>> up next to my discussion about the future of book publishing in the digital age. you will hear from authors guild president and richard posner, a judge of the seventh circuit u.s. court of appeals and lecturer at the university of chicago law school. this is an hour and ten minutes. >> good evening, everybody. i want to welcome all of you. thank you for joining us for the second in our new series of conversations at the newbury. the newbery has been offering educational programs to the public since the early 1890's. so we think of this new series as an integral part of a long and important tradition in chicago. tonight's program is being audio

recorded by chicago amplified which is an initiative of chicago public radio. chicago amplified is a web based on the library of educational events, and you can listen to a pot test of this event at the chicago amplified website. book tv is also reporting the program, and we will post on our website the broadcast time when it is known. toward the end of the program there would be in a potentially for audience involvement. in order to make sure that everybody can hear audience comments or questions and to include what you have to say in the recording, we will bring a microphone to audience members who want to speak. with other forms of technology in mind, that bst now to be short yourself bonds and other devices are.

i wanted thank our sponsors for generally defend generous the supporting these events. as the longtime coach fare of one of our book groups, appreciate that importance of conversation about ideas. she has played an important part in creating these series is in thinking about the kinds of conversations and conversationalists that we should host year. thank you very much. our conversation was tonight, an extremely well-run members of the chicago and national intellectual cultural and legal world. my introductions to them will be brief since i feel confident that all of you know something of them and their work. a fascinating career mixing work as a prominent lawyer at the

firm as in our attention as it is known today with writing and especially the riding of fiction . his novels have one much acclaim from reviewers and from his peers, symbolized by their receipt of prestigious honors including a british silver dagger work. moreover, they have reached an enormous audience, millions of copies have sold. his pro bono contributions to the legal environment of the state of illinois among other places are notable, including his involvement with the hernandez case and the re-examination of the death penalty here. he is currently serving his second term as president of the authors guild. most of you probably know about it, but in case you don't, it is an american organization that supports and provides a range of pro bono advice authors and has taken strong stands on such

matters as who will books projects. i have to say that one of the things i like most is that he is an ardent and knowledgeable baseball fan. another is that he is a longtime friend of the newberry. i want to add that if you have not yet read his 1967 book i urge you to. as chicago magazine has recently reminded us, fred shapiro believes that richard posner is the most cited jurist of the 20th-century, and at present out 21st century. there is good reason to come to the conclusion. first he has been a member of the seventh circuit court of the united states court of appeals since 1981 and has written a vast body of legal opinion. second, during that time he has published many, many books and articles in in recent years has become a much discussed blocker.

third, taken as a group his publications explore what i think is a remarkable range of intellectual interest, doing so with great subtlety. fourth, he has helped to educate and train a large number of students at the university of chicago law school where he has remained on the faculty since becoming a judge. among what i think are his most interesting books is his study of the decline of public intellectuals. i might add, the interaction he wrote for a new edition of a largely forgotten classic, james fits james stevens liberty, equality, and fraternity. it is a good introduction, i believe, to the approach to thinking about big issues that are legal but more than legal. this evening we're going to talk about books, authors call libraries, and their fate in the

digital age. obviously the issues involved are important to us here at the newbury, and we think they should be important to everyone. let me provide a little context for the discussion that is born to ensue by quoting two reasons, seemingly contrasting comments by people who have connections with the newbery. one comes from up robert h. jackson, a trustee of hours and a noted cleveland collector who introduced with these words an important conference on books in hard times at this country's most important bibliotheque society, that close to york. today books face the four horsemen of the print media apocalypse. computer, video, the internet, and the iphone. history is changing books, and it is something for us to worry about.

