Meanwhile there are some new really interesting concepts in the ebook world, like free online reading coupled with new approaches to low-overhead publishing. See for example Libertary, www.libertary.com, some more varied and interesting books and less hype. Libertary's developing a low-overhead publishing model that uses free online reading to generate interest in books as well as a bit more highly featured free reading model. Or, if you have good Chinese, check out www.read-novel.com, probably the largest book site in the world. Or of course there's always Safari. And Boing Boing opened their own book site today. So there actually is some really interesting stuff going on in the free books field.

Hopefully the judge will do the sensible thing, which is to give Internet Archive or whoever else wants the right to publish orphans and pay royalties for it, the right to do so. The Fiction Circus blog posting is truly silly. The Author's Guild was not set up by Google, that's for sure. Google just wanted to index all the books and provide links to where you could buy them. The Author's Guild (a long standing and very backward looking organization) sued, claiming that indexing was a violation of copyright. In other words, it was an effort to prevent Google from making their books more accessible on the web. Now you have people like this Fiction Circus clown saying, Google should be able to sell orphan books in electronic form, because others aren't alos doing it. So, we're better off with no one republishing orphan works. Great logic! That is, if you're against people having access to books. I haven't heard that Google opposes anyone else doing this. But, you have to have a committed, well run organization to pull it off. Microsoft, for example, gave a try at offering a book search service, but gave up after scanning a few libraries, it was too hard and not enough short-term profit, apparently. Now we find "libertarians" saying, Google shouldn't do it either, because, well, nobody else is doing it, and, let's keep it that way!

I like the battlefield metaphor. Isn't it great to live in a country where some dumb woman gets fined $200,000 for downloading a few songs and lying about it, and our government can "rendition" an innocent man and send him to Syria to be tortured and our Supreme Court says he can't sue for even one penny because we have state secrets (i.e., stuff that our government does we can't know about), and a private soldier contracting with our government can get drunk and shoot dead the bodyguard of the VP if Iraq, and hasn't even faced charges 9 months later, and .... oh well. Glad to see we still have citizens on our juries who will stand up for the law, even if it means standing up to someone weak and powerless!