Over the last few days, I’ve done something I’ve always meant to get around to but hadn’t yet: worked my way through the entire canon of Sherlock Holmes stories via their posting on Google Books. (Except for the last story collection, of course, which is not yet in the public domain in the US.) After that, I happened onto an interesting Conan Doyle work called Through the Magic Door, in which the author looks at his own bookshelf and discusses each of the works that are dear to his own heart. The first few paragraphs of the book especially...

I mentioned Pride and Prejudice and Zombies a couple of years ago as a great argument for the usefulness of the public domain. Over on eBookNewser, Nate Hoffelder noticed that the e-book now has an interactive iPhone/iPad app available for $4.99 in the app store. While I’m a bit “iffy” on the utility of stand-alone appbooks, I have to admit that this one has some interesting features. Some of them, such as the “original music score” or “buckets of gory animation”, sound like needless gimmicks, but I am intrigued by the way the app incorporates both the “And Zombies”...

On Snarkmarket, Tim Carmody takes a look at the interesting case of why Project Gutenberg has two copies of Milton’s Paradise Lost that were produced within a few months of each other. Project Gutenberg EBook #20, October 1991, was hand-typed by volunteer Judy Boss (who subsequently got a scanner). However, Project Gutenberg EBook #26, from February 1992, was a revision of, literally, the oldest etext known to Project Gutenberg. It pre-dates Hart’s famous decision to type the Declaration of Independence by a good six years, dating back to 1964-1965 and originally rendered in all capital letters by Dr. Joseph...

More news out of the Supreme Court: today it considered a case in which copyright reformers want to remove thousands of works by foreign authors from the public domain in order to “harmonize” US copyright law with international copyright standards. Ars Technica claims the case rose from the ashes of Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which the court ruled that Congress was entitled to extend copyright because "when, as in this case, Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary." So copyright reformers looked for cases where Congress had changed those contours...

I’ve found a couple of more points of view on the HathiTrust lawsuit over the last couple of days, and given that they are diametrically opposed it seems like a good idea to present them together for contrast. First, SF and fantasy novelist Elizabeth Moon strongly opposes the use that the universities and HathiTrust are making of scanned works. Moon is up in arms over HathiTrust’s plans to allow unlimited free download of “orphaned” works from the trust (though she seems to be under the impression that it would allow download of all works, not just the orphaned ones)....

Here is the first ten minutes of the thirty-minute discussion I had with Michael Stackpole at GenCon last month. I will be posting the other two parts in days to come. Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar. In this first part of the interview, we largely discussed the early history of e-books and e-publishing, with a diversion into how...

At the Nieman Journalism Lab, Maria Popova writes about how the meaning of “rare” is changing in the digital age. The physical possession that is a work of art might be “rare”—but once it has been scanned or photographed, anyone can see it. (This put me in mind of the matter of a rediscovered lost work by Shelley that was purchased by a private collector and not released into the public domain.) She touches on an issue of motivation, as well: it’s human nature that if something is hard to obtain, it is going to be more attractive—but if...

On Techdirt, Nina Paley posts about a new site called Public Domain Review, that has started up to call people’s attention to some of the more obsure and unknown works available in the public domain. The site looks like an interesting way to find out more about free e-books, music, art, and so forth that might otherwise languish in total obscurity. Since the site accepts submissions, I have half a mind to write a piece about the Arsène Lupin novels of which I am so fond. Regardless, it’s an interesting reminder that the “Internet slushpile problem” is not...

We’ve carried posts before that posited that e-books had not yet reached the watershed moment where they became more than an attempt to reproduce one medium in another (the way that television was originally “radio with pictures”, for instance). At the moment, they’re just “printed books on digital screens.” And while that’s fine for the people who just want another way to read printed books, video game developer Simon Meek thinks that they’re still not reaching out to modern audiences. Meek has the idea of doing for the gaming generation what PBS used to do for the television generation:...

The Literary Platform has a look at a new publishing project called “Booksurfers”. Booksurfers e-books consist of classic, public-domain works (such as Treasure Island or The Wizard of Oz) paired and hypertextually interlinked with a newer work based on the older one. The article goes into further detail about the ways the narrative is interwoven, and how the publishing company behind it hopes that this will get kids more interested in reading the classics. But more interesting to me is the way that this shows, once again, that there is still current value in the public domain—even for...

On Monday July 4th, the World Public Library's annual World eBook Fair launches, which will combine works from Project Gutenberg, the Internet Archive, and other public collections to create a massive 6.5 million title catalog. The collection will include not just ebooks but other media like music and movies, as well as sheet music and dance choreography. EBookNewser points out that there don't seem to be any events scheduled during the fair to increase visibility, which seems too bad. At any rate it runs until August 4th....

Two e-books, priced $9.99 and $0.99, start two completely different purchase processes. The price level is affecting how eager we are to get a pirated copy. In case of e-books it’s combined with, in my opinion, the biggest solution to piracy – convenience. Digital goods (especially the ones under a magical level of 1 dollar) – music, e-books, applications – join a group of impulse purchase products. It’s not only because of a price. It’s because of possibility of immediate consumption. You can use a smartphone to download an e-book or a song. It usually...