Andrew Wiley, representing literary heavyweights like Salman Rushdie, Philip Roth, both alive, and among others the estates of Norman Mailer, John Updike, and Vladimir Nabokov, has done a deal with Amazon to make many of these works available for the Kindle platform.
This is, however, not a step of authors taking publishing in their own hands, […]

With a little bit of schadenfreude we report, that the RIAA once again missed its business goals by a factor of 10, when Joel Tenenbaum was ordered to pay some $67k instead of $670k — similarly to Jamie Thomas (down to from $2m to $54k). That’s why the business model does not look so promising […]

“Weaker copyright leads to more artistic production.” This is in shorthand the findings of Felix Oberholzer‐Gee from Harvard University and Koleman Strumpf from the University of Kansas in their most recent paper on “File Sharing and Copyright” (Chicago Journal on Innovation Policy and the Economy, Vol. 10, Nr. 1, pp. 19–55):
Since the advent of file […]

“Fair use” and other copyright exceptions are worth real money and create real jobs. This is what the CCIA — the Computer & Communication Industry Association — found in a study. Industries that rely on fair use exceptions to copyright law grew faster than the rest of the U.S. economy from 2002 to 2007, expanded […]

The US Department of Government Accountability Office just published an authoritative report on piracy and counterfeited goods entitled “Observations on Efforts to Quantify the Economic Effects of Counterfeit and Pirated Goods”. This must by, finally, the proof how damaging piracy is to people wanting to make a living from Copyright, Patents and Trademarks. Just skimming […]

According to an item on electronista, Apple is this week in talks with US publishers to sort out deals for bringing books to its much-rumoured tabled. Publishers are said to want to control access to files (as Amazon does with the Kindle). Other rumours include Apple-book prices going to be 20 % lower than physical, […]

“On Christmas Day, for the first time ever, customers purchased more Kindle books than physical books”, amazon.com reports in its press release on 26 December 2009.
Commentary:
This could mean that online delivery foor books, after a long wait and a few false starts, might be accelerating much faster than for other media, as electronista suggests.
As long […]

A broad swath of American enterprise ranging from major software makers to motion picture and music companies are joining forces to
oppose a new international treaty that would make books more accessible to the blind.
On Monday, dozens of nations will meet in Geneva to consider adopting the WIPO Treaty for Sharing Accessible Formats of Copyrighted Works […]

Google will pay $125 million in a settlement with the Authors GUild and AAP (the american publishers’ association), which still must be approved by a federal judge before it takes effect. $34.5 million will be used to set up an independent Book Rights Registry. Authors whose books have been scanned in Google’s book project might […]

yourauthor.org supporter Matthias Mala sent us a letter he wrote to the VS-Bundesvorstand, in which he comments on the e-book, on the associated risks of piracy, and on the example of Paulo Coelho.
Liebe Kollegen,
Thema der diesjährigen Buchmesse ist das E-Book. Es ist zwar noch nicht so top, wie dies berichtet wird, dennoch wird das E-Book […]