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Totoro, SOPA, and My Weekend Project
15 Jan
My new hobby has got me thinking a lot about intellectual property. When you’re relaxing on the sofa with a ball of yarn, the mind tends to wander. So, I started wondering, who ‘owns’ this cute lil stuffed Totoro I just made?
The pattern for this handsome little guy comes from LucyRavenscar, the British crochet maven who makes among the best amigurumi around. In her pattern, which she gives away for free on the internet, she specifies: “This is a free pattern of my design, so please do not sell it. Otherwise, use as you like, but if you make this Totoro to sell you must include a link to this pattern. Thank you!”
Copyright enthusiasts might scratch their heads. Why would she possibly give this away for free, especially when she already has an online storefront at Etsy? Let’s extend this argument to libraries: why should publishers let libraries “give away” ebooks for free, for instance? (more…)
eBook Bill of Rights
28 FebIf you follow a lot of library news, you might already know about the eBook news that shook the library community last Friday. In a nutshell, libraries’ primary eBook vendor, Overdrive, made an agreement with publisher Harper Collins that libraries may only lend Harper Collins titles 26 times before having to repurchase the content.
I’m hoping this will be the catalyst for those of us who have a vested interest in the future of eBooks to organize and step up to the advocacy plate. This weekend, Sarah Houghton-Jan (Librarian in Black) and Andy Woodworth wrote this eBook User’s Bill of Rights, which I found by way of David Lee King. I love it! What do you think?
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The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.
The eBook User’s Bill of Rights
Every eBook user should have the following rights:
- the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
- the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
- the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
- the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks
I believe in the free market of information and ideas.
I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.
Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.
I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.
I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.
These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.
To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work.
Kindle Books Outsell Paperbacks: It’s Finally Here
29 JanKindle books are now outselling paperbacks at Amazon. You can read about it on Mashable, who broke the news yesterday morning. I don’t know of any libraries that currently lend Kindle books, even though it is possible with open format .mobi files.
For me, libraries are a whole lot more than books. But do our patrons feel the same way? This could be the single most important issue of libraries’ futures. We have to get this right!
Net Neutrality: Then and Now
5 Jan
(The Daily Show does Net Neutrality, July 19, 2006)
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About two weeks ago, the Federal Communications Commission voted to enact a new set of Net Neutrality rules that will regulate how broadband companies are allowed to direct traffic on the internet. Although the new regulations don’t go as far as some consumer watchdog groups would like, they do represent the strongest measures taken by the FCC to date. This is great news for consumers who don’t want their Internet Service Providers to arbitrarily restrict or slow down access to their favorite websites!
To commemorate the occasion, I thought it timely to share with you the very first paper I wrote for my LIS program, just over two years ago; it’s a policy paper addressing Net Neutrality. I was still feeling a little rusty in academic writing at the time I wrote this, but I think it does an OK job setting out the issues and teasing out a few of the policy consequences on both ends of the spectrum. Click here to download the pdf, or just follow the jump below.
If you want to know more about Net Neutrality, the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Public Knowledge are two great places to start!
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Kindle Fail.
16 DecOr rather, more like OverDrive fail.
Lately, in advance of the holiday gift-giving season, we’ve been getting a zillion questions at my library’s reference desk about e-readers. Most of these questions come from the market’s biggest user group — Baby Boomers who are thinking about buying e-readers but want to know about library compatibility first. Many libraries now lend e-books via the vendor OverDrive, and we’ve all been told that OverDrive books are not compatible with Kindles. But as a satisfied Kindle user, I’ve been confused by this for awhile since OverDrive offers several titles in Mobipocket format, which is a format supported by Kindle. I personally read Mobipocket books on my Kindle all the time!
And so, one dark and stormy night (i.e. last night), I decided to test this out for myself once and for all. I logged into my library’s OverDrive portal, selected one of the 98 Mobipocket titles, put it in my cart, and proceeded to check-out. So far, so good. Until…
“We’re sorry, but you must register one or more Mobipocket PIDs before you can check out Mobipocket titles.”
WSJ Pooh-Poohs Banned Books Week
29 Sep
Banned Books Week is here! My library is celebrating with our Intellectual Freedom Festival (which, interestingly enough, involves very few books).
The Wall Street Journal is celebrating in its own special way, with an editorial by Mitchell Muncy about why he thinks Banned Books Week is, well, silly. He argues that books don’t really get “banned” in the U.S., they are merely challenged by concerned parents who want to guide their children’s reading tastes in unruly public schools.
But books have been censored by the U.S. government — within the last century, even — and continue to be banned by governments all over the world. By celebrating the freedom to read and calling attention to the fact that books have been and will continue to be challenged and banned, we keep this issue at the forefront of American consciousness and prevent it from happening more often than it does.
The ACLU Brings It On, Facebook!
16 SepI don’t think it’s any secret that I love Facebook, and lots of other social networking sites where you reveal highly personal information about yourself to complete strangers (goodreads, twitter, flickr, delicious, the last fm, etc. . .)
OK, but that being said. . . there are SERIOUSLY some online privacy questions that we’ve never had to grapple with before, and hey — I’m up for some grappling!
The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which I also love, is taking on Facebook in a huge campaign to raise awareness about their sketchy privacy practices. Check out the ACLU’s awesome fb quiz to learn more!
“White-Washing” Young Adult Book Covers
5 Aug
Bloomsbury Children’s Books, USA, recently made the unfortunate decision to put this white girl on the cover of a book that is about a black protagonist “with nappy hair which she wears natural and short.” Their PR department claims they made this choice because the narrator is a compulsive liar who may have been lying about her race, but that’s silly — they obviously did it to make the cover more appealing (i.e. marketable) to white kids. Justine Larbalestier, who is the author of Liar, was very unhappy with her publisher’s choice, and she is my new hero for her thoughtful & impassioned response to the controversy.
School Library Journal reports on a similar scandal involving the cover of Urusla Le Guin’s book, Powers, “released with a white model on the cover despite the protagonist’s Himalayan ancestry.”
Kindle Intrigue
7 JulI’ve had my Kindle 2 for about a month now and I’m loving it. Granted, I’ve been using it mainly to read PDFs, which have limited functionality on the Kindle, and the navigation is pretty awkward, but I love being able to lug around both War & Peace AND The Golden Notebook with me wherever I go. Better yet, I used my Kindle to search Wikipedia for the plot of “Richard III” when we were out watching Shakespeare in the Park last weekend!
But there have been some interesting legal developments in Kindle Land lately. Back in March, Amazon gave publishers the option to disable Kindle’s “read-to-me” feature after the Authors Guild complained that it infringed on their right to profit from copyrighted audio books. In June, Brigham Young University suspended its plans to circulate Kindles in their library due to ambiguous legal terms that had not been settled yet in writing. Then, just 5 days later, Arizona State University was sued for providing Kindle DXs to incoming freshmen by the National Federation of the Blind and the American Council of the Blind, which argue that Kindles cannot be used by the blind.
Rachel
