With a brilliant sense of the à propos, the University of Chicago Press has emailed me to say that they're making Adrian Johns's history of intellectual piracy (mentioned in my post on Saturday night and reviewed by me in The National (Abu Dhabi) last week) available today only as a free e-book download. If it's still February 1 when you're reading this, you can get a free electronic copy of Adrian Johns's Piracy: The Intellectual Property Wars from Gutenberg to Gates, by clicking here.
Update, Feb. 5: A reader alerts me that although Mr. Johns's Piracy is no longer available as a free e-book, his earlier work, The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making, also à propos, has been made available for free instead, at the same link. Not sure how long this will last, of course, . . .
Great! Many thanks for posting this.