Howard Zinn wants you to read his book online, but HarperCollins doesn’t
HIstorian rock star Howard Zinn
People’s historian Howard Zinn has given permission to the folks at History Is A Weapon to put his classic A People’s History Of The United States, online, but that hasn’t stopped HarperCollins from chasing after the website’s developers with threats of a lawsuit for doing so. Last month HIAW published its response to the publishing giant.
While HarperCollins claims both they and the author have not given permission, but the person writing the Cease & Desist order didn’t seem to check her or his facts with Zinn, who had met the HIAW crew in advance and and also gave positive feedback after seeing it online. Download your archived copy here (while supplies last).
The online copy is far from an identical experience to the dead trees version . The site creators scanned the book’s some 650 pages and coded it via hand to correct scanning mistakes, missing some here and there. A lawsuit seems a little ridiculous. The site developers have said they’ll take it offline if and when they ever are asked to do so by Zinn or his family, so HarperCollins could quickly ascertain whether permission was given.
One of the great things about the text is all the ways in which you can get it these days.There are public performances of it, posters, radio programs and lesson plans based on it. An online version seems like a natural progression for something that indeed belongs to the people. For scads of reasons why it’s better to publishin your print book online and give it away for free, you can read pretty much any forward to a book by Cory Doctorow (here’s one now), but we can dispense with the bulk of them that have to do with helping the humans and focus on the one HarperCollins is interested in: money. As publishing giant Tim O’Reilly asserts: it’s not piracy that costs sales, but obscurity. 37 Signals offers an online version of its book Getting Real to sell copies of that book as well as its other one, Rework.
A People’s History of the United States has achieved cult status that any publishing house should be clamoring for. Part of the price of cult status is that you give up a certain degree of control. The advantage is that the community forms a self-creating market and your book is sold to each member who sees it as a point of honor to have and give out to others. HarperCollins should see the book for the national treasure that it is, do away with the copyright and offer it under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 license where ever there’s a market for it, and with an attribution-only license in parts of the world where there may not yet be a market and get the book translated quickly and efficiently by people in other countries who could turn it into a DIY economic stepping stone.
How much better to share the ideas carried in this book by turning it over to the people themselves?
READ: A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn
CHAPTERS:
1. Columbus, The Indians, and Human Progress
3. Persons of Mean and Vile Condition
7. As Long As Grass Grows Or Water Runs
8. We Take Nothing by Conquest, Thank God
9. Slavery Without Submission, Emancipation Without Freedom
14. War Is the Health of the State
16. A People’s War?
18. The Impossible Victory: Vietnam
19. Surprises
20. The Seventies: Under Control?
21. Carter-Reagan-Bush: The Bipartisan Consensus
23. The Clinton Presidency and the Crisis of Democracy
24. The Coming Revolt of the Guards
25. The 2000 Election and the “War on Terrorism”
I know now that patriotism is not enough. I must have no hatred towards anyone.
