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Michiko Kakutani Surveys the Cut and Paste Culture
In the three years that we've been blogging we've urged you to read books and articles that we thought interesting, but we've never presumed to order you to read something.
There's always a first time, and an article by Michiko Kakutani in the March 21, 2010 New York Times has inspired us to resort to the imperative case. Ms. Kakutani is the Pulitzer Prizewinning reviewer for the Times, a job she has performed with distinction for almost three decades, and in her penetrating essay Texts without Context she has captured our zeitgeist in a way that few other brief examinations of contemporary culture that we're aware of have done.
Our zeitgeist not a pretty sight. But if you want to understand who you are and where you fit into 21st century civilization, we herewith direct you to read and reflect on what Ms. Kakutani has to say.
Her ruminations take the form of an overview of books about the influence of the Web on art and entertainment. "These new books" she writes, "share a concern with how digital media are reshaping our political and social landscape, molding art and entertainment, even affecting the methodology of scholarship and research. They examine the consequences of the fragmentation of data that the Web produces, as news articles, novels and record albums are broken down into bits and bytes; the growing emphasis on immediacy and real-time responses; the rising tide of data and information that permeates our lives; and the emphasis that blogging and partisan political Web sites place on subjectivity."
We find ourselves on the horns of a dilemma. Ms. Kakutani's essay is about the transformation of our culture from an immersive one (like losing yourself in a good book) to a cut-and-paste one. If we extract some gems to tempt you to read her article, doesn't that make us guilty of the very sin of cutting and pasting that is the essence of what's gone wrong in our culture? But if we don't paste some gems from her essay, can we trust you to thoroughly read her argument?
Okay, we trust you. Immerse yourself in Texts Without Context and have your report on our desk first thing in the morning.
In his wrap-up remarks at February's Tools of Change conference, host Tim O'Reilly urged attendees to focus on "the boring stuff" that needs to be done to realize their vision of the future of the e-book industry.
I found this statement puzzling. Despite the widespread impression that e-book people are the jet-setters of the publishing business, the truth is that just about every step in the creation and publication of e-books is excruciatingly boring. In fact, e-book publishing may be described as long stretches of stupefying tedium punctuated by moments of numbing monotony.
Let me take you through a book's conversion so you will understand what I mean. I urge you to have a strong cup of coffee to stay awake. Bear in mind that though this abstract will take but a minute for you to read, the actual operation requires dozens of man-hours per title. I say "man-hours" but "troll-hours" is more apposite, as the people who do it work in Stygian gloom, eat living things and snarl when poked with a stick. Our staff posed for this group photo.Left to right: Richard, team captain Anthony Damasco, Nathan, John, Pam and Liced. (Not in picture: Michael, who left our company for a less boring job.)
A brief explanation is in order. Most books published by E-Reads are previously published works that went out of print and reverted to the author. In order to reissue them we scan the original printed volumes rather than use text documents furnished by the author, because the former have been copy-edited.
Scanning. The first task in the production of an e-book is scanning. The book's cover and binding are stripped to facilitate the feeding of pages into the optical reader, and headers and page numbers sliced off to reduce garbage in the scanned document. Even if high-speed scanners are used the process must be overseen by a human. Monitoring a scanner has the allure of watching someone rake seaweed.
Proofreading. However state-of-the-art the scanner may be, a digitized document will invariably have errors due to misreading by the camera. The word "in" for instance may be interpreted by the scanner as "m". Thus a proofreader must view and clean up the obvious glitches in the first-pass RTF (Rich Text Format) file created by the scanner. That process is called OCR - Optical Character Recognition. The RTF is then closely read and corrected by a proofreader who compares it word by word and line by line to the original published copy of the book. If you are ever given a choice between proofreading a text file and spending six months in a sensory deprivation chamber, take the chamber.
Final Review. The RTF - the basic building block of e-books - must then be reviewed page by page by a designer to make sure it reads seamlessly. "Once a book gets scanned," explains Nathan Fernald, E-Reads' production manager, "it tends to lose all of its formatting with the exception of single line breaks. And line breaks must be clearly delineated to prevent scene shifts within a chapter from running into each other. When we get a file back from scanning, I have to flip through the physical book page-by-page, comparing it with the file to see if there was any formatting lost such as centered text, indented text, extra line breaks, etc."