then there is what princetons anthony grafton, recipient of the newbery award wrote in his wonderful little but, codex in crisis. set in your local copy shop and your laptop can tell you a lot, especially if you will tour search terms adeptly. but if you want deeper, more local knowledge you will still have to take a narrower path through the library doors and into the land of physical reading material. gentlemen, we are grateful to both of you for being here this evening, and we look forward to your conversation. [applause] >> well, i promised stated that i would start. this will be basically sort of the few minutes of gathering on

my part. as david mentioned, i am the president of the authors guild. and i did the first time in the early 1990's, and the difference now is remarkable. i spent yesterday afternoon and this morning in washington making stops. as president of the authors guild in various senate and house chambers talking with intellectual property staff and finally this morning, a large meeting at the justice department's talking about antitrust issues affecting the book industry. all of them relating to the digital revolution. and just to throw up some of

them in the, the electronic book which probably does not encounter universal figure. the e-book is unquestionably year to stay. it is here to stay for a couple of reasons. one is portability. those of us to spend a lot of time on airplanes know that it is a lot easier to have the ipad that i used to ride on then to be carrying three bulkier books with me. it's also here to stay because i think publishers have begun to realize that it dramatically reduces their cost structure. they don't -- the publishing is often referred to as a 19th

century business kicking and screaming into the 20th-century 100 years too late. there were initially indisposed. now they have realized, they don't have printing costs. they don't have warehousing costs. the don't have shipping costs. most gloriously, the book business is always operating on the model that the publisher bears the risk of sale, meaning that you have shipped books to a store. if they don't sell, the bookseller shipped them back to the publisher. so the-book is seemingly here to stay. would it it has brought many perils and opportunities. among the concerns, of course, first book piracy is becoming

rampant. mrs. -- congress tried to deal with this recently. a piece of the ill-fated legislation that was known as online privacy act. i don't remember what the acronym was. the internet community rose up in war. but parcae, like percy of all kinds of intellectual property is a growing problem. it concerns me as president of the author's skill because everything is being pirated. it is not a special person -- curse for best-selling authors, but at the bottom of the food chain our authors to live their margins are nibbled into any further the books just won't be published. so that is one problem. the book obviously has created

the risk of enormous concentration in the book business. the e-book was not really invented by amazon, but they pioneered its sale. at one point a couple of years ago they had many percent of the e-book market. they still have 60 percent. one more reason not what would happen in a market that is that concentrated. so that is another concern. the mere survival publishers is another question today. the book business has not been terribly profitable for quite some time, certainly since september 11th. and whether the so-called brick and mortar publishers will survive, with amazon going into the publishing business, you

know, that is -- that is a separate issue from my own perspective, my publishers have always added value, both in terms of the marketing of books and the editing of books. but perhaps another model is going to emerge. i'm not particularly eager to be an entrepreneur in the book business. hiring my own editors and hiring my own marketing people, not because i have not been blessed to be in a position where i suppose it's feasible, but simply because i don't really know how to do those things and i would rather spend my time writing them worrying about the marketing of my boat. and then, of course, there is the question of special pertinence here which is with the libraries are going to survive.

but me step back and say that the combination of book discounting and now that. ♪ have made the survival of bookstores very much in doubt and very much if amazonite occupies the space in the way that they have a commitment to be very hard for any book retailers to survive, and i can explain in more detail why the world about the way. has to do -- that, and other things from a prevented bookstores from trying to get into the same business. so bookstores are hard pressed.

borders closed stores last year. independent stores have closed all of the country. .. pure the issues are with different, and that is because of the prospect of a mirror of

universal access through the computer terminal in your home, and where libraries still exist in that environment. google a few years ago scanned the collection of several major university libraries and wanted to make the content available for sampling by the potential readers. the authors gold and sued them because in our view for only displaying snippets to each individual user. they were using the whole book and selling advertising in doing so so they claim it is a fair use. we think it isn't. the case was settled on what i

thought were generally reasonable terms, but the justice department objected because so-called orphan works, which are books whose copyright ownership can no longer be determined more covered by the settlement necessarily come and google would have ended up with a defacto monopoly over the true origin works, and the judge in new york thought that there was a reason to disapprove the settlements just like the justice department did. so that is being litigated. but in the world where it's clearly a good thing for 10-years-old who can speak english in china to be able to have access to the full content of the university of michigan library for an institution like this one another for having

