Books

France: All your books belong to us

February 29, 2012

Last week France passed a law that permits the state to seize authors’ rights on books published before 2001. Scribes have just six months to opt-out, or lose their moral rights and the ability to determine a price for their work. It’s essentially a Compulsory Purchase Order for intellectual property – the author’s work is [...]

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Apple Poised to Benefit from U.S. Government’s Five-Year Push for Digital Textbooks

February 3, 2012

Source: MacRumors The Associated Press reports on a new initiative from the U.S. government to help push schools and textbook companies make the transition to digital textbooks over the next five years. With Apple pushing itself to the forefront of the digital textbook discussion with its iBooks Textbooks launchjust two weeks ago, the company stands [...]

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Shakespeare expelled from Tucson, Arizona schools

January 17, 2012

First schools try to let the colored and whites get their educatin’ together. Then they want to teach the “theory” of evolution. Sick of liberal institutions of learnin’? Move to Arizona, where the school board has voted to ban Shakespeare from classroom bookshelves. Bigwigs among the school board in Tucson, Arizona have released a list [...]

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CIA: Operation Ajax, the Interactive Graphic Novel by Cognito Comics, to be Made Into Animated Motion Picture by BoomGen Studios

January 12, 2012

The revolutionary iPad app, CIA: Operation Ajax will soon become an animated feature film as Cognito Comics announces a new partnership with BoomGen Studios to expand the property into multiple media platforms. Ajax has been turning heads since it was released almost a year ago, with the New York Times calling it “one of the [...]

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CIA Won’t Give Ex-Agent a Copy of the Book He Wrote Because It’s Classified

November 16, 2011

Former military intelligence officer Anthony Shaffer is suing the Pentagon and the CIA over their extraordinary attempts to censor Operation Dark Heart, the book he wrote recounting his days as a military spy in Afghanistan and elsewhere. One problem he’s run into: The government has the original unredacted manuscript he wrote. And it won’t give [...]

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Ranger’s widow tossed from Rumsfeld book signing

August 29, 2011

Two people were removed from a Donald Rumsfeld book signing Friday at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, including the Yelm widow of an Army Ranger who blames the military for her husband’s suicide. Security officers for the former secretary of defense escorted Ashley Joppa-Hagemann out by the arm, she said Saturday. She and Jorge Gonzalez, the executive [...]

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C.I.A. Demands Cuts in Book About 9/11 and Terror Fight

August 25, 2011

The agent, Ali H. Soufan, argues in the book that the C.I.A. missed a chance to derail the 2001 plot by withholding from the F.B.I. information about two future 9/11 hijackers living in San Diego, according to several people who have read the manuscript. And he gives a detailed, firsthand account of the C.I.A.’s move [...]

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Ikea founder Ingvar Kamprad’s Nazi ties

August 25, 2011

Author Elisabeth Asbrink says Mr Kamprad was an active recruiter for a Swedish Nazi group, and stayed close to sympathisers well after World War II. The details go beyond what Mr Kamprad has previously admitted. The Swedish billionaire has said his involvement was youthful “stupidity”, and the “greatest mistake” of his life. In her book, [...]

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Black Death study lets rats off the hook

August 17, 2011

Rats weren’t the carriers of the plague after all. A study by an archaeologist looking at the ravages of the Black Death in London, in late 1348 and 1349, has exonerated the most famous animal villains in history. “The evidence just isn’t there to support it,” said Barney Sloane, author of The Black Death in [...]

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Nazi war criminal Josef Mengele’s journals to be auctioned

July 19, 2011

The Connecticut-based Alexander Autographs said Thursday’s auction would include some 3,500 pages of “hidden journals” of the doctor at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. The items are expected to fetch between $300,000 and $400,000. The identity of the owner was not indicated. Alexander Autographs, which specialises in historical manuscripts, said the auction would include a “historically [...]

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William Burroughs publisher faces obscenity charges in Turkey

May 17, 2011

A winner of the International Publishers Association’s Freedom to Publish prize, Irfan Sanci has previously been sued under Article 226 of the Turkish penal code, for publishing books including Guillaume Apollinaire’s Adventures of the Young Don Juan, but was acquitted in December. He and his translator are now facing further obscenity charges for publishing 2,500 [...]

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William S. Burroughs On Trial for Corrupting Turkish Morals

April 27, 2011

William S. Burroughs died in 1997, but he’s still causing trouble. The Turkish Prime Minister’s Council for Protecting Minors from Explicit Publications has accused Burroughs of “incompliance with moral norms” and “hurting people’s moral feelings.” The Turkish translation of The Soft Machine came out in January, and the Prime Minister’s Council accused it of developing [...]

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Harry Potter books ‘unacceptable’ because they encourage magic

April 14, 2011

A Catholic diocese in Poland has warned that the Harry Potter books are unacceptable because they encourage “instructions to practise magic”. The letter from Gliwice diocese also warned that in the best-selling books the “dangerous world of magic is presented as good”, and preached about the dangers of Halloween and the ancient and pagan Polish  [...]

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