Digitisation was supposed to lead to a great democratisation of access to creative work.
From Nick Harkaway
Amazon is a corporation, not a philanthropic trust dedicated to the production of works of art and literature.
Google's library plan was staggering and exciting - it wasn't the idea I objected to, but the method.
The market, as we're all painfully aware in the aftermath of the banking crisis, can be an idiot. It has no perception of right or wrong, or even sensible or insane. It sees profit.
We lose stories every day because they drift out of use and into the vast limbo of in-copyright, out-of-print books whose ownership is unclear.
We need to differentiate between commercial piracy - where criminal organisations produce illicit DVDs on a huge scale - and domestic, unauthorised filesharing, which may or may not be detrimental to overall sales.
I'm usually reading too many books - in fact, I'm usually reading enough books that if the stack fell on me, I'd be injured.
I work in our living room, a strange room in a strange, topsy-turvy house. I work underneath this enormous bookshelf.
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