The Shallows talks a lot about Google Books, and many of our books have addressed the issue of copyright. This is a really interesting article about "orphan books" and where they fall into this argument. (An orphan book is one that the copyright has not expired, but where they copyright holder is unknown or can't be found)
Amazon introduces the Kindle that lets you share ratings of and highlighted passages from books you've read with your friends through social media networks, and introduces "Kindle Singles" -- "short stories written by well known authors and published electronically by Amazon that come at a cheaper price than full-length books," for our shorter attention spans.
This article is referenced in our current book about what the internet is doing to our thinking. It is written by Nicholas Carr who is also the author of our next book, The Shallows. It sounds like it will be a very interesting book.
A book I ran across about information overload and how we can take control of the media that is overloading us and use it to our benefit (the Foreword is written by Clay Shirky).
In Britain, a new austerity budget has threatened massive library closures across the country, with some communities in danger of ending up with no public library at all. Philip Pullman's local chief counsellor accused authors of defending libraries because they like the royalties they earn from the books libraries buy. In response, Pullman has given this stirring speech about the value of libraries to their communities and to civilization
Our book talked a lot about Wikipedia and the process of errors encouraging more people to edit. I thought it was kind of funny to see the biggest mess ups Wikipedia has had.
This is also an example of what we were talking about yesterday. We can write the biography of anyone in an online encyclopedia where most people go for references..talk about power.
Here is a little update on China's censorship after social media became a more common tool for getting information out as Shirky talks about in the last part of the book.