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Read the Chart, Not the NYT Article, to Get the Straight Dope on Book Profits
(cc photo: Sarah Browning) There’s a certain category of newspaper article where you’re better off ignoring the text and just looking at the accompanying graph. Such an article is “Math of Publishing...
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Unlike Amazon, Publishers Understand Authors–and How to Rip Them Off
Ken Auletta (cc photo: JD Lasica, socialmedia.biz) In a lengthy New Yorker piece (4/26/10) about the Amazon/Apple battle over e-books, Ken Auletta paints some familiar heroes and villains: “The...
View ArticleIt’s Apple’s Party, and We’re Just the Guests There
Media Detector, a New York Times blog, has a post today (6/14/10) about a comic book adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses that Apple is insisting be bowdlerized before it can be turned into an app for...
View ArticleIt’s Publishers’ Greed, Not E-Books, That’s Pinching Authors
Jeffrey Trachtenberg, writing for the Wall Street Journal (9/28/10), reports in “Authors Feel Pinch in Age of E-Books” that electronic publishing is ruining authors: It has always been tough for...
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Chris Hedges Was Supposed to Write a Book About the Media…
I caught this story at Single Payer Action. The account is based on a talk veteran reporter Chris Hedges gave recently at the Sanctuary for Independent Media in Troy, New York: “Knopf –which, of...
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Dubious Math in the Case for Amazon’s ‘Evil’
In AlterNet‘s article “Is Amazon Evil?” (12/8/10)–reprinted from the Boston Review (11-12/10)–the description of the economics of e-books is seriously dubious. Reporter Onnesha Roychoudhuri writes: If...
View ArticleCBS News Still Covering for Ronald Reagan?
In his new book, Ron Reagan says he saw early signs of Alzheimer’s disease in his father, Ronald Reagan, while the late president was still in the White House. When he said as much on ABC‘s 20/20 last...
View ArticleWould the Bard Have Survived U.S. Copyright Law?
A New York Times op-ed today (2/15/11) by Scott Turow, Paul Aiken and James Shapiro (“Would the Bard Have Survived the Web?”) uses William Shakespeare as exhibit A in their case for copyright, noting...
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The One Graph That Explains Why Copyright Is Too Long
From Matthew Yglesias (3/30/12), one simple chart that illustrates why copyright terms are way, way, way too long for the good of the culture: Books published before 1923 are in the public domain; we...
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Are Apple and Publishers Helping Readers by Ripping Them Off?
The Justice Department alleges that Apple‘s collusion with book publishers to fix ebook prices has cost readers $100 million. So why are so many news reports on the anti-trust suit suggesting that the...
View ArticleTurning Down a Free Palace for Everyone Requires a Very Good Reason
Imagine an amazing new invention that allowed anyone to duplicate any existing building, using no resources. However, the law requires you to pay for such instant buildings, at about the price of...
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Smearing Gore Vidal, Then and Now
–A 1977 New York Times review (4/20/77) by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt of a collection of Vidal’s essays: Button from Vidal's unsuccessful 1960 run for Congress. So we are left to speculate over the...
View ArticleGore Vidal: FAIR Event, 1990
In the first few years of FAIR’s existence, Gore Vidal referred to us a “noble, doomed enterprise.” He meant that as a compliment, both to our work and to the immense task of challenging the myths and...
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Are Birmingham’s Books Right for Washington, D.C.?
(cc photo: J Brew) In recent years, as an observant patron of bookstores in the Washington, D.C., area, I’ve noticed an unusual selection bias at the Books-A-Million chain. Its bookshelves are not...
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White Man Publishes Book! USA Today Mistakes This for News
Our most finely tuned instruments were unable to detect even trace amounts of irony in this USA Today headline. A collection of short stories published by entertainment lawyer Kevin Morris makes the...
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