Morning Coffee – 30 August 2019
Here are a few stories to read this Friday morning.
- One reason online media is dying is that the people with money think that makes them smarter than everyone else, and as a result they don’t listen to their employees.
- Macmillan CEO John Sargent stood in front of a group of librarians and repeated his claims about library ebooks affecting retail ebook sales. Unfortunately, he left the meeting unscathed.
- StoryAI is a writing bot that is so good it’s creepy.
- Canadian libraries are lobbying their government over the high cost and limited availability of digital content in libraries.
- Audible gave way on Audible Captions, and will disable the feature on some audiobooks when it launches in a couple weeks.
- The Internet Archive continues to spin its ongoing copyright infringement as "controlled digital lending".
Comments
Barry Marks August 30, 2019 um 2:23 pm
"The Internet Archive continues to spin its ongoing copyright infringement as "controlled digital lending"."
It’s perfectly valid to look at what Internet Archive is doing as copyright infringement but most people disagree. If I recall even the courts haven’t agreed with this yet. But you’re always referring to them in this way and to me it’s you who is doing the spinning.
It would seem to me that in a blog you would want to give your point of view but when you keep trying to push it as news, over and over and over, you cease to be convincing and it begins to come across as harping.
It is your blog and there’s no reason you can’t spin and harp if that’s what you want to do. If it was my blog and I believed what you believe, I’d present my arguments in an editorial and present news as news.
Barry
Darryl September 1, 2019 um 4:08 am
I too find your moralising on this one a little irksome. Controlled digital lending is a concept developed by lawyers and published openly for anyone to read, including Publishers. I too have my doubts about their argument. But they are carrying out their actions openly. If they are sued and the concept is found to be invalid, they will suffer the consequences.
Which would be a shame, because controlled digital lending is an example of what the copyright law should be if it implemented a fair and equitable balance of rights, as opposed to being the result of many years of ad hoc lobbying by "rights holders".
Erin September 11, 2019 um 11:04 am
I’m glad Audible is being agreeable about the concerns about the caption feature they are rolling out. They are conceding without legal battle with the Big 5, but for indies and small press publishers, it is still not good news.