The staggering monotony of this process will explain why I granted Nathan one day off every week. He was beginning to exhibit classic symptoms of going postal.
Formatting. Once we have a clean, error-free RTF we format it for various e-book platforms plus print on demand. For print editions, cover art must be sized precisely to the trim of the book using charts comparable to those used to navigate the waters off the Cape of Good Hope.
As if these labors were not excruciatingly demanding enough, we must then create...
Metadata. Metadata is vital book-related information required by retailers. It includes cover image, ISBN number, BISAC code, language, territorial rights, suggested retail price, publication date, brief description and other details and data. Retailers provide pages and pages of metadata definitions, specs and tolerances, all in fine print. And each retailer has different requirements or a different order of the same requirements. You can read about it in detail in Mastering the Mysteries of Metadata, but - long story short - it is comparable in complexity to the instructions for applying for a Fulbright grant, except that you can get away with lying on a Fulbright application.
ISBN Management. ISBNs are unique identifying numbers used in the book industry. They identify not just a book but every edition of a book. Publishing companies purchase a block of ISBNs and, after assigning them to each edition of each book, register them with R.R. Bowker, the official ISBN agency in the United States. (You can read more in Learning to Love your ISBN Number.) Of all the lassitude-inducing tasks performed by our staff, none compares to selecting, assigning, maintaining and registering ISBN numbers. It is like sorting jelly beans by color, except that when you are finished you are obliged to ship the jelly beans to a facility where someone else will eat them. Tales of woe abound. For instance, just when we had become resigned to the Sisyphean labors of managing 10-digit ISBNs the gods imposed 13-digit ones on us. Then Amazon informed us that none of our ISBN's were suitable for the Kindle, and required us to produce unique Amazon identifier codes.
Royalty Management. Retailers furnish sales information in spreadsheets. In an ideal world the formats and information fields would be uniform. In reality royalty reporting is the Second Coming of the Tower of Babel. We have to reformat each and every retailer's report so that our accounting system can read and process it. Though it is universally agreed that ISBN numbers are the key to successful royalty report generation, our filters constantly catch busted numbers requiring hours of sleuthing to set right. We find rogue data in other columns, too. All it takes is one misplaced article - "The"at the beginning of a title instead of at the end, for instance - to send our royalty tracker into paroxysms of indignation followed by stern instructions to mercilessly hunt and correct the offensive mistake.
There is much more that I haven't reported, but I'm afraid it would make you suicidally depressed. I asked John Douglas, who manages our database, to tell us what is boring about his job. "I'm sorry, I don't have time to tell you," he replied. "I'm too busy doing a boring job."
In conclusion, Mr. O'Reilly, be careful what you wish for when you wish for boring stuff.
The most exciting thing about being in the e-book space is telling people that we are in the e-book space. Showing off a cool e-book to a civilian? That's exciting. But making the e-book you're showing off? I think I'd rather watch paint dry.
January '10 E-Book Sales Almost Quadruple January '09
If your head is still spinning after 2009's triple digit growth rate, you'll need a clamp to steady your skull when you read that January 2010 e-book sales posted a nearly 370% jump over the same month in 2009, according to the International Digital Publishing Forum and the Association of American Publishers. The numbers are $31,900,000 for January '10 compared to $8,800,000 for January '09. January was also the biggest e-sales month ever, and it wasn't even close. The biggest month to date was December '09 at $19,100,000.
IDPF reminds us that:
* This data represents United States revenues only * This data represents only trade e-book sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts. * This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers * This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales * The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers * The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is "All books delivered electronically over the Internet or to hand-held reading devices"
The graph at at the top of the page shows sales through '09 but do not reflect January 2010.
Cory Doctorow Discovers Why Publishers Get 90% and Authors 10%
When Cory Doctorow launched his Publishers Weekly column a few months ago, we wondered what publishers could learn from him as he chronicles his efforts to self-publish a book. Our conclusion? Everything.
However, his latest article suggests that there's something that he can learn from publishers. It's that publishing is an exceedingly complex communal enterprise, one that relies on a surprisingly fragile network of interdependencies. As in the famous proverb about losing a war for want of a horseshoe nail, the difference between success and failure of a book may have to do with extraneous factors such as the cost of gasoline or a strike at a paper mill. Some of those factors may seem preposterous, but preposterous or not they can render us totally helpless when they bring the progress of an enterprise to a dead halt.
