Corinne Reilly at the Philadelphia Inquirer is reporting on the current state of textbooks in Iraq. Students who are in the K-12 system use textbooks published decades ago. Graduate students have to purchase their books through friends in other countries. The textbook problem stems from a number of causes. Bookstore owners, frightened by the violence, are opening slowly. Delivery of books purchased online is unreliable, if not impossible. From the article:

Like so much else here, access to textbooks is improving. But progress is slow in a country with almost daily …

Continuing OEN’s coverage of Google’s orphan works settlement, Eric Bangeman at Arstechnica is reporting that the Internet Archive has submitted a letter to the judge in The Authors Guild v. Google. The letter asks for the same copyright indemnity for its Wayback Machine that is being offered to Google. Both Google and The Authors Guild oppose the move. From the article:
“The Archive’s text archive would greatly benefit from the same limitation of potential copyright liability that the proposed settlement provides Google,” argues the Internet Alliance in a letter to Judge …

David Wiley has posted a parable of sorts regarding the current state of academic publishing. He compares it to someone who has created a brillant product, but is forced to distribute it under a draconian agreement with truckers. From the blog post:
Why do more faculty not see that, as researchers, we come up with ideas for research, find grant funding for the research, identify and hire graduate students and other professionals to perform the research with us, carry out the research, write up the results of the research in a …

Daithí Mac Síthigh has a blog post on a recent decision by the UK Information Commissioner that the Freedom of Information Act can apply to course materials. The decision stems from Ben Goldacre at badscience.net requesting information about homeopathy courses taught at the University of Central Lancashire. The decision was not absolute, excluding case studies resulting from the lecturer’s research. From the blog post:
his decision may have an impact on universities (as well as those who criticise them) far beyond the question of homeopathy. Indeed, given the well-known exemption from …

Pam Samuelson starts her column “Legally Speaking: The Dead Souls of the Google Booksearch Settlement” at the O’Reilly Radar by saying that:
Google has scanned the texts of more than seven million books from major university research libraries for its Book Search initiative and processed the digitized copies to index their contents. Google allows users to download the entirety of these books if they are in the public domain (about 1 million of them are), but at this point makes available only “snippets” of relevant texts when the books are still …