Not if you bought the book in e-version off of Amazon. Apparently, e-book sales are reversible according to Amazon. Apparently, although you purchased your copy legally on Amazon and put it on your Kindle, Amazon reserves the right to go onto your Kindle and erase your purchased content, or so they think they do. Of course, only after crediting your sale charge back into your account ! Goodbye, book…

After a move that deleted a range of books from customer’s Kindles, including 1984 by Orwell – How Ironic ! – Amazon sent out a press statement that the company that added the books to the online store did not have the copyright to do so and were in fact uploading illegal content. However, does this give Amazon the right to go onto Kindles and delete ? Apparently not, if you read Amazon’s license agreement and terms of use.

I know that if I buy a Kindle and buy Amazon e-books instead of the traditional dead trees, I will not be able to lend my e-books to my friends and I accept that I can’t resell my purchased digital copies either when I am finished with them. But now I will not even know that I will have them for myself to read ? And I will have to make due with my money back ? Are you adding extra credit for devaluation too ?

It seems like David Pogue is right; “As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table.”

Twitter is often thought-of as a unidirectional communication channel. Mostly by people who are not on Twitter. When Pogue was speaking in a seminar and wanted to demonstrate the imminence of the Twitter community, he asked for the best 140-character pun. The reactions started to flow in. He repeated with other questions and realised that he was actually displaying communication with the masses.

His Twitter followers turned out to be the wisest and funniest group of people, according to Pogue. And according to PEW and Quantcast this might be true since the demographic of Twitter is different from that of for instance Facebook, MySpace and YouTube.

The seminar display turned into a social media experiment. David Pogue thought up a list of 40 questions, statement or other prompts that he posed to his 500,000 followers and compiled the best reactions in his book The World According to Twitter, out in August of this year.

What can you expect ? Some of the funniest photo captions and parental advice that you cannot help but feel ring true. And if you think it’s all good fun, imagine what Pogue went through to contact his followers who’s comments he wanted to publish. The ones that had changed their username, the ones that had quit twitter and the ones that were on honeymoon…

When asked for comment on the situation, Anderson replied that the outcome was unintentional. While both he and his publisher, Hyperion, say that sources were originally credited in footnotes, it seems that when deciding against using that structure in the book and changing it to an in-line crediting lay-out, neither Anderson nor his publishers found a way to satisfy Wikipedia’s crediting policy and unintentionally omitted the references altogether.

When reading Creative Commons’s explanation of Wikipedia’s Attribution-ShareAlike 2.0 licence, it states that it will allow others to “remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms”. The terms Wikipedia has set for the use of its article are attribution, sharing alike, if need be indication that the original work has been modified and release under identical license of the original work accompanied by a notice of such license.

This last one of course could find Anderson and his publishers in a quandary. If part of the book is adapted from material under a CC-BY-SA license, the parts or whole that contain that passage will also need to be published under the same license. If I understand the licensing agreement correctly, Anderson would be permitted to commercialise his writing, however, he would still have to publish his work under a Share-Alike license. And I doubt that he would want that. The publishers have indicated that the book will be re-edited to include all appropriate attributions, but even so, Anderson should have paraphrased the original sources or in lieu of that used quotes and block quotes. The issue whether or not Anderson committed plagiarism is difficult, but at least he practices what he preaches; Free is Free.

The citizen group requested the West Bend library to have the title removed from the children’s section and only make the book available to adults so that they would be aware of their child’s choice of reading. When the library did not immediately complied with the request, the group organised a petition to be sent. In response to this move, a second group called the West Bend Parents for Free Speech was formed to oppose the objections. Consequently, at a meeting beginning of June, the library board received two petitions, one with 700 signatories supporting the move and 1,000 opposing it. The library voted unanimously to sustain their initial decision.

But the story gets better. Once the library sustained their refusal to move certain books to the adult section, the Milwaukee branch of the Christian Civil Liberties Union (CCLU) joined the ranks of complainants by filing a suit against the library motioning to have Baby Be-Bop not moved to a different section, but to have it removed from the library completely by stating that the book is offensive. According to the suit, the book is “explicitly vulgar, racial (sic) and anti-Christian”.

But the CCLU goes further than that. Robert C. Braun, president of the Milwaukee branch, has written a fax message to the West Bent Daily News stating that “Mayor Kristine Deiss and the West Bend Library allowed a hate crime book, which offends minorities, gays and Christianity to remain in the public library, despite the fact that both prayers and God’s name have been removed from public places”. He also writes that a vigil is planned outside city hall to “pray for [the] West Bend mayor and city Library Board” and he invites interested individuals “to join us at a later date when we burn the “Baby Be-Bop” book”.

It seems the CCLU has no problem with destruction of public property.

Last April, the Minnesota Historical Society Press spoke to Publisher’s Weekly about their plans in accordance with the state’s cut on the society’s budget. The Press will discontinue four out of eleven positions within their ranks and the publishing volume will be reduced with around thirty percent. The Minnesota Historical Society Press released thirty titles last year.

But the straggling continues elsewhere. A 40-million dollar cut in funding for Louisiana State University in Baton Rouge threatens LSU Press with severe consequences. According to Ben Mann, professor of mass communication at the university, LSU press relies on an estimated two percent of the 40-million cut to stay afloat, while the press’ director Mary Katherine Callaway says that a worst-case scenario of the press not receiving any budgetary support would leave them with ‘really tough decisions’.

Michael V. Martin, chancellor of LSU Baton Rouge campus, released a written statement saying that the university’s first priority is protecting its academic core. That seems to suggest that the question for each and every university is whether it considers their press to be part of that core. Chances are that as it stands, reputation and renown are not enough of an value asset for institutions trying to mend their financial gaps and no university press should want to rely on their reputation alone for survival.

If you ever have the urge to turn your computer into a no-nonsense, two finger operated, no editing allowed, old-fashioned typewriter, this is the freeware for you !

BookSwim operates by the same standard as NetFlix; monthly subscription and free shipping both ways. cnet news’ Peter Glaskowsky reviews the service.

Philip Stone, the magazine’s charts editor and awards administrator wrote in the congratulatory statement;

“What does the future hold for these items? Well, given that fromage frais normally comes in 60-gram containers, one would assume that the world outlook for 0.06-gram containers of fromage frais is pretty bleak. But I’m not willing to pay £795 to find out.”

Runners-up for the award were Curbside Consultation of the Colon, The Large Sieve and Its Applications, Strip and Knit With Style and Techniques for Corrosion Monitoring.