Most days, us Canadians get the e-book shaft. Barnes & Noble won't sell to us. Amazon will, but at higher prices and with less selection. We're the forgotten child of the e-book world—with the exception of January 1, aka New Year's Day, aka Public Domain Day, when countries that calculate the length of an author's copyright based on the year an artist dies get access to a whole bunch of new entrants. Here in Canada, a glorious (for now) life + 50 land, authors whose death occurred in 1963 are now part of the public domain. In Australia and other life...

When I was visiting relatives over the weekend, I had a fairly potent reminder of the enduring power of the public domain—and I finally succumbed to the inevitable realization, that in some cases, piracy is just too much work. On Saturday night of our stay, it turned out we didn’t have time to watch Marvel’s The Avengers as I’d hoped we could. So my sister-in-law instead introduced me to the first episode of an engrossing ABC television series called Once Upon a Time. The premise is that Snow White’s Wicked Queen worked a curse that trapped well-known fairy tale...

Foner Books’s blog reports that Amazon has lately reassigned new ASINs (Amazon Sales Identification Numbers) to thousands of free public domain e-books. This has the practical effect of orphaning them from their sales histories and reviews, and making thousands and thousands of web links to them no longer work. Amazon has also apparently changed the weighting of its “also bought” lists, so that paid public domain books show up with more prominence and frequency than free versions of the same books. It may not necessarily be all bad news, though. The relative absence of public domain titles...

On The New Republic, David Bell takes a five-page look at some of the implications e-books have for the future of libraries. In light of the New York Public Library’s ongoing plan to move many of its books away from its main branch into offsite storage with 24-hour advance request required, Bell wonders to what extent libraries really need to keep books around anymore, and what the changing role of the library might mean in years to come. One thing Bell points out is that millions of public-domain book titles are available through the auspices of organizations like Project...

Seen on BoingBoing the other day: an update on crowdfunding site Unglue.it, which has launched five campaigns to crowdfund the free Creative Commons release of specific books. The site has successfully released one book, receiving $7,578 from 259 supporters to “unglue” Oral Literature in Africa by Ruth Finnegan for a CC-BY release—meaning that people can make whatever use they want to of the work as long as they include attribution of who it was originally by. The BoingBoing post linked to the blog of Joseph Nassise, author of the book Riverwatch that was the subject of one of Unglue.it’s campaigns. On...

Here’s an amusing little blog post from the New York Times about reading and guilty pleasures. It seems to be saying that people feel guilty about reading modern (allegedly inferior) stuff they like instead of reading all those old hard-to-plow-through “classics” that (they feel) aren’t much fun to read. The article is kind of amusing because the way it starts, by questioning whether one genre can or should be considered inferior to another, you assume it’s going to say that modern stuff isn’t necessarily any worse than older stuff—then it takes a screeching 180-degree turn when it suggests that,...

On Techdirt, Mike Masnick calls attention to a Kickstarter project by self-publishing author Aaron Pogue, in which Pogue seeks to raise $30,000 to release the third book in his self-published trilogy into the public domain. (He’s already dedicated the first two to the public domain, though apparently hasn’t made them available legally for free download.) It’s part of a project called The Consortium, which aims to be a modern-day patronage system, allowing fans to pay authors a salary in return for those authors putting their works into the public domain. The Kickstarter has only raised $4,135 in pledges from...

By its very greatness (and excessive length), War and Peace has become a cliché for great literature. How many times have we heard someone say, “Well, it’s not exactly War and Peace, but…” in defense of some work of more recent literature they enjoy? Which is why it’s so amusing that the book has been bitten by one of those e-book transcription bugs that are more commonly associated with works from more recent times. A blogger named Philip reports on the Ocracoke Island Journal that, in a Barnes & Noble e-book version of the public-domain classic, every single instance...

Seth Godin has received an email from Amazon (and paidContent has picked up as news) that Amazon is cracking down on public-domain and “private label rights” e-books. The note states that Amazon will only allow sales of content freely available on the web by the actual copyright owner of that content. It specifically calls out permission-granted-to-redistribute stuff—i.e. private label rights—as the sort of things that will not be accepted. Amazon will accept public domain content, but may not sell a public domain book if “its content is undifferentiated or barely differentiated from one or more other books.” What I...

Publishing Perspectives has another of those guest-column-cum-self-promotional pieces it runs every so often, this one from Jonas Lennermo, creative director of Publit—the company who provides the e-commerce solution used by Harlequin Scandinavia, as well as several large and 200 small publishers in Scandinavia. Lennermo discusses the benefits of publishers selling their books D2C (Direct To Consumer), bringing up O’Reilly and McSweeney’s as examples. (But not Baen, for some reason. Everyone always seems to forget about Baen.) But while O’Reilly and McSweeney’s are publishers who know how to do D2C with smashing success, they also use proprietary, self-developed systems that...

I’ve mentioned a time or two the personalized Disney’s Jungle Book children’s book tie-in that my parents got for me one Christmas. Printed in a rough font that I retrospectively recognized as coming from a mainframe line printer, it would never pass muster in the print-on-demand world of today, though as I pointed out when I first mentioned it, there are print-on-demand operations that exist to do much the same thing today in more polished form. Well, lately I’ve heard (via Galleycat) about one that takes the cake for sheer chutzpah. Rather than producing original fiction with the names...

On TechCrunch, Chris Velazco has an interesting little post about iKamasutra, a Kama Sutra-based appbook that was pulled from Apple’s app store and Google Play for explicit material (which consisted of a few suggestive lines without much detail). From my vantage point, [app developer] NBITE has complied with everything that Apple has asked of them (and more). Brown hair? Fixed. Potentially suggestive gray lines? Gone. So what exactly is Apple’s problem with the app now? Well, when Apple finally responded to the Cesur and the NBITE team, it was to say that there were too...