CBC: Google says it will volunteer its top execs to testify at parliamentary committee. “Google said it will volunteer some of its top executives to testify at a parliamentary committee that is studying the actions of the Silicon Valley giant after it ran a five-week test that blocked news links to some of its Canadian users.”
Prospect: Meet the archive moles. “Most of the time, my work feels more like that of a detective than an editor. Falling down endless online rabbit holes is an occupational hazard. I read old reviews in digitised newspaper archives, and trawl obituaries, looking for interesting titbits. Internet Archive—the non-profit digital library that houses millions of books—is an indispensable resource, not least because so many of the titles it holds can’t be easily found IRL. But none of this would work without access to various bricks-and-mortar collections, especially the London Library. You’ll find me in the stacks, rootling out books that—as revealed by the stampings inside—no one’s read since the 1980s, or earlier.”
Techdirt: ‘Publication Laundering’: How Publishers Happily Accept Fake And Nonsense Conference Papers In The Pursuit Of Profits. “Profit margins are extremely high for top publishers — typically 30-40%. And yet academics are routinely forbidden from sharing their own papers, because they are pressured to assign copyright in them to the publisher, which uses the control that affords to block wider access to knowledge. An eye-opening post by James Heathers on Medium reveals that the greed and rot in the world of academic publishing goes even deeper.”
Motherboard: Publishing Company Starts School Year by Removing Over 1,000 E-Textbooks. “Since late August, academic librarians in the U.S. and abroad have been scrambling to identify alternative textbook options for students and instructors after a major publishing company pulled a large amount of e-book and e-textbook titles from circulation.”
The Nation: You Can’t Buy These Books. “In reality, the publishers’ attack on the Internet Archive is a Trojan horse for a very different, and radical, idea: that e-books are fundamentally—legally—different from paper books. If accepted, their argument would remove e-books from the many statutory protections upon which library rights positively depend. That outcome would leave libraries vulnerable to the draconian licensing deals under which e-books are increasingly offered. And libraries would have to pay and pay, in the absence of digital books that can be permanently bought and owned outright.”
PublishersWeekly: Publishers, Internet Archive File Dueling Summary Judgment Motions in Scan Suit. “The battle lines have now been drawn in a potentially landmark lawsuit over the scanning and lending of books.”
Techdirt: Now That Rupert Murdoch Has Convinced Governments To Force Facebook To Pay For News, Facebook No Longer Wants Anything To Do With News. “This should surprise no one, but Joshua Benton, over at Nieman Lab, has a really fantastically well-reported article about how Facebook basically wants out of the news business entirely. It goes through multiple reasons why this is the case, but a big one is that Rupert Murdoch’s decade-long demands that Facebook and Google simply fork over some cash to news organizations (for sending them traffic) has finally had some modicum of success in Australia, and is now being considered elsewhere around the globe.”
Bleeping Computer: Macmillan shuts down systems after likely ransomware attack. “Publishing giant Macmillan was forced to shut down their network and offices while recovering from a security incident that appears to be a ransomware attack. The attack reportedly occurred over the weekend, on Saturday, June 25th, with the company shutting down all of their IT systems to prevent the spread of the attack.”
The Bookseller: Ukrainian children desperately need books – UK publishers, please help. “Sixty percent of Ukrainian refugees are children and more than 2.5 million Ukrainian children have been displaced within the country. Ukrainian refugee children are out of school and at high risk for abuse, developmental delay and psychosocial problems. Book reading and storytelling cannot solve these problems, but they can act as a mechanism to begin the healing process. Books are a source of information and democracy, and it is therefore in the interest of the global publishing industry to support Ukrainian publishers.”
Publishers Weekly: Efforts for Ukrainian Publishers, Refugee Children Expand. “In the months since Russia invaded Ukraine, the international publishing community has come together with a number of initiatives aimed at offering support to children’s authors, publishers, and aid organizations. Here, we continue to cover these ongoing efforts.”
ABC News (Australia): High Court asked to decide if search engine giant Google is a publisher of content. “Google and Melbourne lawyer George Defteros are set for a showdown in the High Court of Australia today over whether the search engine giant is classified as a publisher or not. Mr Defteros successfully sued Google in 2020 for $40,000, after it failed to take down a story he said had defamed him.”
Hürriyet Daily News: Google translation’ of book into Turkish sparks debate. “A veteran translator has stirred controversy among literature experts by announcing that he has translated a biography of Milan Kundera from French into Turkish although he is not a francophone. Osman Akınhay, co-founder of Istanbul-based publishing house Agora Kitaplığı, said in a tweet on April 27 that the book was ready to be published after eight months of ‘sentence-based work with the help of Google Translate,’ though admitting that he does not have full command of French.”
Washington Examiner: Meet the publisher bringing JRR Tolkien and military manuals to Ukraine’s readers. “[Oleh] Feschowetz did not enter the book industry to promote military expertise. He left a senior post in the philosophy department at the nearby Ivan Franko National University more than two decades ago on a ‘mission to return Ukraine to the Western civilization’ — a goal reflected in the selection of poetry, philosophy, and literature available in his catalog. And yet, the martial texts only sharpened the edge of the publisher’s broader efforts. ‘Because Russia always interpret[s] the culture just like a weapon,’ he said in another conversation. ‘We must do the same. Culture is a weapon.’”
Analytics India: Top preprint servers for publishing your AI research . “Preprint servers are open access online archives or repositories that contain research papers before their peer review and publication. Their main aim is to accelerate the dissemination process of research findings and enhance their visibility. As the peer review process takes time and there is a subsequent delay in publication, preprint servers are useful tools for researchers to post a full draft of their research papers and get immediate feedback from their colleagues. Let’s take a look at some of the most popular preprint servers in AI research.”
Poynter: He started an LGBTQ magazine during the pandemic. Here’s what he learned.. “Ten years have passed since the germ of the idea for a Florida-based LGBTQ publication first came to journalist John Sotomayor. And in 10 years, much has changed. To start an LGBTQ magazine based in Ocala, one of the last remaining pockets of old Florida, surrounded by unvarnished nature and nicknamed the “horse capital of the world,” was already an ambitious idea. But to start one at the beginning of a global pandemic? That was on an entirely different level.”
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