Bloggasm

Since I wrote a detailed article on releasing your book for free online, I thought it would be appropriate to link to this Guardian article, opining at length about the differences between American and British copyright, and the merits of Google Book Search:

There are people who foresee a disaster for publishers and writers. Personally, I think that books are going to be OK, for one main reason: books are not only, or not primarily, the information they contain. A book is also an object, and a piece of technology; in fact, a book is an extraordinarily effective piece of technology, portable, durable, expensive to pirate but easy to use, not prone to losing all its data in crashes, and capable of taking an amazing variety of beautiful forms. Google Book Search is going to be a superb tool for accessing the information in books; but how much of Middlemarch or White Teeth or Tintin in Tibet is information? You can see in the Bodleian’s rich holdings of manuscripts and old books just how much of the cultural history of books, and their cultural importance, lies in their bookness. This will, I think, dilute the impact of digitisation for writers and publishers: even if you could rip an MP3 of Moby-Dick, who on earth would prefer it to a bound copy?

via ed

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