February 2011

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.
The eBook User’s Bill of Rights
Every eBook user should have the following rights:

the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

The eBook User’s Bill of Rights is a statement of the basic freedoms that should be granted to all eBook users.
The eBook User’s Bill of Rights
Every eBook user should have the following rights:

the right to use eBooks under guidelines that favor access over proprietary limitations
the right to access eBooks on any technological platform, including the hardware and software the user chooses
the right to annotate, quote passages, print, and share eBook content within the spirit of fair use and copyright
the right of the first-sale doctrine extended to digital content, allowing the eBook owner the right to retain, archive, share, and re-sell purchased eBooks

I believe in the free market of information and ideas.

I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can flourish when their works are readily available on the widest range of media. I believe that authors, writers, and publishers can thrive when readers are given the maximum amount of freedom to access, annotate, and share with other readers, helping this content find new audiences and markets. I believe that eBook purchasers should enjoy the rights of the first-sale doctrine because eBooks are part of the greater cultural cornerstone of literacy, education, and information access.

Digital Rights Management (DRM), like a tariff, acts as a mechanism to inhibit this free exchange of ideas, literature, and information. Likewise, the current licensing arrangements mean that readers never possess ultimate control over their own personal reading material. These are not acceptable conditions for eBooks.

I am a reader. As a customer, I am entitled to be treated with respect and not as a potential criminal. As a consumer, I am entitled to make my own decisions about the eBooks that I buy or borrow.

I am concerned about the future of access to literature and information in eBooks. I ask readers, authors, publishers, retailers, librarians, software developers, and device manufacturers to support these eBook users’ rights.

These rights are yours. Now it is your turn to take a stand. To help spread the word, copy this entire post, add your own comments, remix it, and distribute it to others. Blog it, Tweet it (#ebookrights), Facebook it, email it, and post it on a telephone pole.

To the extent possible under law, the person who associated CC0 with this work has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to this work

This Is Why Your Used Bookstore Clerk Hates You

This Is Why Your Used Bookstore Clerk Hates You
Although bookstore workers love their customers, or are at least morally obligated to, sometimes the love is so great it turns murderous. Ever tried to finish all-you-can-eat coconut shrimp? That’s the love we’re dealing with here. Although your narrator worked at a used bookstore just outside of the city more than a decade ago, he shut his eyes tight, remembered three years of Fat Slice Pizza, and relived some moments of quiet desperation.

Finnish library uses games to crowdsource indexing

Finnish library uses games to crowdsource indexing
This Post From Spingwise points the way to a neat project from Finnish indexing effort Digitalkoot that now offers a series of games by which players can help fix mistakes in the indexing of old Finnish newspapers.
Digitalkoot is a joint project run by the National Library of Finland and distributed work platform Microtask that aims to index the library’s enormous archives so that they are searchable on the Internet. As in so many similar efforts, limitations on computers’ ability to recognize text causes numerous instances where human help is required. That’s where Digitalkoot’s games come in. In both Mole Hunt and Mole Bridge, human players offer solutions to problematic words, thereby helping the Digitalkoot effort make Finland’s archives more accurate and more accessible to all.

Library Users, Librarians, and Libraries Boycott HarperCollins Over Change in Ebook Terms

www.BoycottHarperCollins.com
New York, NY — Library users, librarians, and libraries have begun to
boycott publisher HarperCollins over changes to the terms of service
that would limit the ability of library users to borrow ebooks from
libraries. A new website, BoycottHarperCollins.com, is helping to
organize their efforts to get HarperCollins to return to the previous
terms of service.

On February 24, Steve Potash, the Chief Executive Officer of
OverDrive, sent an email to the company’s customers — primarily US
libraries — announcing that some of the ebooks they get from
OverDrive would be disabled after they had circulated 26 times. Soon
after, librarians learned that it was HarperCollins, a subsidiary of
News Corporation (NWSA), that intended to impose these limits.
Immediately, library users, librarians, and libraries began voicing
their opposition to the plan by HarperCollins, with several library
users and librarians urging a boycott.

As Joe Atzberg

er, of Columbus, Ohio, one of the first librarians to
address the issue, wrote on his Atzblog
:
“The previous model already forced libraries to pretend a digital
‘copy’ was a single physical thing. Only one library’s user can have
it ‘checked out’ at a time. And only on one device. The clearly
misapplied language around this tells you what a terrible idea it is.
To be clear, this model eliminates almost all the major advantages of
the item’s being digital, without restoring the permanence,
durability, vendor-independence, technology-neutrality, portability,
transferability, and ownership associated with the physical version.”

Information on this grassroots campaign can be reached via a website
that went online on February 27, 2011, BoycottHarperCollins.com. The
boycott will end as soon as HarperCollins agrees not to limit the
number of times a library can loan each ebook.

Paging through a life tied to books

Paging through a life tied to books
Jonathon Welch didn’t plan on making Buffalo his home when he chose the University at Buffalo for his post-graduate study in the early ’70s, but once he got here he never left. The owner of Talking Leaves bookstore on Main Street in Buffalo, NY has run his shop for more than three decades, adding a second location in late 2001 on Elmwood Avenue.

Welch, 60, grew up in Mukwonago, a village in southeastern Wisconsin, where he took to books at a young age — and also developed a lifelong habit. Look closely at his hands, and chances are you will see written notes scrawled in pen.

The Shallows — Chapter 3

In chapter 3 Carr refers to the developmental maturation of the mind and our intellectual transformation and correspondingly, the types of technologies which have evolved. The book and the Internet belong to what is termed “…intellectual technologies. These include all the tools we use to extend or support our mental powers – to find and classify information, to formulate and articulate ideas, to share know-how and knowledge, to take measurements and perform calculations, to expand the capacity of our memory” (44). Carr further refers to the instrumentalist and determinist views of technology – essentially the former views that we are in control of our technologies, and the latter views technology as utimately out of our control (46).

* Does the way that we gather information from the Internet (quick reading and scanning) help to expand the capacity of our memory?

* How does our use of the Internet compare to the ancient reliance on verbal information and the latter development and reliance on the written word?

* Are we as a species in control of the transformation of the Internet as an intellectual techology?

New OverDrive DRM terms: “This message will self-destruct”

New OverDrive DRM terms: “This message will self-destruct”
“This goes a step worse so that each digital “copy” effectively self-destructs after a set number of reads in your system or consortium. That is to say, if you wanted to help blunt the crushing demand for a popular title, this would only help you slightly, if at all. And only one user at a time. And only if your users are faster than the rest of the consortium. After that you (and the rest of your consortium) are straight out of luck. Guess you should have bought more print copies?”

Mr. Edison’s Kindle

Technologizer takes a fun look back at some ideas and inventions that were ahead of their time.

“Thanks to Google Books’ archives of Popular Science, Popular Mechanics, LIFE, and other magazines that frequently reported on futuristic gizmos, we have a readily accessible record of technology that failed to live up to the initial hype–including random notions that never got off the drawing board, startlingly advanced products that didn’t find a market, and very rough drafts of concepts that eventually became a big deal. The best of them are fascinating, even when it’s not the least bit surprising that they flopped.”