Okay, Those in the Berkeley Area: now it's your turn to be envious of Richard Urban!
Amalyah Keshet ________________________________________ ? (forwarded) I realize this is somewhat hard for most folks to get to, but if you happen to be in Champaign/Urbana in early April, this talk might be of interest. I believe the Center for Advanced Study has been trying to make audio capture of these presentations available, if not live, then after the event. Amazon Kindle and the Right to Read: Privacy and Property in the Late Age of Print / Ted Striphas Tuesday, April 07, 2009 4:00 pm Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum 600 South Gregory Street Urbana, IL Since its release in November 2007, the Amazon Kindle has emerged as a?and perhaps the?leading portable electronic reading device. Widely touted for its unique screen, capacious storage, and wireless content delivery, Kindle has prompted both enthusiasts and critics to wonder if it will eventually ?outbook the [printed] book? (to quote Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos). This presentation will not settle the matter, nor will it try to. Instead, it will focus on two key Kindle features: its two-way communications capability; and the ?read to me? text-to-speech feature, new to Kindle 2. The purpose of this presentation will be to show how these features have empowered Amazon.com and the Author?s Guild to assert extraordinary rights over, respectively, the content and form of reading. In doing so, these entities render ?the right to read,? which Richard Stallman identified over a decade ago, as increasingly alien and, indeed, alienable. Cosponsored by: Department of History, Illinois Informatics Institute Additional support from College of Media, WILL Public Media More information on this lecture series is available at: http://www.cas.uiuc.edu/events/ViewProgram.aspx?Guid=3C936E61-BE27-480B-8574-0ABFD2AE8073 Jerome McDonough, Asst. Professor Graduate School of Library & Information Science University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign 501 E. Daniel Street, Room 202 Champaign, IL 61820 (217) 244-5916 jmcdonou at uiuc.edu<mailto:jmcdonou at uiuc.edu>
