Ending Book Hunger: Access to Print Across Barriers of Class and Culture

218 Pages·2020·1.172 MB·English

by  Lea Shaver

Ending Book Hunger
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Ending
Book
Hunger
Access to Print Across
Barriers of
Class and Culture
Lea Shaver
New Haven & London
Published with assistance from the foundation established in memory
of Amasa Stone Mather of the Class of 1907, Yale College.
Copyright © 2019 by Lea Shaver.
The author has made a digital version of this book available at no
charge at http://www.bookhunger.org.
This book is licensed for public use under the terms of the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0
International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0). Under its terms, you
are free to make and share a copy, translation, recording, or
excerpt of this book for personal, educational, charitable, or
other noncommercial purposes. For complete terms, visit
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/.
This book may not be reproduced for commercial advantage, in
whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that
copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright
Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written
permission from the publishers.
Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educa-
tional, business, or promotional use. For information, please e-mail
[email protected] (U.S. offi ce) or [email protected] (U.K. offi ce).
Set in Janson type by IDS Infotech Ltd.
Printed in the United States of America.
ISBN 978-0-300-22600-3 (hardcover : alk. paper)
Library of Congress Control Number: 2019941035
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992
(Permanence of Paper).
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
one
Book Hunger 1
two
Making Books Affordable 15
three
Refl ecting Diversity 27
four
Serving All Languages 46
five
Reinventing Distribution 64
six
Going Digital 79
Contents
seven
Negotiating Permissions 96
eight
Fair Use of Existing Books 111
nine
New Copyright Exceptions 125
ten
Choosing Open Licenses 141
eleven
Rethinking Incentives 154
twelve
All Children Reading 167
Organizations Profi led 185
Bibliography 189
Acknowledgments 195
Index 201
vi
Ending Book Hunger
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one
Book Hunger
“Half the world suffers from hunger. The other half
wants to lose weight.” So read a slogan I once saw chalked
on a campus sidewalk. Its irony was aimed at the global
food crisis, but the same paradox holds true for books. If
you are reading this book, you almost surely belong to the
latter group. As readers in a world of abundance, you and
I struggle to manage our textual diets in the limited time
we have. Amazon.com now offers more than a million ti-
tles for instant digital delivery. Whether we use a library,
a bookstore, or a digital device, our main challenge is
choosing among all the appetizing options.
For most of the world’s population, however, things
are very different. In the 1980s, economic crises across
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