Caveat Lector

I shall have to brush up my toes. AKMA kindly emailed me to tell me he’d linked to me.

He says he’s interested in the copyright morass shambling about in the USA right now. (A shambling morass. I don’t know where I’m getting my mental images this morning.) I confess rather shamefacedly that in my ebookist persona I have intentionally stayed well away from what are called “digital rights management” issues, not so much for lack of interest as in the awareness that I couldn’t possibly keep my temper in check, and would no doubt do more harm than good for my own side.

(How far away? I’ll tell a story on myself. At an OEBF working group summit last year in Chicago, attended by somewhere around 75 people, I put together an afternoon’s seminar on the Open eBook Publication Structure, intentionally aimed at the non-technical. My talk was up against an open forum on the DMCA. The minute I learned that, I said to myself in my best holdover Southern accent, “Self, ain’t nobody gonna be at your talk.” I was right, of course. Three attendees, one of whom didn’t need it.)

So what you’ll read here about ebooks is mostly the technical details of putting together content so that it both works as an ebook and lasts past any particular generation of ebook-reading gadgets. Those are the areas in which I possess some expertise. In the next few days, I’ll try to dig up some links that address AKMA’s concerns.

I sat up and took negative notice of copyright some years ago, when my husband first got involved with Tolkien’s languages. Not to bore you all with a long, sad, and often ugly history: the situation is that the Tolkien Estate has gifted a small number of people with access to JRRT’s unpublished linguistic writings, and over time both this group and the TE have done their best to discourage, threaten, and lawyer (yes, “lawyer” is definitely a verb in this case) other scholars and scholarship out of existence under the banner of protecting copyright.

My husband has a book-length, publishable grammar of Sindarin. The only other grammars of Elvish (Sindarin or Quenya) are at best outdated and at worst utterly inaccurate. (The stuff on Ardalambion is good as far as it goes.) I don’t know if it’ll ever see the light of day. I hope so. It’s rocking good stuff.

Copyright preventing the dissemination of scholarship. For Pete’s sake, has anyone read a chap named Jefferson lately?

On a whole ’nother subject, let me return AKMA’s favor: AKMA says what I wish I had about Mideast politics, as well as many other things. I don’t often discuss politics, for the precise reasons AKMA cites. Perhaps my voice is no great loss; I am a truly lousy historian and a worse psychologist. I do not doubt, however, that other voices more valuable than mine are silenced for these reasons, and that is a tragedy.