That seems to be the bitter lesson Doctorow is learning, a lesson that anyone with more than half an hour of experience in the publishing industry knows all too well. An example is typesetting, and Doctorow's frustration with a delay has him talking to himself. "I completely failed to note that any delays in the typesetting would grind the whole process to a halt. No galleys, no proofs of the printing process, no chances to experiment with the small-scale printing, not until the book is in a print-ready form. Let that be a lesson to you, Doctorow: job one is typesetting, period."
"All these logistics remind me of why I'm a sole-proprietor freelancer," he concludes. "I hate managing people. I hate critical paths and project management. And I suck at it. None of this is a surprise. I knew that these details would be the hardest part of the self-publishing job, and it's been made harder because pretty much everyone is working for free or cheap as a favor, so I can't call them up and demand results."
Here's the thing. Managing people, critical paths, project management are what publishers do. They do it every day, and most of the time they do it very well. But, unlike Doctorow, they seldom get people to work free or cheap as a favor. They have to pay salaries and rent and warehousing and printing and shipping as well as advances and royalties. Which is why, as we stated in our title, publishers get 90% and authors get 10%, and they're entitled to it.
Yes, there is an alternative - do what Cory Doctorow is doing. But hopefully he has gained some respect for how the other half lives. "Hell," said Jean-Paul Sartre, "is other people." But other people do occasionally serve a useful purpose, and publishing books is one of them.
File-Share This. Court Judgment Costs Music Downloader $675,000. Book Pirates Next?
One of the most Draconian suggestions for combating book piracy is to go after the people who download books from file-sharing sites. So far print and e-book publishers have refrained from doing so, mostly because it is bad public relations to sue customers. The music industry had no such scruples when, earlier in the decade, it went after music downloaders, taking some 30,000 of them to court. You have to be in extremis to do that. The music industry was in extremis.
Just about all of the cases except one were settled. (See Can You be Sued for Downloading a Book?) The one holdout was a fellow named Joel Tenenbaum, who opted not to accept a cheap settlement offer back in 2003, when he was accused of willfully infringing 30 songs by downloading and distributing them on fileshare website KaZaA. Last July a federal jury in Boston ordered him to pay $675,000 to various record companies - that's $22,500 per song.
"I'm thankful that it wasn't much bigger, that it wasn't millions," he said after the verdict. Well yes, but given that the average settlement was between $3,000 - $12,000, his statement was undoubtedly uttered through a clenched jaw and a stiff upper lip. His attorney says the penalty will bankrupt him.
The trial was a slam-dunk for the music industry. "Plaintiffs built their case with forensic evidence collected by MediaSentry, which showed that he was sharing over 800 songs from his computer on August 10, 2004," Sheffner says. "A subsequent examination of his computer showed that Tenenbaum had used a variety of different peer-to-peer programs, from Napster to KaZaA to AudioGalaxy to iMesh, to obtain music for free, starting in 1999. And he continued to infringe, even after his father warned him in 2002 that he would get sued, even after he received a harshly-worded letter from the plaintiffs’ law firm in 2005, even after he was sued in 2007, and all the way through part of 2008."
It's hard to quantify the effects on would-be file-sharers of the suits brought by the Recording Industry Association of America, but it's safe to assume that the same peer-to-peer network that shared music shared news of the lawsuits as well, and downloaders sought easier pickings.
Like e-books.
The effect on music uploaders, at least KaZaA, was dramatic. Under tremendous legal pressure, the company changed its name to Kazaa and went straight. If you visit their website you'll see a banner proclaiming "Kazaa is 100% legal and supported by" such record labels as Atlantic, Warner, Sony, EMI and Atlantic.
If book publishers were willing to drop their misgivings about public relations, you might one day see a similar banner hoisted by a book pirate listing Random House, Simon & Schuster, Macmillan, Hachette, Penguin and HarperCollins as supporters.