fired a few missiles i will turn this over to the judge. when david and i first talked about this program, he said well, who would be an interesting companion, and i immediately thought of judge posner. he's one of the intellectual figures that we have come and i knew as somebody that published as many books as he has, that he had undoubtedly contemplated our digital future. >> my perspective is quite different. i'm not a best selling author. [laughter] i guess they all have been academic and they don't sell many copies, they don't generate much income. so, whenever you are dealing with issues are to oral literature or any kind of

writing, there are two basic interests you have to consider. one is the incentives of people to create the art, literature and so on, and that of course is what space stress is interesting to the other is distribution of these works and the access of people to these works, and its distribution and access that has been revolutionized by computers and in that revolution, which i think is a tremendous, tremendously good thing but it does have negative implications for some creativity i think it is a scandal myself that the

google has been frustrated in its efforts to digitize all work store published. they ought to be all digitized and accessible to everyone in the world. otherwise you're just withholding people their access to the great body of human fraud. digital distribution is more efficient than libraries or bookstores. i'm not talking about research libraries, because of course they have diversified all sorts of activities that are not simply storage lending or providing access to books.

so they have a future, diminished future because to the extent they are providing access service where it all works of art digitized will be eventually fewer scholars and well come to research libraries to do research. they will research on their laptop. it's just what such an efficient motor of distribution that it should be universalist what. it's instantaneous. i happen to be a tremendous admirer not only of googled of the amazon which is an unbelievable resources. it's so immensely easy to obtain books through amazon. where the bookstores -- with

some bookstores have actually benefited from amazon because amazon has provided the market to small bookstores that specializes in out of print work so i get a lot of out of print books to these small booksellers through amazon, and amazon not only provides access to these people, but they also, you know, i don't know your experience but my experience with amazon is terrific. you get books sent to you by some m. absolutely unknown tiny bookseller, who knows where the, and its prompt and when they represent the condition of the book that's how it comes. so, some book sellers actually are benefiting dramas on. but the only real advantage that

the conventional bookstore has over amazon is browsing the that is willing to change because amazon already provides recommendations. they are looking at what you are ordering and if you're using that to make recommendations. that's an artificial intelligence service that is not highly developed. it's not sophisticated and it doesn't work well. but that is just a matter of time before advances, and computer science will provide much more intelligent advice for amazon and what you should be considering for browsing. so i don't think the book stores apart from the specialists out of print, a satiric staff, i

don't think they have a future. and as for libraries they are dying because of all of the ways to get access to a book coming into a library and looking in the card catalog and giving to the shelving -- [laughter] if you want to do research, you do to digitally and get access to -- you should be able to get access to every book in the world. so i don't see that as -- the college university students they don't go to the university library any more. you go to the university of

chicago we don't see any people there. but you will see some kids drinking coffee or what have you, socializing. it's just not efficient research as far as storage is concerned, you could put every book that's ever been published in the full text and at all the works of art and music and you've probably seen it on a chip this large the whole world would have access to it coming and i don't think these libraries can compete. there's been a significant reduction in the use of university libraries in particular. now, book sales -- hard books.

i see why that evokes, but hard books it has an increase but it sort of has its own so that's not the problem for reading books that are in the old fashioned printing book working on the opinion of it much easier but to read an entire book rather have the book. that is to see if you on the hard books, it's hard to beat amazon as a motive distribution to the books compared to bookstores. so what are the effects on the authors on the creators? >> it's probably , because as scott says once all this stuff

is floating around in digital form it is easy to appropriate if there is no protection against it. people like me don't care because it's not a significant part of my income. there's also a lot of people to move their books. it's actually a too edged sword because more people read the books and have begun interesting microsoft for example, plans bitterly about policy in the third world, people stealing their operating system windows. i think they are kidding because what happens with microsoft is these people maybe they stole the operating system but now

there are all sorts of other microsoft projects that they decided they want so you become microsoft and not apple which helps microsoft. then the question is there are other ways which historically and no reason why they are compensated. it's not true it used to be patrons not royalties they are relatively recent development. as long as there is a demand for new works and art and so on there are lots of different ways of conversation and also in piracy but i think it is right there is an impact that it's the least established authors and a tradeoff between the great

