News

Library of Congress Gets Digitization Grant

News

  The Library of Congress has received a $2-million grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to digitize public domain works. The grant emphasizes digitizing “at-risk” titles—or books that are falling apart—and volumes about American history. Dubbed “Digitizing American Imprints at the Library of Congress,” the project will also allow the LoC to invest in […]

Read the full article →

Teachers split over Shakespeare

News

Teachers have steered the Shakespeare curriculum for younger pupils in England away from Othello and Henry IV Part I in favour of lighter texts. After a poll, plays set for 13 and 14-year-olds in England could include Romeo and Juliet and As You Like It. Othello did not make the list because more than half […]

Read the full article →

Molly Ivins, Columnist, Dies at 62

News

Molly Ivins, the liberal newspaper columnist who delighted in skewering politicians and interpreting, and mocking, her Texas culture, died yesterday in Austin. She was 62. Ms. Ivins waged a public battle against breast cancer after her diagnosis in 1999. Betsy Moon, her personal assistant, confirmed her death last night. Ms. Ivins died at her home […]

Read the full article →

Rowling unveils last Potter date

News

The last instalment of the Harry Potter saga will be published on 21 July, author JK Rowling has announced. She confirmed the date fans will be able to get their hands on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows on her website. Rowling has said two characters die in the final book and fans are wondering […]

Read the full article →

Author Sidney Sheldon dies at 89

News

Sidney Sheldon, best-selling US author of Rage of Angels and The Other Side of Midnight, has died at the age of 89. He died of complications from pneumonia at a hospital near Palm Springs, California, his publicist said. Before turning to novels at the age of 50, Sheldon had a successful career writing Broadway plays […]

Read the full article →

In Memoriam: Allan Barnard

News

Former editor Allan Barnard, 89, died on January 22 in Forest Hills, N.Y. Barnard, who spent five decades in publishing, died from complications due to Parkinson’s disease. He spent the majority of his book publishing career at Bantam Books and Dell.   Barnard was also widely regarded as one of the industry’s pre-eminent paperback reprint […]

Read the full article →

Google’s Moon Shot: The quest for the universal library

News

Every weekday, a truck pulls up to the Cecil H. Green Library, on the campus of Stanford University, and collects at least a thousand books, which are taken to an undisclosed location and scanned, page by page, into an enormous database being created by Google. The company is also retrieving books from libraries at several […]

Read the full article →

Printing Press to Project Gutenberg

News

Most of you have heard of Johannes Gutenberg, the father of the modern printing and inventor of the movable type printing press which revolutionized the printing and dissemination of information. With Gutenberg’s invention, translations of Arabic, Persian and other texts from Asia were made available in major European languages. The world became smaller with the […]

Read the full article →

Hart’s Opinion on Copyright Law Rejection

News
Thumbnail image for Hart’s Opinion on Copyright Law Rejection

Some sad news to report: the 9th Circuit has rejected constitutional challenges to the copyright laws in *Kahle v. Gonzales*. The opinion is here. Sad, yes, but also positively maddening, for reasons I will explain shortly.First, a bit of background: Plaintiffs in this case — the Internet Archive and its Chairman, Brewster Kahle, and the […]

Read the full article →

Cuts threaten services at British Library

News

It is at the heart of Britain’s cultural, literary and political life. Each day writers, academics and researchers join those who have crossed the world to access the fruits of every publication produced in the UK and Ireland, from the humblest tome to the Magna Carta. But according to the British Library, government-imposed spending cuts […]

Read the full article →

Challenges to Copyright Law Rejected By 9th Circuit

News

Stanford Center for Internet and Society Kahle v. Gonzales – In this case, two archives ask the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California to hold that statutes that extended copyright terms unconditionally — the Copyright Renewal Act and the Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) — are unconstitutional under the Free Speech Clause […]

Read the full article →

← Previous Entries

Next Entries →