I am absolutely delighted to announce that, today, the 15th December 2021 marks the publication of my eighth academic book: Warez: The Infrastructure and Aesthetics of Piracy . The book will be available to buy in print, but it’s already available, open access, to download from the OAPEN library.
I mustn’t say too much in public about this, for fear of being unprofessional. However, I wanted to jot down a few notes about “being a PhD supervisor” and what it means and what it’s like. I am always terrified when my students come up for viva.
Some things we do in life happen once; the first time will be the only and last time. Our births and deaths, of course, are the two key ones. CONTENT WARNING: this post discusses suicide, death, and dying. I am a member of the Swiss organization, Dignitas, which is most well known for its assisted suicide clinic.
One of the basic tenets of digital philosophy is that downloads are non-rivalrous. When I download something it remains accessible to other users to download. But what if this isn’t actually true and what if there is a strong disutility premise at work? Bitcoin has not done much for the world, but it does provide a useful reference point for thinking about this. The annual energy consumption of Bitcoin is enormous.
2021 was another pretty bad pandemic year, in many ways. For those of us with immune system compromise it was alarming to see a near-wholesale return to “normality” among the general population when our lives remained under extreme threat.
In the world of OA publishing, there have been further (not-so)shock waves reverberating this week as Knowledge Unlatched was sold to Wiley. One of the questions this raises is: how was it possible for this sale to go through and what could have been done to prevent it? One of the first points to raise, and one that I have already made on Twitter, is that Knowledge Unlatched had to take a corporate form that protected its founder’s investment.
Today marks a significant milestone for me. All ten of my academic monographs are now – or will be when published – openly accessible and free to download. The books that are not yet out have advance contracts that stipulate open access.
By necessity, the bibliography to my book on Warez must cite a number of unconventional works that are not covered by standard style manuals. In particular, I need to make reference to NFO files that contain ASCII art and other iNFOrmation about the Warez Scene. As noted more extensively in the introduction, one of the primary sources upon which I draw is the DeFacto2 archive. The format of some of these entries should be explained.
tl;dr: use the node.js module html-pdf-chrome to print programmatically, not Chrome’s built-in virtual-time-budget. See my print.js file for an example. My CV is generated automatically from Birkbeck’s online repository. It uses a system that basically generates a paginated version of the CV in the browser, using CSS regions technologies, then does a headless print via Chrome. All the source code is available for this.
We are at an exciting moment for open-access books. UKRI has announced a forthcoming funding mandate, kicking off in 2024. Plan S funders are deciding what to do about books. And much (if not all) of the dissent around the idea of OA monographs has gone quieter. It seems, at least to me, that more and more people are persuaded that OA books are a good concept… so long as the route by which we get there is equitable.
