Forget what you learned about the origin of printing. Movable type using Chinese porcelain pegs was invented by Bi Sheng in 1040, four centuries before Gutenberg and his press. And where there is printing, there is copyright, too. So, yes, you can also forget that other myth, the one that says China and copyright are incompatible.
“Nobody was ready for [the pandemic]. It’s almost impossible to be ready for something of this nature. But if you have a really healthy organization, and you have caring leadership at the top, usually you get through it,” says Bill Baker, president emeritus of Channel Thirteen in New York and co-author with Michael O’Malley of “Organizations for People.”
That old proverb about a book and its cover – well, yes, it’s still true. But in the era of Zoom conference calls, we may be forgiven for judging people by their bookshelves.
“There was a really important moment in my own battle against Castleman disease,” Dr. Fajgenbaum says. “I went from hoping that things would work out and hoping that someone else would figure out a drug, to wanting to turn my hope into action.”
Editors look for things like a high level of engagement – not just a lot of followers, but how many people are interacting and retweeting with an author.
On Independence Day in the United States, this “Best of BTB” special edition features author/activist Jane Mosbacher Morris. She urges us to reflect on the future of publishing, from news to novels. “What we bring into our households, what we bring into our offices, truly influences the environment in which we’re living,” she says.
The democratization of ideas is a really wonderful thing. You have more people from more diverse points of view contributing to the world’s body of knowledge. But of course – and all publishers recognize this – it also creates a huge problem for the consumer of ideas.
Today, March 12, marks the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web. CERN, where in 1989, Tim Berners-Lee drafted his proposal for a way to link documents and data across the Internet, is celebrating the occasion, along with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the World Wide Web Foundation.
How much will we continue to read, and how much will reading continue to matter?
In this “Best of Beyond the Book” episode, award-winning video game developer and novelist Jakub Szamalek asserts, “I’m absolutely convinced that books and games are not competitors and that people are likely to do both.”