Okay, hotshot, so you want to be an e-book publisher? Piece of cake. All you have to do is provide your retailers with the following information about your books:
eISBN
Title
Contributors
Description
Publisher
Language
Territorial Rights with Country Code
Suggested Retail Price with country code
Publication Date
BISAC Code
Collectively, this information is known as Metadata, and unless you provide it for every title and in a format that is usable by retailers, the stores will not carry your e-books. And every retailer has its own format requirements.
Take the simple matter of book titles. What is your retailer's protocol for designating them? Do they prefer "The Grapes of Wrath" Or "Grapes of Wrath, The"? And how about the byline? "John Steinbeck"? Or "Steinbeck, John"?
Or take suggested retail price. Which currency are we talking about? US dollars? Canadian dollars? Australian dollars? British Pounds? And do you know the Country Code associated with the currency?
Then there's the matter of territorial rights. There's a code for every country in which you have the right to sell your books. Do you know the country code for Lesotho? Cameroon? Mozambique? How about the USA? Canada? You'll need a 13-digit eISBN for each and every e-book. Do you have them? Know where to get them? Are they free or do you have to buy them?
And of course you'll need BISAC codes, the numbered subject headings organized to help retailers display books by topic. Are you publishing a fantasy? What kind of fantasy? Contemporary (FIC009010)? Historical (FIC009030)? Paranormal (FIC009050)? (You can read all about BISAC Codes here.)
What about your covers? What's the retailer's convention for image files, .png or .jpg? What's the minimum pixels per square inch? Minimum width in pixels?
There's lots more -- pages and pages of definitions, specs and tolerances in fine print provided by each retailer.
Still think any bozo can become an e-publisher? Do your Metadata homework and get back to me.
What Publishers Can Learn From Cablevision-ABC Feud
When the publishers of #1 bestselling hardcover Game Change windowed the e-book edition rather than issue it simultaneously, Kindle owners protested by deliberately downgrading the book in their Amazon reviews. Their action, which fell somewhere between populist revolt and temper tantrum, elicited an editorial by Publishers Lunch's Michael Cader urging publishers to do a better job educating the public. "Publishing people who care about these pricing discussions need to get in the online forums and start issuing press releases and find other ways to address readers honestly about price," he said. We agreed with him.
We've changed our minds.
What made us change our minds was the confrontation between Cablevision and ABC over how much the cable provider should pay ABC to carry its programs. Held as hostage was the Academy Awards, one of the most watched shows on the annual television calendar.
The reaction of subscribers was identical to that of Kindle owners deprived of Game Change. They didn't understand the issues, nor did they give a damn who was in the wrong. They wanted their Academy Awards, and they wanted them now. Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Commerce Subcommittee on Communications, Technology, and the Internet, said this about the blackout: "When pulling a signal becomes the nuclear option in negotiation, it inflicts collateral damage on consumers who pay their bills and have done nothing wrong. Someone needs to be speaking up for them in this dispute and those like them, and make no mistake, this is the latest example of consumers getting caught in the middle because the high stakes incentives created in these negotiations are not working for the average customer who just expects their programming to be there when they want it."
Fortunately for the average customer, the dispute was settled in time. (Actually about 18 minutes late, occasioning the wry observation by New York Magazine's blogger that subscribers blessedly missed the egg laid by co-hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin.)
The moral of Cablevision vs. ABC as far as the publishing industry is concerned is that consumers have no patience for such arcane issues as windowing, loss leader pricing or agency business models. They expect their book when they hit Download and they want it at a reasonable price. Educational initiatives are a waste of time. We need to get our pricing act together. Though there is no Academy Awards show to bring us to the brink of catastrophe, the e-book industry will not realize its full potential until we provide our products reliably and at prices that make sense to customers.
John Sargent, admiral of the Macmillan fleet, has charted the course of his company to meet the challenges of modern publishing, traditional and digital. In a memo to Macmillan authors, their agents, and readers, Sargent spelled out a host of initiatives and policies. "It has become clear to me," he says, "that there is far too little accurate information available in this time of unprecedented change. The issues we all face together are complex, and no news story or 140-character snippet can adequately address them."
Some of the content of his message had been explicitly announced in the last turbulent months, other policies are fully articulated for the first time. You may read the announcement in its entirety here, but in essence:
Starting at the end of March, we will move from the “retail model” of selling e-books (publishers sell to retailers, who then sell to readers at a price that the retailer determines) to the “agency model” (publishers set the price, and retailers take a commission on the sale to readers). We will make this change with all our e-book retailers simultaneously.
