Literary Podcasts

With my week off from the literary life to focus on preparation for the Bazaar Bizarre, we spent quite some time listening to podcasts. Primarily we listened to geeky podcasts from Boston and podcasts from former Tech TV hosts. (Not to say Leo Laporte isn't still on G4.)

So imagine my surprise to find this list of literary podcasts from Ed Champion.

I think I'll add some of these to my downloads and listen to them on Monday as I trudge to my cave of 10,000 e-mail messages.

More on Google Print- Salon and the EFF

Here are a few more articles to add to the ever growing, but nowhere near comprehensive collection on the rise of Google Print, Amazon, Internet Archive's funding from Yahoo and MSN and Random House's Press Release.

First off, this older link with several different views on Google Print.

Then there's Random House's announcement on how they will handle these new services. They seem to be going the digital permissions route rather than the more common electronic right or electronic distribution designation. (PDF warning)

Let's see what else I missed while catching up from Frankfurt and going on vacation. . . .

There's Amazon's announcement (finally) on a pay per page electronic view of books.

Then there's this story from Salon that takes a look at the argument.

And finally there's this announcement from boingboing on a forum at the New York Public Library -THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS.

So between Amazon, Random House and Google Print we have 3 different ways to monetize (in a manner of speaking) page hits of actual books.

We also see lawsuits a-plenty for Google Print.

Real quick thoughts on the subject-

What about song lyrics and poems? Both separate and used within books that Amazon is scanning. Fair use on poems and songs doesn't really exist.

So Google is now becoming a content provider? No longer content to just point you to a site, they're actually scanning and providing content under the Google domain. Does this change any understanding of fair use?

There's gonna be a lot more in the coming days as more publisher's start to freak out and write rules for services that have yet to be actualized and used by people. Can you imagine what it would be like once these services are actually at a level where people can use them? Yeah, cue the crickets for a while.

Digitizing books and (not) taking names

While I've been spending countless hours in an attempt at creating a policy on electronic uses of books (or at least some kind of map for the real policy makers to use), booksquare.com has been kicking ass in keeping up-to-date on the daily (sometimes hourly) announcements in publishing as well as the other copyright issues that are happening outside of publishing. All the entries from November 3 to November 11 are pitch-perfect in their covering of Microsoft, Open Library, Amazon, and the orphaned works.