Category: reviews

Free piracy today only

With a brilliant sense of the à propos, the University of Chicago Press has emailed me to say that they're making Adrian Johns's history of intellectual piracy (mentioned in my post on Saturday night and reviewed by me in The National (Abu Dhabi) last week) available today only as a free e-book download. If it's still February 1 when you're reading this, you can get a free electronic copy of Adrian Johns's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, by clicking here.

Update, Feb. 5: A reader alerts me that although Mr. Johns's Piracy is no longer available as a free e-book, his earlier work, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, also à propos, has been made available for free instead, at the same link. Not sure how long this will last, of course, . . .

Copywrongs

A printout, corrected in green ink, of Google's scan, partly obscured by the hand of Google's scanning technician, of an essay by Immanuel Kant on the injustice of counterfeiting books

“Terms of Infringement,” my review of Adrian Johns’s new history Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, appears in this weekend’s issue of The National (Abu Dhabi).

In the opening paragraph of my review, I refer to an essay by Immanuel Kant. Its title is “Of the Injustice of Counterfeiting Books,” and in Google Books, you can see a Google technician’s hand obscuring the text of it at the bottom of page 234. Above: My scan of a print-out, corrected by me in green ink, of Kant’s essay as scanned by Google, along the scanning technician’s hand.

Cockney Keats?

“Keats Speaks,” my essay about whether the real Keats spoke the way the one in the recent Jane Campion movie does, appears in the 1 November 2009 issue of the New York Times Magazine.

You can read the Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine article that accused Keats of “Cockney rhymes” here (though signed “Z.,” it was by John Gibson Lockhart, and it appeared in the August 1818 issue). Just as infamous was a similar attack in the Quarterly Review by John Wilson Croker (though the issue was dated April 1818, it actually appeared in September).