I have two copies of Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture on my desk right now. The hardcover version has this subtitle: "How Big Media Uses Technology and the Law to Lock Down Culture and Control Creativity." Provocative to be sure, and I'll bet it helped sell books (I'm all for that), but I always thought it undermined the reasoned tone that Lessig struggled to maintain in the book itself.

The paperback has the same dizzying black and white lines with the hidden copyright symbol, a pattern that gives me a migraine if I look at it too long. It's also called Free Culture. But it's subtitle is different: "The Nature and Future of Creativity." Pretty bland, but appropriate for a work of scholarship rather than a polemic. I thought at first that blurry cover pattern had caused me to hallucinate, but no, the print is plain as day. I can think of a number of theories for the change, but let's pretend it's a benign one -- the first subtitle would have had a difficult time fitting on the spine of the (smaller) paperback.

posted by Patrick Ross @ 4:23 PM | Academia, Books, Free Culture Movement

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