I draw your attention to this wonderfully unsentimental yet passionate defense of books by Toby Mundy. The publisher at Atlantic Books, Mundy offers his personal views on the devaluation of the medium for the thought-provoking site Medium.com. Specifically, of course, he draws our attention to Amazon and its Wal-Mart-like ability to muscle publishers (and by extension authors) into lowering prices toward ...
It’s a longstanding cliché we parents repeat that our kids can have more fun with a box than with the toy that comes in the box. It’s still true, and we still don’t trust our own wisdom in this regard because presenting a kid with an empty box for his birthday or some other occasion is a risky bet that ...
More than a decade ago, a book editor managing her own imprint at one of the big publishing houses gave me some insight into her world that I’ll never forget. “I have to publish about five diet books,” she told me, “in order to invest in one new novelist.” It’s important to understand that this is not a comment on ...
When it comes to new ideas about copyright, Derek Khanna is a very good looking person. In fact I’m reasonably sure this particular tweet was actually composed by his perfect hair. For the uninitiated, Khanna is the new poster boy for conservatives against artists’ rights, a career he effectively created for himself when he wrote a thoroughly uninformed memo for ...
This op-ed that appeared in yesterday’s New York Times is easily one of the best pieces I’ve read on both the cultural and financial dangers of forsaking copyright in the name of technological “progress.” The entire article is a pull-quote, but here are two that get right to the heart of the matter: “The value of copyrights is being quickly ...
