Digital Minds Network

In this article published in Counterpoint, Octavio Kulesz discusses the need to revisit traditional copyright:

EPISODE 1. ‘What is virtual can have real effects’. This was the conclusion drawn by the Argentinean Professor Horacio Potel in 2009 right after the trial against him had come to an end. What had happened? Since the early 2000s, he had been managing a few websites related to European philosophers where he included information about their lives and ideas, as well as PDF versions of their books. The problem was that some of those works, such as Jacques Derrida’s, were not in the public domain, which led the rights-owners to take legal action against his unauthorised copies. However, the public reaction to the process was immediate and overwhelming: thousands of students and researchers flooded online social networks to express their discontent, the general claim being that Potel’s sites were vital, since very few people could otherwise enjoy those expensive translations imported from Spain. Eventually, on 13 November 2009, the Argentinean justice decided that Potel’s actions did not justify penal prosecution and all charges were dropped.

Read the full article...

Electric Book Works provides a 25-page excerpt (about half) of the course notes for "Designing for digital: What print-book designers should know about ebooks", developed by Arthur Attwell. This course is for designers, editors and production managers in book-publishing companies.

Most publishers are looking to use their content in ebooks or on websites or cellphones, and the aim of this course is to help production teams understand how their work does and will increasingly affect the way books look when they're not just in print.

In investigating Arab publishing, we've been reminded of this valuable survey from 2007 published by Next Page. The survey's objectives here:

• to produce reliable and representative data on reading habits and reading attitudes in the Arab world;
• to gain an understanding of the current state of readership and to segment main groups of readership among the literate population;
• to gain an understanding of the primary, preferred and available mediums and channels for acquiring written information;
• to build the requisite infrastructure for future readership surveys.

The summary explains that:

The survey was implemented in two phases. The first phase covered Egypt, Lebanon, Tunisia, Morocco and Saudi Arabia and the second phases covered Algeria, Jordan, Palestine and Syria (9 countries total).

Read more about the survey here.

The NextPage Foundation with the aid of Synovate Marketing Research Firm did a study entitled, What Arabs Read: A Pan-Arab Survey on Readership. Phase one of the study which spanned five Arab nations was conducted in January 2007 and included results from Egypt, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia and Morocco. The results were illuminating and frightening as it showed what an Arab book market is really interested in, but also proved that readership is quite low in the region. The following is an anaylsis of part of NextPage’s findings, examining what I feel to be contributing issues to the lack of readership in the region, as well as some small steps we can take to better the overall situation.

Here is my essay in PDF.