The author believes that publishers and authors will, in the digital age, benefit from freely sharing information, and that digital rights management (DRM) and other protection mechanisms are crazy. He has argued on behalf of libraries that ebooks and other digital content deserve the same First Sale rights that physical purchases have. But that…

This article presents an interview with Gigi Sohn, president and cofounder, as well as the strategist, fundraiser, and face, of the advocacy group Public Knowledge (PK). Since cofounding the organization in 2001, Sohn has fought alongside major library associations and their allies for the public's interest in the emerging digital world. Sohn is…

Since the early 1990s, Carl Malamud has made it his business to return to the public what is rightfully theirs: free access to public information. Despite legislation that mandates such access to government information, some categories of information have been excluded, notable among them court opinions (with the exception of the U.S. Supreme…

Just as the Internet is likely to be one of the most disruptive overall technologies of a man's lifetime, Google Books may become one of the most disruptive technologies for academic libraries. The immediate challenge is that Google Book's deeper indexing and more advanced relevancy ranking usually works better than that of local catalogs--and it…

This article presents an interview with Dan Clancy, engineering director for Google Book Search. In this interview, Clancy talks about the pending Google Book Search settlement, involving millions of volumes digitized from libraries, which drew a lawsuit from the Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild. He also discusses pricing,…

As waves of grim economic news wash over state and federal governments here and abroad, libraries of all types and sizes are bracing for budget cuts the likes of which have not been seen in three generations. Unlike most financial crises, this one is ubiquitous, with all but a handful of states in the red and getting redder. Globally, the meltdown…

Evidence for open access as an emergent, global state of mind is everywhere. The "New York Times" went "open" last September, and the "Wall Street Journal" is slated to follow. Increasingly, scholarly communities are breaking with tradition and calling for the open sharing of research, software, and data. Amongst these global initiatives is the…

A little over a year ago, press releases from the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Cornell University touted the release of new "jointly drafted" copyright guidelines to govern what has become a tense subject: the use of electronic course reserves, or e-reserves. Since the mid-1990s, e-reserves have offered libraries and academic…

Librarians face a dilemma when it comes to copyright. On the one hand, if content providers disappeared, libraries and their patrons would suffer. By doing their part to eliminate copyright violations, they help keep publishers in business. On the other hand, they understand that "information wants to be free." They resent license agreements that…

If the resort city of Anaheim, California, home of Disneyland and its "imagineers," marked a departure from the urban reality of the typical American Library Association (ALA) annual conference, it was impossible, at this 2008 meeting, to avoid urgent library issues. How do libraries maintain their value and cultural presence as users…

Institute for the Future of the Book, based in Brooklyn, aims to combine new ways of thinking with new media to forge a new path for expression. The institute, which was founded in 2004, is on its way to releasing the first version of Sophie, an "all-purpose tool" for creating multimedia texts. Like the institute itself, Sophie's mission…