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Concern the the Google-AAP settlement gives Google an unfair advantage wrt to orphan books and may inhibit scholarly access to these out-of-print works.

Justice Department is looking at the settlement between Google and AAP & the Authors Guild for violations of anti-trust law. The settlement gives Google a huge edge over competitors, at the same time it avoids resolving the Fair Use issues.

Although this NYT opinion piece deals with more than just judicial censhorship, it give a very apocolyptic view of the influence of courts on higher education in several categories that I find very frightening in the same way that the fact that one judge was able to censor a sequel to "Catcher in the Rye" without any academic review or input was bone-chilling to me.

Publishers fail again at basic fact-checking.  The assumption must be that the reading public doesn't care about the truth when something is called a memoir.

A heavily corrected unfinished draft of an early Jane Austen manuscript sold at auction at Sotheby's in London on Thursday for almost 1 million pounds ($1.6 million), three times the estimated presale price, The Associated Press reported. The draft of "The Watsons" went to an unidentified buyer; Sotheby's said it is the only major manuscript by Austen still in private hands.

No penalty for misrepresenting a work of fiction as truth. The lesson of "A Million Little Pieces" is publishers will not worry about misrepresentation when it generates publicity for book.  We have a new category of work "semi-fiction" - formerly know as BS.

It's a dream tucked in the backs of many journalists' minds: the article they write becomes a blockbuster movie and they reap a healthy share of the profits, a walk on the red carpet and - who knows? - maybe even an Oscar.