All the new adult trade books for which we have the rights to publish in e-book format will be available at the first release of the printed book. We will no longer delay the publication of e-books (read: no windowing).
We will price our e-books at a wide variety of prices. In the ink-on-paper world we publish new books in different formats (hardcover, trade paperback, and mass market paperback) at prices that generally range from $35.00 to $5.99. In the digital world we will price each book individually as we do today. Generally e-book editions of hardcover new releases will be priced between $14.99 and $12.99; a few books will be priced higher and lower. This is a tremendous discount from the price of the printed hardcover books, which generally range from $28.00 to $24.00. E-book editions of New York Times hardcover bestsellers will be priced at $12.99 or lower while they are on the printed list. E-book editions of paperback new releases will be generally priced between $9.99 and $6.99.
For physical books, the majority of new release hardcovers are published in cheaper paperback versions over time. We will mirror this price reduction in the digital world.
There has been a lot of concern from e-book readers that $9.99 books will no longer be available. Most Macmillan e-books will still be priced below ten dollars.
Sargent says he has not addressed illustrated books or books for young children, nor the long-term or author royalty consequences of the change. He will save those and other topics for future posts. But he does state categorically that "these changes will apply to every e-book retailer with whom we do business."
"I've been robbed!" is a cry heard with growing frequency as authors discover that their books are being sold or given away on any one of countless pirate websites. To make things worse, these pirates work in the open, flagrantly touting their wares and thumbing their nose at legitimate copyright owners and their legal representatives.
Many of the perpetrators operate far beyond the reach of any laws and understand too well that few copyright owners are willing to spend time or money to bring them to justice. Stephen King stated it as well as anyone: “The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,” he said in an email reported on Teleread. “And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.” (It's a wonderful image but not necessarily an accurate one, as we recently reported).
Although piracy is rampant, victims are not completely without recourse. Every major legitimate Internet service provider has a procedure for reporting incidents of piracy perpetrated on their sites and redressing offenses. Reputable ISPs fear liability if they enable infringements. Using threats of terminating service, they will pressure culprits to take down illegal material - at least, when they know about it. All too often, however, they do not know they are hosting an infringement until the infringee brings it to their attention.
You would think that as soon as that happens the ISP would hasten to yank the pirated material off its website. But, as those who have complained to their carriers have discovered, it's not that easy, because the service provider has no way of knowing whether or not the complaint is valid. You have to prove that you are the true copyright owner and have a valid claim of infringement. The victim, in other words, has to demonstrate that he or she is in truth the victim. Here is where injury is compounded by insult.
Anyone who's ever been abused and then told that he or she was "asking for it" will appreciate how offensive it is for an author to be asked to provide proof of authorship. But if we put our lawyer hat on we will realize that it's necessary. Those who review claims have no way of distinguishing the robber from the robbed without some ID and documentation. Thus, when you click on a website's "takedown" link to request removal of your stolen book, try to keep your cool when you are informed that "Under Section 512(f) of the DMCA, any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity is infringing may be subject to liability."
We recently had reason to ask Scribd to remove a work by our client that had been posted on its site by a third party. We were furnished with a link to its takedown procedure such as this one. It took us only a few minutes to fill out and within 24 hours our request was heeded and the file removed. I am told that Scribd has been cooperative about such complaints. Once it receives and investigates one and confirms that an infringement has occurred, Scribd creates a file documenting the true copyright owner so that future attempts at illegal uploads will be flagged if not summarily rejected.
That's one win for the good guys. Unfortunately, the score is Bad Guys 1000- Good Guys 1. What it will take to level the playing field?
After reporting on a remarkable dialogue between blogger C. Max Magee and a book pirate we received a comment from a person named jap [sic] claiming to be a pirate too.
His posting elicited a host of comments from readers ranging from vituperative ("Pirate is too sexy a term. What you are is a petty thief") to respectful ("You have me intrigued, Jap. I would suggest you are not a typical pirate...") to grudging agreement ("In a world without pirating, a majority of people would just not buy the book. So yeah, I definitely think the impact is overrated (or over-agonized about.")
