Last week News Review looked at how publishers are reacting to digitalisation. This week will concentrate on how it is affecting bookselling and the outlook for the future. Read more
Digitalisation has become such a huge issue in the book world that News Review will be investigating the latest developments over the next two weeks. First, what are publishers doing about it and how will this impact on writers? Read more
Publishers are beginning to take the initiative in the Google Print wars, perhaps not before time, as they suddenly find themselves confronted by a digital future which is not somewhere off in the future but very much in the here and now. The hard lesson the Napster free downloads taught the music business has not been lost on the big publishers. Read more
A summer promotion from Microsoft offers three free e-books a week for download using their Reader Software. The offer will run from July through to November and includes bestselling titles such as Bill Bryson's A Short History of Nearly Everything and Margaret Atwood's The Blind Assassin. Read more
'I did something which I haven't done before, which was really just play. I went into the British Library, looked at a whole load of books about subjects I was interested in, and just waited to see anything that jumped out at me.
Kate Thompson was horrified to discover that her book, The Sunday Times bestseller, A Mother's Promise, had been plagiarised and rewritten by AI - just days after publication. And then it happened again.
On Saturday, the Trump administration fired Shira Perlmutter, the register of copyrights and director of the U.S. Copyright OfficeThe US copyright office has information on its website about how to register and what advantages there are in doing so. www.copyright.gov/register/, just two days after the dismissal of Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden, under whose auspices the U.S. Copyright Office operates. Perlmutter was appointed by Hayden in 2020.
Protection of copyright has always been a top priority for the Association of American PublishersThe national trade association of the American book publishing industry; AAP has more than 300 members, including most of the major commercial publishers in the United States, as well as smaller and non-profit publishers, university presses and scholarly societies, and that point was driven home again during the organization's annual meeting held via Zoom on May 8. Read more
Mark Price has said he has been advised that there are "two grounds on which a legal case could realistically be pursued" against Meta in the UK for the company's use of pirated books to train artificial intelligence (AI) models. Read more
When readers first met her in The Golden Compass (first published in the U.K. in 1995 as Northern LightsHandy site which provides links to 7,500 US publishers' sites and online catalogues. www.lights.com/publisher/), Lyra Belacqua was a young orphan, hiding in a wardrobe at Oxford's Jordan College, spying on the scholars she lived among in a world with some parallels to our own. Read more