access that computers get off to the consumer of intellectual product swap and the disincentives for the product if they are not fully compensated. >> well, first i have to defend the authors guild pursuing google not as an act of altruism but did it as a commercial venture, and they are selling advertising every time you go and look at the page google and the authors and the publishers had all agreed on a way to decide that income in the settlement, and unfortunately the court for its own reasons

didn't approve along with the justice department said the settlement perished. but it's a fight over who is going to make the money. and a lot of this -- all of these issues revolved aren't the concept of copyright, which has always existed as long as the republican constitution provides for protection for inventors and creators and it's a limited lawfully which is granted to the author in the case of patent to the inventor and it's supposed to be the incentive that the creator has that they can exclude people from using their intellectual property work for a period of time eventually things

pass in the public domain. a lot of this is become the preacher of large corporations most recently due to the activism of the walt disney company which didn't want mickey mouse and the need to enhance the public body of knowledge want to some extent in conflict to amend the way that conflict has been resolved under our existing model is through the existence of libraries where he have free access to the intellectual property created by what law firms. the manufacturers by the way don't like this.

>> one of the significant i think important libraries and its importance is the fact access to books is free. you walk into a library and this knowledge is available to you for nothing. one of the pirates of the google settlement provided that there would be access to the google collection, call it what he will win every library it would be a terminal for providing access to the content of these libraries and so, when we exalt amazon, we also have to ask the question

about what happens to the young, the poorer and the elderly who have been traditional users of the public library and even to some extent this institution? and it would be unfortunate if the effect of this attempt to broaden access to the world ends up excluding certain people this has been a threat in the digital world from the beginning. it's still with us and the problem is transferred to the world of books that is a significant concern. the libraries are trying to make arrangements with publishers now

to download to make the library sites where the e books can be downloaded. many public libraries are of the country are doing that. some of the of course want to do it without limitation and literally supplant amazon by using the library running rights to make the books available for free through their portal in which case one copy of every book will be sold in the library to make it available for everybody in the world, the authors and publishers of course of an arms about that idea. but i don't know if the judge wants to respond to any of that or just answer the broad question which is what do you think the future of copyright is? >> i'm not a fan of copyright

actually. [laughter] i do certainly agree with you that google isn't motivated by altruism. this is a jungle, right, authors, booksellers, everyone is struggling for financial lead vantage so i think the first copyright locker seen an english-speaking world's is about 70 - 7010. isn't that the first english copyright law? the greatest literature was written before, right? [laughter] you have dante and shakespeare and so on. a lot of the incentives for what

write-in besides royalty is based on your ability to get people to copy your stuff. there aren't a lot of people right out of compulsion trying to make money. they have to eat but that isn't why they are trying to write. they would like to get rich but the right because i think the of a great drive to do it. they have patients or they have nowadays and actual patronage system because a lot of writers are employed by universities, as other employment, they are actually compensated for writing to read the have a salary through that covers their teaching and writing. so patronage remains an important mode of compensating but isn't a part of copyright.

also, and especially now, there are all sorts of ways in which successful writers make money from the sale of their books. they are invited to give lectures. they exploit other media, movies, tv series, etc.. so, the problem of copyright is it's a tremendous blockages of access. the fair use doctrine that was mentioned has been scandalous what contract it won by

publishers. you get a bookend on the copyright page you will say no part of this book can be reproduced for the permission of the publisher, the r. dee paper in which they say that with the publishers and authors misrepresent what the rights they have by and denying the fair use doctrine is don't use their copyright's, so the fair use doctrine says that you are permitted without getting permission without compensating the author you are permitted to, quote, y parts of the work or use it in other ways to provided

that there is a justification for this appropriation without seeking permission, and of course any time someone quotes a book or newspaper article or what have you from the copyright work, he is using a copyright work, it is lawful, and to publish an academic work with the exception of textbooks and academic article for example without getting permission of the author. if i get all of these e-mails

