Russell Davies has a piece in the Guardian reacting to the Metro’s somewhat breathless denunciation of piracy as a “colossal threat” last week. The Metro piece frets that piracy could cost authors and publishers millions of pounds, and “be as devastating as illegal file-sharing was for the music industry.” (Because we all know how bereft and bankrupt the music industry now is, what with no new music being recorded anymore since Napster turned every recording artist out on the street to busk for a living. Alas, if only consumers had been willing to pay for digital music sold...

It seems that without exception, any time someone notices e-book piracy, it’s suddenly a huge problem, instead of having built over nearly twenty years during which most publishers and authors who were not Harlan Ellison did not find it worth their time to bother doing anything about. An article in the Guardian today is no exception. UK writers think that a new publicity campaign is needed to educate people on why “stealing” books is wrong. (Clearly they’ve observed the success that those obnoxious, patronizing PSAs Hollywood has tacked onto theatrical movies have had—because naturally the people who pay to see movies...

Is (news)print dying? It’s an interesting question, and the answer seems to depend on who you believe. On The Guardian, former editor Peter Preston writes that perhaps newspapers don’t have that much to fear from the Internet after all. But "in the UK at least, there is no such correlation", reports the number-crunching analyst Jim Chisholm. "This is true at both a micro-level in terms of UK newspaper titles and groups and at a macro-level comparing national internet adoption with circulation performance. Indeed, the opposite case could be argued: that newspapers that do well...

Since The Times’s website just went from registration-wall to full-fledged paywall, the articles about paywall journalism are coming out in force. Here is a trio of particularly interesting ones. On the “Strange Attractor” blog, Kevin Charman-Anderson goes into the economics of print versus web publication and advertising. He notes that printed papers cost a lot more than web publishing (pointing out the statistic that for the amount the New York Times spends on printing, it could send every subscriber two Kindles), but print advertising makes up 80% of most papers’ revenue. Charman-Anderson points out that online advertising...

From Resource Shelf. Worth reprinting in full: Earlier this week we posted about a “just announced” 10 year project from the British Library to digitize 40+ million newspaper pages. From the Official Announcement: Digitised material will include extensive coverage of local, regional and national press across three and a half centuries. It will focus on specific geographic areas, along with periods such as the census years between 1841 and 1911. Regarding copyright issues it goes on to say: Along with out-of-copyright material from the newspaper archive – defined in this context as pre-1900 newspaper material – the partnership will also seek to digitise a...