Tuesday, September 15, 2009

academic napster

Harman has a post about people searching stuff about him and being informed by academia.edu (which, I have to admit, is really weird when people search for me, considering there is no legitimate reason to do searches with my name. Crazy students, I presume).

Anyway, he seems shocked that someone is looking for a download of his Tool-Being, and furthermore seems surprised that there is a "napster" of books. Such distribution channels are only growing, and as things like the kindle make reading pdfs about as annoying as reading them printed off, I think we will see this sort of thing growing.

As at least some of you know, I use to moderate a forum on the internet that was for a while at the forefront of scanning and putting academic manuscripts online (done originally, if you want to know, to benefit mostly high school students). Most of the real action has, however, migrated over to gigapedia and scribd.

I know there is a real push by many in the academic blogosphere to see a significant increase in things like creative commons and copylefting instead of copyrighting material. I have to say I see no problem with taking this further with academic pirating. But that is just the type of crazy marxist I happen to be.

EDIT: Btw, GH, I just looked through the usual suspects and didn't find a copy of your tool-being on the pirate websites. Not sure if you should be sad or happy.