Australian government commission recommends shorter copyright, circumventing geoblocking
I may have been a touch premature in posting my earlier article, about an Australian government committee suggesting bookstores be permitted to import books from overseas. I’ve run across a better...
Australian official denies government interest in shortening copyright terms
If you were optimistic that Australia might reduce copyright terms to 20 years as recommended by the recent Australian Government Productivity Commission report, think again. A number of Australian authors have...
What Is Adobe DRM and How to Deal with It, by Piotr Kowalczyk
Nook Simple Touch is supported with Adobe DRM
Before you start buying books in a particular ebookstore, check what kind of DRM is used there.
DRM (Digital Rights Management) is intended to prevent...
Novelist Diana Gabaldon causes fanfic furor
Update, 5/10: One of the commenters points out that, since I originally posted this, Diana Gabaldon deleted first all comments on her two blog posts on fanfic, then the posts themselves....
The Nostalgia Critic asks, ‘Where’s the Fair Use?’ #wtfu
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVqFAMOtwaI]
The notion of “fair use” is a long-enshrined concept in copyright—effectively an “exception” to copyright law, it allows the use of portions of (or in some cases the entirety of)...
Consumers believe they have more rights than they really do in digital media
To buy or to license? That is the question that’s stumped a lot of e-book and other digital media consumers over the years, recently culminating in an author’s lawsuit against Simon...
Barnes & Noble reminds us once again that we don’t own our e-books
David touched on this a couple of days ago, but this Gizmodo piece from yesterday makes it worth bringing up again. The hassles that Nook owners in the UK are going...
Massive civil disobedience for scholarly open access
Online knowledge forum Big Think has shared a profile of the Kazakh woman who's single-handedly taking on the Goliath of scholarly publishing, and leading a global civil disobedience campaign in support...
VoiceView accessibility for Amazon Kindle via USB audible adapter—starting today with the Paperwhite
Amazon today introduced VoiceView for Kindle with a brand-new USB audio adapter that will enable blind and low-vision users of the current Paperwhite to hear text-to-speech content and to navigate their...
P-books to e-books: The ethics of downloading and the legality of scanning
I first heard about this story via Mike Shatzkin in a lengthy piece at his Idea Logical blog, then in a shorter piece by Mike Masnick at TechDirt. Since then,...
AMAZON
A sad tale of Amazon monetization: eReaderIQ and the affiliate program
Courtesy of the Kboards, a worrying item about struggling e-book sites and their ability to monetize engagement with Amazon - or not - has...
