Blog

I am not a person who generally feels well-informed; for a year I called our Prime Minister Julia Jillard. So I’ve been reading a series of remedial primers, the Oxford Very Short Introduction.  >

Elsewhere
Fascinating look at the true origin of the AIDS virus >

Ad

< Back to Blog
0 Comments

Reading in an Age of Change essays now online

JA September 01

Our two Reading in an Age of Change essays are now available on our editions page, as well as the Meanland site, your longform reading leisure.

McKenzie Wark writes on publishing A Hacker’s Manifesto and the beginnings of a copygift economy:

I wrote a book once about intellectual property. Basically, I’m against it. As I wrote in this book, called ‘A Hacker Manifesto’: ‘Information wants to be free but is everywhere in chains.’ The digital—an age-old property of information—is an idea whose time has finally come. The relation between digitally encoded information and the material in which you find it—the page, the screen, the disc, the drive—is now perfectly arbitrary. Pretty much the same information could be on this page or that disc or that website. A weird ontological property of information, something in its very being, is now fully active in the world—and causing all kinds of trouble. Not least for authors. Not least for me.

Sherman Young explores how the book as a physical object enables control of the industry, and what ebooks mean for key stakeholders:

Books as physical objects are easily controlled—they need to be printed, sold and shipped. And the entire book industry is based on that premise of control, extracting revenue at key gateways. Replacing the physical object takes away the existing means to exercise that control, allowing disruptive new possibilities—and non-incumbent players are often better equipped to take advantage of those than traditional stakeholders. Resistance to the introduction of e-books is as much about the struggle for business survival as any romantic notions of ink and paper.


 

Our Friends


 

Only the comment field is required. Omitting the ID fields increases your risk of being mistaken for spam.