No, stupid, it's not friends...nor the Alaskan wilderness...not human capital...or even children...I'm here to chat about books. I don't know that I would qualify as a bibliophile or anything, but I'll readily admit to having gotten myself lost in a number of great books over my years (to check my favorites, head over to my other blog). And in the past few days I've run across a couple of links that caught my eye under the guise of stuff about books...
First, there's the news that Google has begun scanning copyright materials again even though five major publishers have filed lawsuits against them. Seems that Google is scanning in major works of copyright material in hopes of building a massive database of searchable text from lots of works of non- and fiction. The publishers are afraid, however, that if Google has entire works scanned in, that they will eventually be available online in some non-paid form, and it sounds like a reasonable suposition. As much as I'd like to be able to find the exact quote from any book I want and maybe read a bit of the context around it, I understand the desire for copyright holders (I'd like to think the original authors might have some say in the deal here) to control their works.
This whole thing runs into such shaky ground the just didn't exist before the internet/WWW. Throughout our media age, we've seen media become more and more accessable: printing presses, telegraph, telephone, lp's, cassettes, VHS, cd's, dvd, now nearly instantaneous electronic transfer of anything you can imagine. It's tough to restrict the flow of something that people so clearly want more and more access to, and once that access is granted, nearly any attempt to put it back into its bottle just seems foolish. If you're a copyright holder (company, author, publisher, record company) who isn't thinking three steps ahead of how your media is currently being published, you're way behind the times. Good luck...
Second, in a celebration of the old schools worlds, Time magazine has released its list of the 100 all-time novels in the English language. A number of them are ones I'm not familiar with (Midnight's Children, Atonement, Money and a number of others), but there are a bunch of books there that I've read with varrying levels of enjoyement (wonderful: Salughterhouse-Five, enjoying: Animal Farm, respected but hated: Grapes of Wrath, understood but never loved: To Kill a Mockingbird, and reviled: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe).
Time even put out a list of the ten greatest graphic novels - only three of which I've read. Apparently, I've got work to do...
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