Raymond Carver signing books, New York City, 1988
Does an author have the right to prevent people from copying their book(s) for free? Should authors have this right? Does it matter?
Does Copyright Matter? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
The Internet Archive has partnered with BitTorrent to publish over 1,000,000 of its books, music and movies as legal torrents.
From the Internet Archive’s blog:
BitTorrent is the now fastest way to download items from the Archive, because the BitTorrent client downloads simultaneously from two different Archive servers located in two different datacenters, and from other Archive users who have downloaded these Torrents already. The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections.
Internet Archive adds 1,000,000 legal files to the world’s store of BitTorrents – Boing Boing.
Roxane Gay on writers of color:
We are many. We are everywhere. The world of letters is far more diverse than the publishing climate would lead us to believe. You only need to open your eyes and open your mind.
Did you know that Google Books, Web Archive and BBC are the three most commonly used sources on the English Wikipedia?
There is much to love about the Internet. But there is much, as well, to dislike — and/or to be annoyed by, and/or to resent, and/or to mistrust. In late June, the Q&A community Mancx decided to put numbers to those Internet-borne vexations. The firm conducted a survey of 1,900 American adults — adults who self-identified, it’s worth noting, as people who specifically search for information on the Internet. A group full of shoppers and cat-picture-seekers might have yielded different results.
Per Mancx’s numbers, however, the Internet as an information source leaves a lot to be desired. A whopping 98 percent of respondents don’t fully trust the information available on it. Which is a good thing, overall — skepticism! — except that 94 percent of respondents also noted the many negative effects that the Internet’s bad intel can have.
Everything Americans Dislike About the Internet, in One Chart – Megan Garber – The Atlantic.