- writing in ALCS News (Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society) writer and campaigner Katharine Quarmby explains why publishing her work under Creative Commons licences is against her principles.
Links of the week November 19 2012 (47)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
26 November 2012
In 1838 Queen Victoria passed the first international Copyright Act, due to the urgings of authors including Charles Dickens, Maria Edgeworth and Benjamin Disraeli. It took a further 58 years before the American Congress joined the international copyright union %u2013 when Mark Twain joined the campaign, after losing valuable revenue when his book, Tom Sawyer, was effectively pirated in Canada. Now another American movement, Creative Commons, is threatening British authors and journalists with a similar fate.
19 November 2012
Adam Davidson in the New York Times: 'When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage. At least that was my thought when Random House and Penguin, two of the world's six largest publishers, announced that they were coming together last month.'
When you see a merger between two giants in a declining industry, it can look like the financial version of a couple having a baby to save a marriage. At least that was my thought when Random House and Penguin, two of the world%u2019s six largest publishers, announced that they were coming together last month. Ever since Amazon began ripping apart the book business, the largest houses have been looking for a way to fight back. If this merger is any indication, they have chosen an old-fashioned strategy: Size.