So we are published: Copycats?

From the BBC's Rory Cellan-Jones.

Oh no: another boring report about piracy by a strange body with an obscure title.

That was my first reaction on getting hold of Copycats? Digital Consumers in the Online Age [2.76Mb PDF] - a report for the Strategic Advisory Board on Intellectual Property.

But when I read on, the report was full of fascinating insights into the way that we've all begun to think about the rights and wrongs of online piracy - or rather, "unauthorised downloading", which is how this report for the government carefully describes it.

I'll write more about the report, and what is means, later in the week. It's been instructive.

The scholarly community online by Harvard's Stephen Greenblatt

[Stephen] Greenblatt continued to say that last year Harvard passed a vote that faculty would be required if they wrote an article to allow access to a digital version for Harvard, so that all their scholarly work would be universally accessible digitally. "As a general principle, the idea that the work that we do should have value digitally and have universal access," is what Greenblatt says he had been calling for for years. In an article for the MLA, he said we must transform our understanding of what it means to appear on the web and how we can use that. We must make more broadly accessible our work. We must feel that work is significant; though the web must take into consideration the feeling of community that is subscription-based. You feel you are part of a community when you subscribe to a scholarly journal. But ultimately your work can reach a larger scholarly audience with the internet.

A great piece from the Future of the Book site.

Esthesis 4 - Kindle on fire?

Not an I-Pod, not yet.

It seems that Amazon.com’s Kindle is not the flop that many predicted when the e-book reader debuted last year. Citibank’s Mark Mahaney has just doubled his forecast of Kindle sales for the year to 380,000. He figures that Amazon’s sales of Kindle hardware and software will hit $1 billion by 2010.

NYT

"Turns out the Kindle is becoming the iPod of the book world," Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney wrote in a note to clients. He kept a "buy" rating on the share.

Reuters

My contrarian view is that just as most digital cameras are now smart phones, most ebook readers are also smart phones. People have been reading books on tiny screens since the days of the Psion and Compaq's iPaq, and it's common on Windows Mobile and similar phones.

So, while the Kindle might be Amazon's iPod, I reckon the iPhone is more likely to be Apple's Kindle - at least until e-newspapers take off.

The Guardian


Evaluating e-books nationwide - the JISC national e-books observatory project