It’s finally possible–although still hardly likely–to skip the traditional publishers altogether, publishing yourself (via Amazon, for example), and get discovered by fans directly.
books
Copyright and the public domain
Randy Picker has a fascinating post on the Faculty Blog of the University of Chicago’s law school of the copyright status of scans (by Google, for example) of public domain works. Does the effort of digitizing the work qualify as enough original effort to create a new copyright?
Are books — electronic or not — becoming "fringe media"?
Kevin Kelleher of GigaOM believes that “books are becoming a fringe media.” I say: true for non-fiction, not so much for fiction.
Prefaces, Prologues and Paratext
A preface or prologue is a sort of pretext to the writing that follows it; it sets up the reader, as it were, to encounter the text that it introduces. It attempts to mediate then, between the world of the … Continued