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Is E-Book Milestone Worth Cheering? – Deadline.com

Is E-Book Milestone Worth Cheering?

By MIKE FLEMING | Tuesday July 20, 2010 @ 9:21am EDT

Amazon.com is crowing that for the first time, its e-book sales volume has surpassed hardcovers. Am I the only one who sees this as an apocalyptic sign for the great pleasure of book reading? Amazon's basing its assertion on sales figures for the last three months, when buyers were lining their Amazon Kindles with summer beach reading. Amazon chief Jeffrey Bezos marvels that the milestone is more remarkable given that Amazon has only been selling e-books 33 months, as opposed to the 15 years it has been moving hardcovers. A report on the milestone in The New York Times indicates that within the next decade, less than 25% of books sold will be in print.

The lure of e-books is easy to understand: with no trees killed, books come cheaper to consumers, who no longer have to lug around hardcovers when an entire library can be loaded into a single lightweight device. On the cost front, I wonder what will happen when the makers of Kindle and other devices corner the publishing market and are no longer interested in selling its software at loss leader prices so that it can move hardware. That confrontation is inevitable, when more brick and mortar stores vanish.

My biggest problem--and the reason I'll always stick to print books--is that I think the entire experience of reading a books is cheapened by technology, same as it was in music. Young people don't become invested in musical artists the way I did when I bought vinyl albums, savored the cover art and gave every song a chance (my kids pay a buck to download hits only and don't care about an artist's progression). Future generations of readers won't value the ritual experience of buying a book, appreciating its distinctive smell and formative heft, earning the way to the end, page by page, and then displaying the best ones like trophies on a shelf.

Now, the whole business of publishing is changing. More and more authors like James Patterson are co-writing novels. That's made them more prolific and wealthy, but it doesn't mean their books are better. Tom Clancy is taking this a step further this fall with the fall publication of Dead or Alive, a Jack Ryan thriller. All of the big authors write their signature franchise character books solo--Patterson works alone on his Alex Cross mysteries--Clancy wrote the Jack Ryan book with frequent collaborator Grant Blackwood. While other authors continued Ian Fleming's James Bond series, Robert Ludlum's Bourne series and even Mario Puzo's The Godfather characters, it's only because those authors are dead. What's Clancy's excuse? I see it as another step in the wrong direction.

As for e-books, I'll give the last word to Elmore Leonard, who's still cranking out his customary 3 to 4 pages each day from 10-6, even as he prepares to turn 85. "To me, a book is a book, an electronic device is not, and love of books was the reason I started writing," Leonard told me recently. "I don’t have a word processor, e-mail, any of that stuff. I write in longhand mostly, then put it on my typewriter as I go along. I don’t have any interest in any of that electronic stuff, but I’m going on 85, and won’t have to worry about it too much longer.”

What about the rest of us, Elmore?

Is E-Book Milestone Worth Cheering? – Deadline.com

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law

By Sophia Li

Communications scholars often fret over the legal nuances of using copyrighted material in their research, says Pat Aufderheide, a professor of communication at American University and director of its Center for Social Media. Ms. Aufderheide and Peter A. Jaszi, a law professor at American, hope to help researchers rest easy with a new guide to using copyrighted work—like political cartoons or screenshots from online games—in their studies.

Because of the "fair use" provisions of copyright law, copyrighted work can be quoted if it is being used for a purpose different from its original intent, according to the report, which was vetted by a committee of lawyers.

The report, released today, gives communications scholars four types of research-related situations as examples: analyzing copyrighted material, quoting it to illustrate a point, using it to spark discussion, and storing it in a collection. The situations in the report were based on 387 responses to a survey of communications scholars conducted in collaboration with the International Communication Association.

The center's guides establish what's acceptable for a field and tell scholars how to apply the law to the cases they encounter, said Ms. Aufderheide.

The center plans to continue producing similar documents for other groups, like an association of research librarians, that want clearer guidelines on using copyrighted works, she added.

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law - Wired Campus - The Chronicle of Higher Education

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety January 21, 2010
Posted by Kevin Smith in : Authors' Rights, Copyright in the Classroom, Open Access and Institutional Repositories , trackback
I attended parts of the ScienceOnline 2010 conference, held here in the Research Triangle this weekend. There was a fascinating array of topics discussed and an interesting crowd of 270+ that included many working scientists, librarians and even journalists. It was a great opportunity to listen to scientists talk about how they want to communicate with one another and with the general public.

There are some excellent discussions of what went on at this year’s conference, especially here and here on Dorothea Salo’s blog. Those with a real passion for more information can check out this growing list of blog posts about the conference. I won’t try to compete with these comprehensive recaps, especially because my selection of events to attend was rather idiosyncratic, and perhaps even ill-advised. But I do want to make three quick observations about what I personally learned from the conference.

First, I discovered one more argument for open science that had not occurred to me before, but has the potential to be very compelling for scientists on our faculties. One reason academic research should be online is that “junk” science is already there. If the general public — including the proportion thereof who vote or require health care — do not make good decisions in regard to matters involving scientific knowledge, we can only blame ourselves when the best research is not available to them, hidden behind pay walls.

