Ethics and Publishing

Fantasy novelist George R.R. Martin threatened to decapitate an unknown Amazon employee after 180 copies of A Dance with Dragons leaked ahead of the highly anticipated novel's July 12 release date. Martin blamed Amazon Germany for the mistake. Here's an excerpt from his post: "If we find out who is responsible, we will mount his head on a spike.

According to Poynter, Matt Taibbi's just-posted Rolling Stone piece on Michele Bachmann "borrowed liberally" from a 2006 City Pages cover story written by G.R. Anderson.

The newly minted Yale grad was feeling discouraged. The 24-year-old teacher had quit his day job to write a book, and only his two closest college buddies thought anything of his work. As he noted in his diary, he encountered "serious obstacles."

from The Chronicle of Higher Education

I am honored that you have chosen me as the subject of your journalism school graduate thesis. At the behest of your instructor, you e-mailed me to ask how I've "built my personal brand over the years." I'm answering with this column.

See how public domain material moves into the non-public domain.

Echoes of Shepard Fairey.  Fair use defenses based on the transformative nature of the work are expense and often "won" by copyright holders on the basis of the cost of defense.

A federal judge ruled in favor of a defendant who reposted an entire article in a copyright case on Monday, Wired reports. The lawsuit was brought by Righthaven, a Las Vegas-based "copyright litigation factory," according to Wired, that has sued more than 200 websites, bloggers, and commenters for copyright infringement. This particular lawsuit targeted Wayne Hoehn, who posted an entire editorial from the Las Vegas Review-Journal and its headline, "Public Employee Pensions: We Can't Afford Them" on a website medjacksports.com.

Chunka Mui is looking forward to the day that a company offers a similar service for eBooks. But he'd like to go one step better. He wants Apple (or Google or Amazon) to credit him for all the paper books he's bought over the years. He wants to be able to read them as eBooks, too.

A few years ago, b2b publishers were snapping up all the titles they could get in order to create large publishing behemoths. Now, many of those big publishers have shuttered underperforming titles and split off the rest of their assets into smaller, more niche publishers, often led by the former employees of the big companies.

For all their convenience, e-readers such as the Kindle, Nook, and Sony Reader have introduced citation challenges for researchers and scholars.

Changes in the publishing industry not only affect those in the industry, but all readers, and the quality of the books they read.

The appeal by Thomas Steinbeck is similar to the one the high court rejected in 2009. They both stem from a dispute over who controls the rights to publish Steinbeck's works.

Is self publishing technology helping to connect writers with readers, or is it completely disrupting the publishing industry?

Do you see any problem with publishers offering exclusive deals to super markets? Do you feel this type of deal devalues a book?

Blogs don't have editors or fact-checkers. Talk about value add.

Transparency, relationships and other things corporations could learn from a small bookstore.