Megan

Scholars Are Wary of Deal on Google’s Book Search

Another article discussing the Google Book Search deal from The Chronicle of Higher Education (subscription required). The article points out that some of the issues at stake in the deal are different for academic authors than for published authors: “A professional writer and an academic author often have different notions about when and how to make work available. One counts on revenue from book sales; the other cares more about spreading ideas.”

Archiving Writers’ Work in the Age of E-Mail

An interesting article on new issues arising from the increasingly digital artifacts of writers.

“‘Once we learned how to preserve paper, we were good,’ says Naomi L. Nelson, interim director of the manuscript, archives, and rare-book library at Emory University’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. ‘That really hasn’t changed a lot. With computers it’s a whole different ballgame.'”

In addition the article touches on some interesting areas of intellectual property (or the uncertainty of it):

“Information that lives inside a writer’s personal hardware — like the data on Mr. Updike’s floppy disks or Mr. Rushdie’s hard drives — may not have physical dimensions, but it is at least attached to a single device that is owned by somebody. ‘It’s physically here,’ says Mr. Kirschenbaum, gesturing toward a shelf of Apple Classic computers, donated to the Maryland institute by the poet Deena Larsen. ‘I can wrap my arms around it.’

Not so with e-mail and social-media content. These are not programs run on individual computers; they are Web-based services, hosted remotely by companies like Facebook and Google. The content exists in an ethereal mass of data known in information-technology circles as ‘the cloud.’ There, Mr. Kirschenbaum says, ‘you get into this wilderness of competing terms of service.’

With more and more information being stored on the Web, it is no longer clear who owns what.”

Publishers Face Pressure From Libraries to Freeze Prices and Cut Deals

From the Chronicle of Higher Education comes an article about possible price freezing for libraries.

“LET’S MAKE A DEAL (MAYBE): The publishers’ hall at the recent Association of College and Research Libraries conference, held in Seattle in mid-March, was a study in give-and-take: how much publishers such as Elsevier and Oxford University Press will give in this lousy economy, and how much budget-strapped librarians can take.”

A small press with growing appeal

The Crumpled Press is a small press that was born out of the minds and hands of some University of Chicago alumni. This article in the University’s magazine talks about the press, their book binding parties, and how it is possible for a small publisher to thrive. As co-founder Alexander Bick says in the article, ” ‘The standard line is that digitization kills books,’ says Bick. ‘I think it’s more accurate to say there’s a symbiosis…our success contradicts the idea that bookmaking no longer makes sense.’ “