Letters to the editor
The terrible club of men
When I read the article “December 6 remembered” (30/11/2005) I felt once again like I belong to a terrible club, the club of men.
The article says that Marc Lepine is purposely not mentioned so as to dispel the myth that violence is done by “bad guys.” However, Marc Lepine’s name appears to be substituted with “men.” This is unfortunate since the author alienates a large group of society that needs to be kept on board in remembering this tragedy and help with making our society safer for everyone.
Marc Lepine was not a man, he was an “it.” When I consider attending a candle light vigil such as that on December 6 at the U of M, I am dissuaded since I appear to belong to the terrible club of men.
If it is everyone’s responsibility to end violence against women, as the author states, let’s include everyone. This doesn’t minimize the tragedy, but maximizes the effectiveness of the response to the tragedy.
R. Thiessen
Google print
Just a heads up, as it stands with Google Print, if you’re an author of copyrighted works and they are out of print, or even in print, Google’s claim of increased book sales for authors who hold copyright is likely bogus. Readers who discover work by authors they’d never read before are likely to go to Amazon or other “used” online stores,and buy the book “used,” thus bypassing both authors and publishers.
Google’s grab of copyrighted works does not include just excerpts. As I understand it, they have scanned the entire book and put it in their own locked archives, without permission Even the author, so colonized, cannot reach the entire digitized copies of their own works. Google’s digitization without permission can interfere with the publishers’ and the authors’ previous agreements in more ways than one.
Google doing full-book digitization of copyrighted books can seriously violate the “electronic rights,” which have already been promised to their publishers via the authors’ signed contracts with their publishers.
The issues about Google Print are many and far reaching, far beyond just how we will all be able to do “research” online. The blessing is, as noted, that public domain books will be online for all. The glitch thus far on research of pubic domain works is that, as it stands, researchers will need to know the public domain works by authors’ names that they wish to read, otherwise Google will spit up a scattershot list in response to key wordings, most of which the researcher is not likely to find relevant.