someone says i want to make ten copies of your article and i say of course you have my permission [laughter] so, you know, the -- all sorts of -- when you make a movie, you were running into a fan fair use wind field because you might accidentally photographed in your movie some paintings on walls. there's been a case like that that captors and the free have a picture they are sued for copyright infringement for

copying, so for the patch for authors swa the one hand the original author wants to have protection against. on the other hand he also liked to be able to use a lot of published stuff. where would shakespeare be in the copyright era? he is a shameless plagiarist not only the plots, the story, the story tells but if you read the play, the great example that i particularly like in the life of julius caesar there's a great description of cleopatra on the nile river.

it's terrific. shakespeare took to the english translation and rewrote it and put it in one of the great scenes. if he did that today the modern author that keeps getting stretched out 75 years now since we have to get put talk's permission because if you put in the blank verse he would change some things where there's so much overlap and sorry we have to get his permission. he says you are a very successful playwright, an obscure greek historian.

[laughter] it's a good copyright business. a tremendous bonanza for lawyers. i emphasize the fact all academic writing one builds on the academic field of the more you realize they've borrowed tremendously from their predecessors and the more difficult you may get a copy to appropriate at the same time that you are increasing the financial words to the new creator.

there's a lot in there that i would like to quarrel with. [laughter] whatever the virtue of judge posner on what copyright there are now massive industries erected on its existence and the chances of congress throwing away copyright to the detriment of all of these industries that are dependent on intellectual property is i fink not realistic, as i think they are here certainly for the foreseeable future. you're talking about what we might discuss with the books or edited now. and in another sort of side of the digital world.

it goes in extensive outsourcing and now a harvard university press doesn't at the books it publishes, it out sources, not all of them come it's done several of mine so this company called tnt, i don't know why it's called that, of explosives and it's not the manuscript electronic it's in their somewhere you have access to it, they have access to and what

that means is when you make your body changes that is immediately invisible to both the editor and the author, so that increases the rapidity of the editing and because there's a company that's entire business is editorial work toward the are really good at and really fast and it is much, much easier to do we writing and editing digitally them by hand. it's extraordinary were in a lot of rewriting. it's just so much easier, so effortless to free right to have

it retype constantly. one for access and also for the authors and its simplified research extraordinary for judges >> just what they think we need to know to vote for them and often very little. so i looked up the product, i looked up the company's and i find a lot of stuff, things i could never find out in the conventional way and the

tremendous advantages which i'm expressing scott is very concerned for the fighting force interest of the author although i do emphasize the fact that too much copyright protection hurts the authors. you think of all the derivative works if you seen the movie careless that's a takeoff on jane austen's clueless sorry, so that's a very good movie. so if emma porcelain copyright,

then clueless would be a derivative work and at the copyright jane austen would be able to block the production of clueless losses amounted to less and deal with a jane austen descendants would be difficult was of the person has the idea for quote less and can't tell too much they decide to make their own clueless to have their works controlled by the original author of the work for much as derivative and that is an example to kind of block the copyright law creates for new

creative work. >> my only response to that is i'm not in favor of unlimited extension of copyrights. i kind of instinctively think that there is having unlimited period which both incentivizes people who want to right outside the university setting and frankly never buddy's riding inside the university setting it's not unusual on the university of iowa writers workshop because there are certain hallmarks of that there's great value having it come from all segments of the society and i do think that the copyright law right now.

if there were no copyright there will be a whole lot of people who would write any way and they wouldn't write the second and the the third and fourth book when they discovered that there was no three word in net this is an argument back-and-forth in where you should strike the balance but if clueless were to be written during jane austen's lifetime that's much different than the production of invisible man now that the matter in hyde park it had been many years that the allyson estate having the

invisible man traumatized, and i kind of feel like what's in a limited period of time that ought to be the right to say i only want people to encounter my characters, my story in the way that i originally envisioned. certainly judge posner is right that most are happy they have their works traumatized and film and broadens the audience. it's good payday there wouldn't be any record for the authors in that system. i do think there is the french concept, continental concept that in author has a certain interest in the integrity of his

