Penguin Ebooks & The Research Works Act: Publishers Gain, Communities Lose

John Dupuis | ScienceBlogs | February 13, 2012

I was really angry riding home on the bus last Friday night. Not angry because the transit system here in Toronto is royally fudged in general or that transit to York University is fudged in particular.

No, it wasn’t that particular aspect of the public sphere that had me upset.

It was the growing tendency of publishers of all sorts to try and take their works out of the public cultural commons and place them exclusively behind pay walls. It’s their desire to monetize every reading transaction that had me hot under the collar.

Here’s what I tweeted standing on the bus, altered a bit for readability:

Penguin withdrawing ebooks from libraries & The Research Works Act are the same things.