Second, I was fascinated to discover that health science bloggers have developed a code of ethics to try and account for the many issues that arise when scientists put important and potentially life-altering information onto the open web. The benefits of this openness are indisputable, but so are some of the risks. This code of ethics represents an attempt to address some of those risks and minimize them (there is a somewhat different discussion of a similar issue from the conference here). The criteria applied to evaluate health care blogs (see the text of the code itself) — clear representation of perspective, confidentiality, commercial disclosure, reliability of information and courtesy — encapsulate standards that all of us who try to share information and opinion online need to be aware of.

Third, I was amazed at how important, and problematic, copyright issues were to this group. I attended seven sessions at the conference, and five of them dealt with copyright as a major (although often unannounced) topic of discussion. Even recognizing my tendency to gravitate toward such sessions, this is a high percentage. I asked a fellow attendee why so many sessions raised copyright and was told, albeit with tongue in cheek, that it is “ruining our lives.” More seriously, one scientist described trying to put his classroom lecture slides online and being told by his university’s counsel that all material that he did not create had to be removed first. Apparently there was no discussion of the applicability of fair use and how to decide what was and was not allowable; just a wholesale rule that would discourage most scientists interested in sharing. This suggested to me that it really is very important to improve the quality of copyright education on campus — for faculty, librarians (who are often the ones asked for advice) and even legal counsel. We cannot reasonably advocate more online open access unless we also give our scholars the resources to accomplish that goal. In many ways the technological infrastructure is becoming trivial and it is the policy and legal questions that must be addressed directly if we really want encourage openness.

Scholarly Communications @ Duke » ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan
By MOTOKO RICH
Associated Press John Steinbeck

The families of the author John Steinbeck and the musician Woody Guthrie, which previously opposed the proposed Google Book settlement that would create a vast digital library of books, say that they now support it.

In a statement released Thursday by the Authors Guild, one of the parties to the settlement, Gail Steinbeck, the wife of Thomas Steinbeck, the author’s son, said “the majority of the problems that we found to be troubling have been addressed.”

The settlement of a copyright infringement lawsuit brought by the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers against Google after the company began scanning books from university libraries, was originally announced in October 2008. Since then, a widespread group of authors, academics, librarians, public interest groups, as well as the Justice Department, have raised an array of objections based on antitrust, copyright and class-action issues.

Ms. Steinbeck, who had received notice of the settlement shortly before a May deadline for authors to opt out of it, sent a letter back then to several influential authors outlining her concerns. Responding to her urging to “stop it in its tracks right now,” a group of authors that included the musician Arlo Guthrie, Woody Guthrie’s son, asked the court for a four-month extension on the opt-out date. It was granted.

In September, the Justice Department laid out its concerns in a memorandum and in October, Google and its partners pledged to revise the settlement. The revised agreement was submitted to the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in November, making it easier for other companies to license Google’s digital collection of copyrighted but out-of-print books and established the position of an independent fiduciary, or trustee, who would be solely responsible for decisions regarding so-called orphan works, the millions of books whose rights holders are unknown or cannot be found.

In an e-mail message to fellow authors cited in Thursday’s statement from the Author’s Guild, Ms. Steinbeck wrote that the revision “meets our standards of control over the intellectual properties that would otherwise remain at risk were we to stay out of the settlement.” She added that neither the Steinbeck nor Guthrie families would “initiate a separate lawsuit against Google.”

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan - Media Decoder Blog - NYTimes.com

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

The Cornell University Library has established a collaborative business model for the arXiv repository.

Here's an excerpt from the press release:

arXiv will remain free for readers and submitters, but the Library has established a voluntary, collaborative business model to engage institutions that benefit most from arXiv.

"Keeping an open-access resource like arXiv sustainable means not only covering its costs, but also continuing to enhance its value, and that kind of financial commitment is beyond a single institution's resources," said Oya Rieger, Associate University Librarian for Information Technologies. "If a case can be made for any repository being community-supported, arXiv has to be at the top of the list."

The 200 institutions that use arXiv most heavily account for more than 75 percent of institutional downloads. Cornell is asking these institutions for financial support in the form of annual contributions, and most of the top 25 have already committed to helping arXiv.

Institutions that have already pledged support include:

California Institute of Technology

University of California, Berkeley

University of Cambridge (UK)

CERN – European Organization for Nuclear Research (Switzerland)

CNRS – Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (France)

Columbia University

DESY – Deutsches Elektronen-Synchrotron (Germany)

Durham University (UK)

ETH Zurich – Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich (Switzerland)

Fermilab

Harvard University

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Imperial College London (UK)

Los Alamos National Laboratory

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Max Planck Society (Germany)

University of Michigan

University of Oxford (UK)

University of Pennsylvania

Princeton University

SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

Texas A&M University . . .

The proposed funding model is viewed as a short-term strategy, and the Library is actively seeking input on a long-term solution. Currently, Cornell University Library supports the operating costs of arXiv, which are comparable to the costs of the university's collection budget for physics and astronomy. As one of the most influential innovations in scholarly communications since the advent of the Internet, arXiv's original dissemination model represented the first significant means to provide expedited access to scientific research well ahead of formal publication.

DigitalKoans » Blog Archive » Cornell Establishes Collaborative Business Model for arXiv Repository

Center Releases New Guide to Navigating Copyright Law

ScienceOnline and copyright anxiety January 21, 2010

Steinbeck and Guthrie Families Now Supports Google Book Plan