NYTimes OpEd on copyright: The End of History (Books)

From the New York Times, April 2, 2010

By March Aronson

Excerpt:

Speaking as an author and editor of illustrated nonfiction, I agree that important change is afoot, but not in the way most people see it. In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.

The hope of nonfiction is to connect readers to something outside the book: the past, a discovery, a social issue. To do this, authors need to draw on pre-existing words and images.

The full article is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/03/opinion/03aronson.html?emc=eta1