The University of Chicago Press continues to offer one free e-book every month. While most of these are academically challenging, this month’s free selection is excellent. The February 2010 free e-book selection is Piracy:
The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns. If you want to score some good free reads, check in regularly for the free e-book of the month. To see all of the currently available free e-books, see their list of e-books by subject.
The February 2010 free e-book selection is Piracy:
The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates by Adrian Johns. Get it at http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ebooks/free_ebook.html
Publishers Weekly says “Adrian Johns traces the tensions between authorized and unauthorized producers and distributors of books, music, and other intellectual property in British and American culture from the 17th century to the present. Johns’s history is liveliest when it is rooted in the personal—the 19th-century renegade bibliographer Samuel Egerton Brydges, for example, or the jazz and opera lovers who created a thriving network of bootleg recordings in the 1950s—but the shifting theoretical arguments about copyright and authorial property are presented in a cogent and accessible manner. Johns’s research stands as an important reminder that today’s intellectual property crises are not unprecedented, and offers a survey of potential approaches to a solution.”
