, and it's an incredibly moving outpouring from the people who knew him. And over at HTML Giant, Kyle Minor reflects on reading as an escape from some of the horrors of life and death (via Bookslut). I'm not sure if you'll read two more moving links this week.
The ALA has come and gone and some of the most cherished awards in young people's literature were announced. Congrats to Clare Vanderpool for winning the Newbery for MOON OVER MANIFEST, Philip C. Stead and Erin E. Stead won the Caldecot for A SICK DAY FOR AMOS McGEE, Paolo Bacigalupi won the Printz for SHIP BREAKER, and Rita Williams-Garcia won the Coretta Scott King Award for ONE CRAZY SUMMER. Congratulations, all!
And are you c
It didn’t take you long to discover why pirated eBooks are so popular…SIMPLICITY!! I have a Sony Touch reader and use Calibre for my ebook manager. I’ve gotten a few free books from the Sony bookstore, but there again is the DRM issue. Can’t even move them to the Calibre library without removing DRM. I do like Smashwords. No DRM and you can download whatever format you want. If you need to change it to something else you can do it in Calibre. You purchased it and you can do whatever you want with it. And that’s the way it should be. Check out freebookspot.es. Not saying you should use it, but check it out. Now if it was this easy to check ebooks out of a library….Just to point out here, if I were to download and read a pirated book, that author or publisher would never have gotten a penny out of me anyway. I would have checked the paper format out of the library or bought it used from a used bookstore or from Amazon’s second hand book sellers. Maybe that’s just an excuse I make for myself, but it’s still the truth.
[...] Un bibliothécaire découvre son Kindle : le terrible cheminement pour trouver des ebooks gratuits, libres etc commence… Partagez cet article :PlusWordPress:J’aimeSoyez le premier à aimer ceci. Tagué 3e lieu, ebooks, réseaux sociaux, supports de lecture [...]
Another source of free ebooks is Smashwords.com, as mentioned above — all formats (including mobi, for kindles), and many authors have freebie loss-leaders. And, as mentioned, no DRM!
Glad to see someone else who notices and dislikes the flashy-page inversion thing. That requirement of e-ink tech drives me screaming inthe other direction. Fortunately, I don’t mind backlit screens, so phone & tablet work for me.
Thank you for posting your experience as a new Kindle owner. I’m currently in my last semester at an ischool and have thus far resisted getting an e-reader, partly because I still prefer the paper in my hands heft of a real book, but partly because I find the price to be very preventative. That said I too have been eying older version Kindles on ebay not that so many of the newer models are the popular buys. I appreciate you sharing your experience because it gives me an idea of what I will encounter if I purchase one, and because I appreciate your skepticism and willingness to talk about things like pirating as something other than pure evil. Ideally I’d love to be totally against pirating, but I also think that publishers and e-book providers need to find better ways of interacting with their customers and giving them the freedom to use the files the purchase as they see fit (ops mini rant). Any thanks again for sharing your experience, I found it really helpful and if I do get a kindle I will definitely be checking out some of those links you posted.
Same model as mine. Acquired summer of 2011 when in Ohio, got a Mark Twain/Walt Whitman cover made for it and, heck, must have used for a few thousand hours by now. Not just for books, but as another backup for basic web browsing and webmail – especially when in the open country – and for geocaching, for which it was unexpectedly useful in the midwest USA.
The eBooks section of the University of Adelaide has an impressive and growing collection of DRM-free classic books, of high production quality:
http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/
Come on, Jessamyn. eBooks are easy.
Ah. I forgot the sarcasm tag.
eBooks could be easy, but I think publishers are still scared in general. I keep hoping they’ll come around to selling and distributing digital copies, like the music industry eventually did.
Hi, I’m a long-time Kindle user, but am new to circulating eReaders in a library. You mentioned that at your occasional you loan out devices to patrons. Do they borrow Overdrive items on them? I’m having trouble figuring out how to do this on a Kindle. We also have Sony readers but I haven’t gotten to those yet.
[...] I got a Kindle [...]
I use my smart phone as an e-reader because, for the most part, I’m against single-purpose digital devices. As the lines between eReader and tablet continue to blur, this may become less of an issue, but I do enjoy being able to read and turn pages with just one hand.
I tried to be a good ebook library user, but between the poor browsing experience and weird software and accounts required, I’ve mostly given up. These days if I’m not finding and downloading books through more libertarian channels, I tend to buy them. Like you, I try and avoid Amazon purchases, though I do frequent Google’s bookshop. Not necessarily the lesser of two evils, but Google pretty much knows more about me already than I do about myself, so I don’t know what further harm it could do.
You made a good choice Jessamyn!
Your version of the Kindle also has the voice function, something the newer ‘upgraded’ models have removed. While a little bracing the first time you use it, it soon becomes pretty natural and means you can ‘read’ even when you are doing chores around the house.
johnofjack – that chart is awesome! And I mean that sincerely – it’s great at demonstrating the ‘simplicity (not!)’ of ebooks – is it available for re-use? I’m putting together a libguide on ebooks and it would be perfect for adding some levity about the whole process
Karl – Sure, you can use it if you’d like. I made it on the clock, though, so it might be better if you credit it to Alachua County Library District rather than me directly.
It really is a wonderful image johnofjack, thanks for making it.
Thanks, Jessamyn. I’m glad it’s useful.