Ethics and Publishing

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."

Google adjusts an algorithm to to combat SEO gaming.  No longer true (at least on Google) that "All publicity is good publicity"

"I suppose you can't blame companies for seeking to protect their own interests," the Commissioner concluded. "But you can blame policy makers if we let them get away with it."

The law was written in an analog era, and it targeted those who copied tapes or CDs. Such people couldn't claim not to know about the copyrighted nature of the works they were copying-it was written right there on the cassette or CD! But in the digital world, this makes no sense. How could slapping a copyright notice on a CD alert anyone using a P2P network about anything?

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

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

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

More on the News of the World scandal, and why the US should be on the lookout.

British tabloid News of the World is publishing its last edition Sunday, News Corp executive James Murdoch has announced. The close comes in the wake of series of phone-hacking scandals involving high-profile celebrities, including members of the Royal Family. The latest involved the phone of a missing 13-year-old British girl, later found dead.

Here's more to that: http://www.stabroeknews.com/2011/opinion/editorial/07/11/ethics-no-self-preservation-yes/ Oh, that Rupert.

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.

from The Chronicle of Higher Education

We need "embedded ethics" in search algorithms.

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.

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.

Cringe: A staffer at the New Yorker makes up facts for his recent popular book, lies about it, apologizes, and resigns from the magazine. The publisher of his book is halting shipment of print books and taking the e-book off the market.