Tag Archives: books

AP reports: Canadian author Emily Somma has filed suit in San Francisco claiming the characters in “Peter Pan,” including Tinker Bell, Wendy and Captain Hook, are now in the public domain and no longer protected by a copyright awarded in 1929. The suit is a pre-emptive move in anticipation of …

Perhaps emboldened by the innocent verdict in the ElcomSoft trial, a programmer has made the code available to crack the Microsoft Reader: Frustrated by the tight security and lack of interoperability of Microsoft Reader eBooks, a programmer named Dan Jackson obtained the source code for a command-line program called Convert …

Publishers Weekly daily newsletter lists the consensus best books of 2002 based upon a survey of the Atlantic Monthly, the Boston Globe, the Chicago Tribune, the Christian Science Monitor, Entertainment Weekly, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and the Village Voice: Fiction: Atonement by Ian McEwan (Doubleday/Nan Talese, …

The title to J.L. Roberson’s benefit comics anthology, Working for the Man (Unbound, $9.95), recalls Roy Orbison’s classic song of working class resentment & ambition, but its purposes are considerably more altruistic. Collected to raise funds for a comic book creator who has recently fallen on dire times, the anthology …

Big day over here: Associated Press’ Anick Jesdanun has written a story on the DMCA exemption request process, including Blogcritics’ support role in the request put together by brilliant Lawmeme editor Ernest Miller. Deepest thanks again to Ernie for including us in his thinking and allowing us to take part …

News on Harry Potter number 5.

The note at the top of Hate Annual #3 (Fantagraphics) asserts that this latest entry from the mind & pen of Peter Bagge is the “Special Boring Mundane, Middle-Aged, Middle-Class Issue.” I’d take issue with the boring & mundane part, but the rest seems right on the money. Always neat …

We have been neglecting Book TV of late, the weekend mini-network on C-SPAN2 concentrating on serious nonfiction. This weekend’s feature is “24 Hours of History”: Join Book TV this weekend for 24 hours of History starting midnight on Saturday December 21st to midnight Sunday December 22nd. Authors will discuss the …

Despite the leanings of oil-slick Americans (including President Bush), the diplomatic bureaucracy, and their own ongoing PR campaign, Americans are finally starting to doubt the “friendliness” of our “allies” Saudi Arabia. Stephen Schwartz’s book, Two Faces of Islam: The House of Sa’ud from Tradition to Terror, points vehemently in that …

The DMCA is the center of a frenzy of activity: Yale’s Lawmeme, in conjunction with Blogcritics is presenting an exemption request from the DVD copy prohibition to the librarian of Congress today – more on that later. There was also a verdict in the ElcomSoft criminal copyright violation trial (also …