THE LATE AGE OF PRINT

Beyond the Book

Browsing Posts tagged copyright

I don’t often write about textbook publishing, but with the start of the new school year I thought it appropriate to say a few more words on the subject. I say more because I blogged about the changing student textbook market around this time last year, exploring how the rental market in particular had started [...]

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Wow! I’m happy to report that my home discipline, communication, is finally making some strides in terms of bringing its book and journal publishing policies into the 21st century. Last week, the International Communication Association (ICA), in Conjunction with American University’s Center for Social Media, released its Code of Best Practices in Fair Use for [...]

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On February 10, 2010, a German court began what may well be the start of the book industry equivalent of the dismantling of Napster. Earlier that month, six global publishing firms — John Wiley & Sons, McGraw-Hill, Macmillan, Reed Elsevier, Cengage Learning, and Pearson — filed suit against RapidShare, seeking an injunction against and damages [...]

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On the heels of my previous post, concerning a 2000 copyright infringement suit brought against author J. K. Rowling, comes news of new allegations that the Harry Potter scribe may have lifted material from a fellow writer.  The author in question, the late Adrian Jacobs, penned a little-known 40-page children’s book back in 1987 — [...]

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I’ve been meaning to blog about this for a couple months now.  An article of mine, which may be of interest to readers of The Late Age of Print, was published in the October 2009 issue of the journal, Critical Studies in Media Communication (CSMC).  Here’s the citation, abstract, and keywords: Ted Striphas, “Harry Potter [...]

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One of the defining attributes of the late age of print is the erosion of old publishing certainties.  Among them is the notion that the free circulation of book content leads inevitably to lost sales.  Another is the belief that strong, proprietary systems are the best way for publishers and authors to secure value in [...]

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Yesterday I ran across this intriguing post on The Guardian Technology Blog, about e-books and book piracy.  There, author Bobbie Johnson advances a provocative, and perhaps counter-intuitive, claim.  E-books have yet to really take off, he argues, because printed books haven’t been subjected to a level of online piracy sufficient to inculcate a digital disposition [...]

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