After a small hiccup, our librarian friends should be able to find and order our new ebook THE TRIAL: The DOJ’s Suit to Block Penguin Random House’s Acquisition of Simon & Schuster from Overdrive for your permanent collections. And all of our readers can enjoy the long fall weekend with a copy: Would you rather spend the time reading the full testimony of Markus Dohle, Jonathan Karp, Michael Pietsch, Madeline McIntosh, or someone else? Or perhaps you’ll jump ahead to the appendix of over 100 pages of emails and internal data and documents entered in evidence? Get yours at the […]
Libraries
Buy or Borrow: The Trial, For Libraries
As promised last week, for our friends in the library community our landmark gigantic ebook on THE TRIAL: The DOJ’s Suit to Block Penguin Random House’s Acquisition of Simon & Schuster, is now available to libraries through OverDrive. The book should be of broad interest to authors, and of particular interest to academic libraries with courses and programs in publishing and writing. Meanwhile, the general ebook is widely available now: So far sales have been highest right from the shop at Publishers Marketplace (where you can choose an epub or a PDF, and send to Kindle if that’s your preferred reader), […]
School Library Book Ban Movement Pushes Librarians To Resign
The NYT looks at recent efforts to ban books from school libraries, with a focus on the effects felt by librarians. They catalog some of the most extreme cases, writing that librarians “have been labeled pedophiles on social media, called out by local politicians and reported to law enforcement officials.” Some have quit after experiencing online harassment and others have been fired for refusing to remove certain titles from circulation. The recent book banning movement, which began in Florida and Texas, has now “exploded across the country,” with calls for bans reaching New Jersey, and at least five states, including […]
OCLC Sues Clarivate for Stealing Library Catalog Records
OCLC has filed a lawsuit against Clarivate and its subsidiaries Clarivate Analytics, ProQuest and ExLibris for “tortious interference of contract, tortious interference of prospective business relationships, and conspiracy to do the same.” ExLibris is developing a collaborative cataloging system called MetaDoor, a competitor to WorldCat, OCLC’s collective catalog of library bibliographic content that is populated by library members who are contracted with OCLC. (OCLC says 8,000 libraries have WorldCat subscriptions.) The suit alleges that Clarivate has built MetaDoor with data from WorldCat, given to them by OCLC customers—a breach of those customers’ contract with OCLC. “In addition to tortiously interfering […]
School and Library Book Bans Go Digital, Restricting Entire Collections
At least three counties have removed access to e-reading apps used by schools and libraries in a continued effort to restrict children’s access to books, NBC News reports. In Tennessee, Texas, and Florida, a few parents have objected to digital reading platforms, including OverDrive and Epic, aiming to restrict access to books on gender, race, and LGBTQ+ themes. The apps became even more widely used due to the pandemic and virtual schooling. These bans affect all users, not just individual students, and all titles — removing access to entire digital collections of books for the sake of restricting a few, […]
Maryland Concedes They Are Regulating Where Congress Would Not Go
In a bizarre reply to the AAP’s request for a preliminary injunction, the state of Maryland both concedes and underscores that Congress specifically declined to create a first sale doctrine for digital goods, leaving it to the marketplace to adapt. Unhappy with that decision and its effect, Maryland has elected to regulate the marketplace for copyrighted goods, in conflict with Congress and the law. They justify that with the novel suggestion that once copyrighted goods are offered to the marketplace, they have magically “left the world of copyright” — except they haven’t — and “entered the marketplace for such transactions,” […]