Walled Culture the book, three years on
Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) was launched just over three years ago. A few weeks afterwards, I talked with journalist and editor Maria Bustillos about…
How to stop video games being made unplayable once support ends
The Pirate Party has long played an important role in fighting the worst excesses of copyright in the EU. For example, when a major copyright update was being…
Forgotten books and how to save them
On the Neglected Books site, there is a fine meditation on rescuing forgotten writers and their works from oblivion, and why this is important. As its author Brad…
Ebook pledge aims to protect libraries and authors from publishers’ growing abuse of copyright
There’s a whole chapter of Walled Culture the book (free digital versions available) devoted to the serious attack on libraries and their traditional functions that is being carried…
Librarians of the world unite: call for action on ebooks
The terrible lawsuit against the Open Library for daring to increase access to books during the Covid pandemic is not just an attack on the Internet Archive’s selfless…
Why sharing ebooks is good for people – and good for publishers
One of the joys of reading is being able to share your favourite books with friends, family and colleagues. As I am sure is the case for most…
Judge puts corporate profits above public benefits in Internet Archive copyright case
Walled Culture has just written about the selfish and short-sighted lawsuit that four of the biggest publishers brought against the Internet Archive. Unfortunately, following oral arguments last week,…
Publishers have long hated libraries; here’s the history, and the next attack
As a Walled Culture post last year noted, publishers hate libraries (well, many of the bigger publishers do, at least.) A handy piece of research entitled “The Publisher…
How publishers lobbied to “axe the reading tax” on ebooks, won – and then paid it to themselves
One of the (many) villains in Walled Culture the book (free ebook versions) is the publishing industry, specifically in the context of the transition from analogue books to…
Digital books do wear out – just like digital music, digital films and video games
There’s a great post by Brewster Kahle on the Internet Archive blog with the title “Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books“. He makes an important point…
If they could, publishers would abolish libraries; here’s what they are doing instead
It is often said that if public libraries did not exist, modern publishers would never allow them to be set up, on the grounds that “clearly” every book…
Enjoy digital ownership and public libraries while you can: they may disappear soon…
Michael E. Karpeles, Program Lead on OpenLibrary.org at the Internet Archive, spotted an interesting blog post by Michael Kozlowski, the editor-in-chief of Good e-Reader. It concerns Amazon and…
Good news: Taiwan creates a new fair use of copyright material; bad news: it’s tiny
Too often we assume that copyright is something that only concerns Western nations like the US and EU. But it’s important to remember that copyright has been exported…
During the Covid pandemic, some publishers didn’t just fail libraries, they exploited them
Back in December last year, a guest post on Walled Culture by Yohanna Anderson related how publishers initially offered universities free access to ebook collections when it became…
US publishers sue to stop a new law requiring them to offer ebooks at a “reasonable” price to libraries
Yohanna Anderson has just written eloquently about ebook price-gouging by publishers. As she notes, this is not just a UK problem, but affects many countries around the world.…
Guest post | #ebooksos crisis: price gouging publishers
Despite only 10% of university reading list items being available in ebook format, “everything is available in E-format” is a sentence librarians hear often. In the so-called digital…