Exact Editions Blog

George W Bush has to apologise because his team produce a background briefing note which says some very rude things about the Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi:

[Berlusconi is] “one of the most controversial leaders” of a country “known for governmental corruption and vice”…….. It refers to the Italian prime minister as a man “hated by many but respected by all at least for his bella figura (personal style) and the sheer force of his will”…….. It says Mr Berlusconi

An important decision on a dispute that has been rumbling for years in the US

Back-to-back rulings by federal appellate courts in Atlanta and New York favoring the National Geographic Society will allow magazine and newspaper publishers to transfer their published archives to computer discs and sell them commercially without infringing on freelance contributors’ copyrights. ……. the 11th Circuit majority determined that because National Geographic’s digital library reproduced complete magazine issues “exactly as they are presented in the print version,”

We have put up a service which is a promotional exercise for the Catholic Herald. Its a browseable, searchable but not properly readable digital sample of the weekly magazine/newspaper which we sell for them as a subscription service. You can try it out from their web pages or from this link:

http://www.exacteditions.com/sample/catholicherald

If a viewer of this sample tries to click through to the full page size, they are politely informed that the ‘thumbnail’ two page view is the … Keep Reading

I noticed yesterday that there had been a spate of sales in the last month for our magazine Ancient Egypt. I wondered whether this was a matter of Cleopatra finally acquiring a taste for Dazed & Confused or Ptolemy getting the hang of digital magazines; but a colleague pointed out that in all likelihood its a matter of pyramid selling…….

Some librarians are complaining that they have been used by Google (hat tip to David Rothman) and they worry that Google is now losing interest in the library market. Google certainly seems to have backed away from publishers (no longer attending the main trade fairs, not making a concerted pitch towards them). So is the Google Book Search project losing its direction? Here are three guesses about that:

1. Google has made tremendous progress with the data capture project. There