Bookbinding Kits 

Order a Bookbinding Kit and support the University of Iowa Center for the Book

In the public domain 

Lessig on the Future of the Public Domain interview by Richard Koman

Shall we have a public domain, or not? Will creative works remain forever in the possession of their creators (or the companies who pay the creators), or will cultural icons and works that have captured the public imagination eventually be allowed to be commented on, referred to, and satirized? Would such a policy represent lethal blows to a company's brand identity (think Mickey Mouse)? We may know the answer soon, as the Supreme Court has agreed to consider the case of Eric Eldred.

Eldred, a publisher of public domain works in HTML form, sued the federal government over Congress' passing of a law that extended existing copyrights for another 20 years (the 11th time in the past 40 years this has happened). The Constitution plainly allows Congress to grant authors an exclusive right "for limited times." If Congress is allowed to continually extend the time period, Eldred argued, the Framers' intent of "limited" protection is slowly being transformed to "unlimited." [read more]

More on Lawrence Lessig here.

Where do you buy your books? 

Fighting the Big Book Chains by Dennis Loy Johnson

To most people, it must seem like a no-brainer: Which is better, an independent bookstore or a chain bookstore? Whichever one has the book you want at the lowest price, natch. And let's face facts -- lately, the winner of that contest has been the chains.

However a surprising recent survey says that regardless of price, people actually feel they're more apt to be satisfied shopping at an independent. Meanwhile, the rabble-rousing plaintiff in an incendiary court case claims the chains' low prices are illusionary, achieved by illegal strong-arm tactics, and may actually be insuring higher prices down the line. [read more]

Preservation initiative 

An Open Letter to the Hennepin County Board of Commissioners and Hennepin County Library Board

March 28, 2002

We, the undersigned library workers and users, wish to express our anger, sorrow and dismay at the recent announcement that HCL intends to demolish its present bibliographic database and authority file. It plans on ultimately replacing them with completely "standard" OCLC catalog records and Library of Congress name and subject forms. The database and authority list, painstakingly and creatively constructed over nearly three decades under the leadership of former Technical Services Director Mitch Freedman and head Cataloger Sanford Berman, are national treasures. Rather than destroy them, HCL should be promoting them as OCLC promised to do in spring 1999. The reasons for undoing this globally applauded work seem specious, narrow-minded, and unconvincing.

If the decision cannot be overturned and the HCL catalog restored to its previous status of preeminence within librarianship, at least the two files should be preserved "as is" for current and future use by the library community. We expect details on how and when this will be done.

Steve Fesenmaier

Preservation Challenge 

The Wayback Machine: The Web's Archive

Now that the Internet is established in the public information space, it has become a new publishing medium. The Web in particular has proved an incredible repository of all kinds of information content. But it has also proven to be a very changeable medium, noticeably lacking in permanence. Particularly during the past couple of years, as the number of new dot com failures has risen, previously existing Web sites have ceased operations and their information content has vanished into the Web's past.

With print publications, the libraries and archives of the world have made a major effort to collect and preserve print items. But the advent of the Web was so sudden and created an entirely new set of problems for cataloging, storage, and retrieval, that few libraries actively collected copies of Web pages. While the library profession worked diligently on finding solutions to the access side of the problems, Web pages were created, changed, and died, with no record of those pages being retained.

Fortunately, Brewster Kahle's Alexa Internet and its sister company, the Internet Archive, have done a huge amount of the collection work. Starting in 1996, the Internet Archive has been storing Web pages, including graphics files, from publicly accessible Web sites that Alexa has crawled. With the October 2001 launch of the Wayback Machine, this huge archive is now freely available to the Web public. [read more]

Bestsellers 

Bestseller Lists 1900-1995