Group items tagged

we frequently encounter the strawman-esque argument “why should the author get paid less just because it’s an ebook?” To which I’d reply, “Why should the consumer pay more for the privilege of giving up rights, quality, and flexibility?”

You call the shots. You retain the rights to your book. And you take home a bigger royalty than you'd normally get from a traditional publisher--if you sell any books.

Many argue--and I agree--that Amazon's shrewd CEO Jeff Bezos is leveraging his company's position as the largest bookstore in the world to corner the market for print-on-demand, electronic publishing (Kindle), and completely shift the paradigm for publishing.

In the U.S., public figures have to prove that statements about them are false and made with malice -- but in Britain a statement that harms one's reputation is enough to justify a libel action. Defendants must prove that statements are true or "fair comment." This has a chilling effect on the reporting of damaging facts.

"If information cannot be freely exchanged, if journalists must fear being sued over information reported in good faith on matters crucial to our defense, matters such as the financial networks supporting jihadist terror, then we cannot make sound security policy," former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy said at a recent conference on "libel lawfare." This is a useful term to describe lawsuits to suppress facts about radical Islam and terrorism.

The Web means that publishing anywhere means publishing everywhere, thus subjecting authors and publishers to litigation in pro-plaintiff jurisdictions

Right now, the electronic-book market finds itself roughly in the same place the market for MP3s was in 1999, the year after the release of the first portable MP3 player.

But that could change in a matter of months if the book industry insists on 1) jacking up the price of e-books and 2) withholding potential best-sellers from the e-book market.

"Publishers are in denial about the economics of digital content,"

aking a new hard line that news articles should not turn up on search engines and Web sites without permission, The Associated Press said Thursday that it would add software to each article that shows what limits apply to the rights to use it, and that notifies The A.P. about how the article is used.

the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it.

Search engines and news aggregators contend that their brief article citations fall under the legal principle of fair use.