From his cover of anonymity jap responded to many of these comments and amplified on his original contention that "You have your morality and I have mine." Though we deplore piracy and are reluctant to offer a forum for its practitioners, we happen to think that it's sometimes better to listen to our adversaries than ignore them, however diabolical their reasoning may seem. This is especially true when they offer cogent suggestions about where we should be focusing our efforts to deal with piracy.
I invited "jap" to write an article for us but he declined. However, in the hopes that we can benefit from his observations, below are a few that we have gleaned from his communications. We will do our best to accept his airy reassurance: "Don't worry: the book business is not in danger."
Richard Curtis ********************************** *You have your morality and I have mine. It is perfectly okay for me to download books (or movies btw). It was also okay to copy or print books for everybody before 1710 (when the first copyright law was passed), or buying that "unauthorized by author" book...
*Probably you are thinking just now "but it is unlawful!!" Is it necessary to explain that law and moral[ity] are not the same thing?
*Morality aside, it is probably of your interest to know that we the ebook pirates do buy books. I understand you are worried for your business but don't worry: the book business is not in danger.
*I have never read most of the books I have downloaded. One of the downloads was a file containing several thousands of books. I have also bought several of the books I previously downloaded and read. Other books I did read I would never buy them. There are also books that I did read and I will buy as soon as I find them in a bookstore. I have also bought books that I know are easy to find and download. In fact buying books is a great pleasure for me.
*Why do many people pirate? I think the answer is different for each person. In my case, I think and I feel that that Internet is a great tool to get books, tons of books. It is the greatest library and the greatest bookstore at same time.
*DRM is a Bad Idea. It decreases sales, and believe me, it has never stopped pirates.
*There is a difference between stealing and downloading. If I steal a printed book at Best Buy, Best Buy becomes poorer. If I download a Dan Brown's book, Dan Brown does not become poorer.
*Part of my money went to Dan Brown's pockets. If you are interested in business, instead of your morality, the question is why many people go to library, and download books AND buy books. For centuries books have been bought by the very same people that go to libraries.
*I am a typical pirate. Most pirates never upload works, neither sell them, just download. Also most pirates buy content in a way or other. I for instance download movies but go to movie theatres. In fact many pirates are high spending people. And many music pirates are buying CDs, the real problem of CD market is that CD is becoming obsolete. Digital sales (iTunes and alikes) are speedily increasing. Hulu is not yet available in my country but I am willing to try it as soon as possible,
*Do you really think a guy who is scanning a book and uploading it is trying to avoid buying it at Fictionwise? That's nonsense.
*How is not paying for a book in a library wrong? How is downloading for free a 1922 book (public domain) right but a 1923 book wrong?
*Until 1978 copyright term was a maximum of 56 years since the work was first published. Nowadays is 70 years since author's death. If I download a 1950 book, is that wrong or right?
*The above terms are for United States. If I live in a country where a 1989 book is in public domain, is it wrong to download it?
*Morality? Copyright is (sometimes) useful, not moral.
*Btw I prefer to buy O'Reilly ebooks, they are not DRM'd.
*It is not possible to protect copyright. You can fight for-profit piracy because you can always follow the money and because any seller (lawful or not) needs to offer his product to public. You cannot successfully fight not-for-profit piracy because it is possible to do it so privately as desired. 10 years of RIAA prosecution did get nothing.
*However may be I can be useful for your business. I am not just a pirate, I am also a customer. Sometimes I pirate books, sometimes I buy them. Obviously, if you get to maximize the times I buy then you are increasing your sales.
*As I said DRM is a Bad Idea. When people buy ebooks, they want to do things like read that book on any present and future device. So many people break the DRM (it is easy) but breaking the DRM is unlawful, so your customers have paid to be outlaws. This is not the kind of thing that discourage piracy.
*Everytime I have bought a DRMed book I broke the DRM for the above reason and I did feel fooled because I paid but I was out of law. Just imagine which is the effect on your law abiding customers. They get a product that is worse than what I get when I pirate. Do you want to reduce piracy? Sell your books sans DRM.
*My best hint for you: don't obsess with piracy, focus on selling.
*How did I read this article? It is not because it is an article about piracy, but because it is an article of this blog, and I usually read this blog because it is a good blog about the book world.
In the three years that we've been blogging we've urged you to read books and articles that we thought interesting, but we've never presumed to order you to read something.
