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 […]

A new organisation, the Featured Artists’ Coalition was launched yesterday (Sunday 5 October 2008) at the music industry’s In The City in Manchester to campaign for the protection of performers’ and musicians’ rights. Formed by some of the best-known names in music — Billy Bragg, Craig David, Iron Maiden, Radiohead, Robbie Williams, Wet Wet Wet […]

On the official Google blog it is announced today that Google is starting a similar digitization campaign with newspapers. As an example they show the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette of July 21, 1969 … Is that now violating the poor news sub-eds author’s rights or an incredibly valuable source for young novelists?

Live blogging from Remix My Lit at Federation Square
It’s the Remix My Lit event at Federation Square, part of the Melbourne Writers Festival, and I’ve been remixing a story for the last half hour or so. It’s a bit of a copy and paste job on chunks of a story that caught my eye, ‘How […]

The recent ‘forward-looking’ Intellectual Property Package of the EU has at its core the term extension of copyright. Earlier, the respective policy unit commissioned a study into this very question, which deals with the topic of term extension in detail and, on the basis of a thorough
legal and economic analysis, rejects the main arguments […]

Harlan Ellison is a screen writer, born in Cleveland, Ohio, 1934. According to the Washington Post he is “one of the great living American short story writers”; and the Los Angeles Times said, “It’s long past time for Harlan Ellison to be awarded the title: 20th Century Lewis Carroll” (from Harlan’s website at http://harlanellison.com/). He’s […]