Michael Mandiberg

More press coverage over students and professors trying to find alternatives to exorbitantly priced textbooks.  Ours will be a standard $50.  Thankfully not in the $150-$200 range that many “proper” textbooks hit.  From Ars Technica:
In 2006, Rice experimented with a wiki for his Introduction to Political Science class. In addition to online articles, the wiki [...]

Lessig writes on this major ruling.
In non-technical terms, the Court has held that free licenses such as the CC licenses set conditions (rather than covenants) on the use of copyrighted work. When you violate the condition, the license disappears, meaning you’re simply a copyright infringer. This is the theory of the GPL and all CC [...]

NYTimes reports on textbook piracy. Textbooks are being scanned and torrented on The Pirate Bay, et all.  Scanning the entirety of a text book seems like a lot of work, but I guess it pays off:
Time flies, however, if you’re having a good time plotting righteous revenge, and students seem angrier than ever before about [...]

Harper Collins has analyzed the data, and concluded that their one month free access to Neil Gaiman’s American Gods had direct and measurable increase on sales.  They were only able to measure it among independent booksellers, as there was an alternate Gaiman promotion going on at the big box bookstores:
 The Browse Inside Full Access promotion [...]

Kottke reports on an author & publisher in dispute over Google Print.
To that end, she asked her publisher, Simon & Schuster, to put her book up on Google Print so it could be found, and they refused. Now they’re suing Google over Google Print, claiming copyright infringement. Meghann is not too happy with this development.
It [...]

Its only in Canada for the moment, but MiniBookExpo is a service to get books to bloggers for review.   Something we have thought about too.

 
The Rules
 

Claim It.
* watch for a book you want
* click through to claim it
* make sure it’s not already claimed by someone else
* leave a comment to claim it (max 2)

Get [...]

Digital Foundations has shown up on the Pearson website.  Pearson is the parent company of Peachpit, which is the parent division of New Riders, which publishes the AIGA Design Press.  Its a mouthful.
Oh, yeah, we picked a cover!

The wiki, at wiki.Digital-Foundations.net is ready for editing. We have posted the table of contents and the first three chapters.  The chapters will be open for editing for two weeks. The plan is to post three chapters every two weeks.
You will need to create a user account and login (upper right hand corner of the [...]

Here are the three first round sketches. Which one do you like best? Which one would you pick up in the bookstore? Which one would you assign in your class? Vote below, post comments to the post, or email additional feedback to authors AT digital-foundations DOT net.
If you are really hardcore, we [...]