Cristopher Kelty on Virtual Libraries: shutting down knowledge?

An interesting article by C. Kelty, author of Two Bits: The Cultural Significance of Free Software (Experimental Futures) on virtual libraries and their role in shaping knowledge:
The shutdown of library.nu is creating a virtual showdown between would-be learners and the publishing industry.  Last week a website called "library.nu" disappeared. A coalition of international scholarly publishers accused the site of piracy and convinced a judge in Munich to shut it down. Library.nu (formerly Gigapedia) had offered, if the reports are to be believed, between 400,000 and a million digital books for free.

And not just any books - not romance novels or the latest best-sellers - but scholarly books: textbooks, secondary treatises, obscure monographs, biographical analyses, technical manuals, collections of cutting-edge research in engineering, mathematics, biology, social science and humanities. Read more

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Thousands of free images of Byzantine art from the Met Museum

Image
From NY Times: All images of public-domain artworks in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collection — about 375,000 — are now free for anyone to use however they may please.The museum announced on Tuesday that it had changed its open access policy to allow free, unrestricted use of any images of artworks in the public domain, using the license designation Creative Commons Zero, known as CC0. Click here to access the collection
Read more

The Harbour of Theodosius

Image
The Harbour of Eleutherios (Greek: λιμήν Ἐλευθερίου), later known as the Harbour of Theodosius (Greek: λιμήν Θεοδοσίου, Latin: Portus Theodosiacus) was one of the ports of ancient Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, located beneath the modern Yenikapi neighbourhood of Istanbul, Turkey. The harbour was located on the south side of the peninsula where the city is built, facing towards the Sea of Marmara. The other harbours of the city were the Harbour of Julian and the small harbour of the Boukoleon Palace, likewise on the southern shore, and the harbours of Neorion and Prosphorion on the northern side. The harbour was built in the late 4th century during the reign of Theodosius I, and was the city's major point of trade in Late Antiquity. The area was later transformed for agricultural use due to the effects of erosion and silting. In Ottoman times, the area was built over. Here is a video about the harbour:
Read more