INSPIRATIONAL: Fess Parker, an American Icon

Friday, March 19, 2010

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/entertainment/8575904.stm

Page last updated at 09:41 GMT, Friday, 19 March 2010

Davy Crockett actor Fess Parker dies, aged 85

*** begin quote ***

Actor Fess Parker, famous for playing American pioneer Davy Crockett in Walt Disney’s classic 1950s TV series, has died in California at the age of 85.

*** end quote ***

An American icon.

A celebrity who was squeaky clean.

An example of the American hero.

Where are the replacements?

# # # # #

Leave a Comment » | INSPIRATIONAL | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj

POLITICAL: Copyrights for out-of-print books? No!

Friday, March 19, 2010

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/23683

Volume 57, Number 4 · March 11, 2010
Publishing: The Revolutionary Future
By Jason Epstein

*** begin quote ***

To offset the decline of backlist I launched in the mid-Eighties the Reader’s Catalog, an independent bookstore in catalog form from which readers could order 40,000 backlist titles by telephone. The Internet existed but had not yet been commercialized. The Reader’s Catalog was an instant success, confirming my belief in a strong worldwide market for backlist titles. But I had underestimated the cost of handling individual orders and concluded, with my backers, that if we continued our losses would become intolerable. The Internet was now available commercially. Amazon bravely took advantage of it and in the beginning suffered the losses that I feared. But by this time I had begun to hear of digitization and its buzzword, disintermediation, which meant that publishers could now look forward to marketing a practically limitless backlist without physical inventory, shipping expense, or unsold copies returned for credit. Customers would pay in advance for their purchases. This meant that even Amazon’s automated shipping facilities would eventually be bypassed by electronic inventory. This was twenty-five years ago. Today digitization is replacing physical publishing much as I had imagined it would.

*** end quote ***

As a society, we extend “copy right” protection to authors to ensure that ideas are available to benefit every one. When a book is “out of print”, then why do we give it “copy right protection” when we are denied access to the ideas. With the Internet and publish-on-demand, there is NO reason for a book to be “out of print”.

Time to reassess copyright laws.

# # # # #

Leave a Comment » | Political | Tagged: | Permalink
Posted by reinkefj