Of course, the conveniences of this approach are vast and, several years into the digital music revolution, still astonishing to me. A few keystrokes pull up exactly what I’m looking for. A couple clicks and 10 majestic symphonies of Gustav Mahler pour onto my cellphone, ready to be summoned while I’m stopped at a red light or sitting on the train. The novelty has not worn off.

But as I haul boxes of discs down to a basement room - at a time when CD stores have all but vanished from the local landscape and musical downloading has reached a tipping point in our society at large - I’ve been thinking not only about the virtues of high-tech listening but also about what’s been lost in our headlong sprint into the digital future. This is not a Luddite’s lament, or a cri de coeur about the significantly reduced audio quality of those compressed MP3 files. I love having more music at arm’s reach than ever before, I love taking it with me wherever I go. But I do find myself wondering why, exactly, collecting music now means so much less.

» viA The Boston Globe

On Friday, Markus Dohle, chief executive of Random House, sent a letter to dozens of literary agents, writing that the company’s older agreements gave it “the exclusive right to publish in electronic book publishing formats.”

Backlist titles, which continue to be reprinted long after their initial release, are crucial to publishing houses because of their promise of lucrative revenue year after year. But authors and agents are particularly concerned that traditional publishers are not offering sufficient royalties on e-book editions, which they point out are cheaper for publishers to produce. Some are considering taking their digital rights elsewhere, which could deal a financial blow to the hobbled publishing industry.

The tussle over who owns the electronic rights — and how much the authors should earn in digital royalties — potentially puts into play works by authors like Ralph Ellison and John Updike.

» via The New York Times

Five major magazine and newspaper publishers on Tuesday announced plans to build an industry-standard platform to present their work on the Web, phones and e-readers in a richer, more flexible and more lucrative form than is possible today.

The consortium of Time Inc., Conde Nast, Hearst Corporation, Meredith and News Corporation does not lack for ambition, hoping to design software primarily for devices that do not yet exist – cell phones more advanced than anything now on the market and e-readers far more sophisticated than today’s mostly static, black-and-white devices.

The unnamed venture, whose outlines were reported last month, was originally envisioned as being mostly about magazines, but John Squires, who will serve as interim general manager, said the ultimate product will work for newspapers, books and other media, as well.

» via The New York Times

If it is information on the health of medieval women or the battle of Trafalgar you require, then the British Library is a pretty good place to look. But those wanting to shed light on more recent events or discoveries recorded online could be in trouble.

Digital literature, online scientific research and internet journalism that should have been saved in the nation’s main libraries over the past five years may have been lost because ministers have failed to give them the legal power to copy and archive websites, the Guardian has learned.

Seen at The Guardian

Time Inc. is gathering U.S. magazine publishers to start a jointly run digital newsstand next year that would deliver their titles to mobile devices like increasingly popular electronic book readers.

Time Warner is leading the effort, and has approached other big U.S. magazine publishers including Conde Nast and Hearst, a source with knowledge of the joint venture but no authorization to speak about it told Reuters.

Users of the service would get a digital newsstand where they could buy subscriptions, potentially by the month or year or in other forms, the source said.

Seen at MSNBC

The key point is the different grades of information: the last text of the Sumerian people should probably be preserved, but the stupid stuff you thought everyone should know as a teenager should probably be forgotten. This problem is posed by services like Facebook and Deviantart, which actively make it difficult to permanently delete your account - because if everyone suddenly did, they’d be out of work.

The main defense against almost every kind of problem is people not being stupid to begin with - but since that’s also the solution to war, famine and the economy we don’t hold out much hope of it being engaged here either.

Seen at Daily Galaxy