or her own work for the kind of intuitive appeal in the copyright, but the bottom line is we are entering a much, much different world there's an emphasis that existed access to books and i don't think we have thought of yet a good answer of segments of the society that cannot go on amazon, but i'm not certain yet that there is an incentive to create an answer. >> you set a limited term, and you talk about a lifetime jane austen in her lifetime the

copyright term is now 75 years from the death and died at the age of 75, and might have written his best work when he was 20, 55 years early, 55 plus 75 is 130. they are compressed like five years. why do we have 75 years? partly mickey mouse. [laughter] because sunny bono skied into a tree and became a national hero

and he famously said copyright should be forever back to congress the copyright should be forever how about 75 years so sunny bono and mickey mouse we have this ridiculous term. it's ridiculous of the so because very often to republish what they'd been written a century ago on the copyright as the author diet recently when

someone asks me to perform i went to one of the older judges and said 30 years or so ago and over th years i give this to the couple and say do whatever you want with that and keep copies so i have a tremendous collection of large ceremonies publishing to service to publish them so people can have ideas

where they got the marriage ceremonies from if anyone tried to publish them some descendant with pop up and say because a lot of trouble. i don't think it really pays. the program where the audience has a chance there are people with microphones, so bring your microphone and then you can say what you want to say.

i look for the chicago-based international that did a lot of business with china also be nice people without to have a chinese woman come to chicago to learn how to set up the intellectual property department in china that looks good, he went,, told them all about it in the chinese officials said why would anyone want to do that? and a lot of non-u.s. countries that are emerging so let's think out of the realm of the u.s. western tero and talk about intellectual property worldwide

regarding the patent and right as a western conspiracy to hold down the developing nations there are certainly the chinese are famous copyright pirates, and the number of american business people who can tell stories about going over to china to take advantage of the low labor cost of their patented tools and find somehow there is a state-owned factory that a opens two or three years later write down the road using miraculously saying this is part

of the landscape and the chinese are not regarded as unduly differential. i suppose when they start creating a lot of that, then their feelings will change. the most celebrated examples are with drugs, and, you know, aids medications in western africa because there is a patent, there's a price and these are impoverished nations that can't afford to pay for it and their point of view understandable to me is that it ought to be available anyway. these are life-saving drugs. we are not talking simply about

expanding world of knowledge, but preserving lives. so yeah, there is significant disregard for the american intellectual property system in the developing world. >> the general problem is that if the country is a consumer of intellectual property it has no real incentive to enforce intellectual property law because the only beneficiaries would be the forerunners -- foreigners. it works out well in the long run the because the need access to our intellectual property to become productive. as they become productive, scott mentioned the low wage rates as they become wealthier countries the wage rates rise and we

benefit from trade with these countries. we actually are financed by china, right? china owns a great deal of the american public debt along with japan and other countries, so we benefit a lot from china's growing wealth. we've potential antagonism with china over taiwan and the islands in the south china sea and so on, so we have a fairly comfortable relationship with china. but it certainly understandable why these countries initially are consumers of intellectual property do not support intellectual property rights. it's true as space mentions with patents even more so than with copyright. my experience with china's

intellectual property i have been told my books have been translated in chinese and the big market in china and once the dean of the beijing will school came to chicago we had a whole satchel full of transitions on the books since the chinese and i was too polite to say these translations, but i haven't. [laughter] of course we want american ideas penetrated in china, right, so the fact they are translating the books without the penalties may be in the national interest of america. >> questions? >> in a recent issue of the new

yorker magazine there was an article about the gentleman there wrote a fiction novel and got a book contract for a homecoming and was discovered for the quickly that he had plagiarized almost the entire book but interestingly from many sources not just from one place. and in this article, the author stated that plagiarism is not against paul. so is there a difference between plagiarism and copyright violation? >> plagiarism is copying whether or not it is copyright material. you are still a plagiarist if you don't disclose. if you say i copy other areas --

pnac come if you say -- suppose i say i want to be a success like -- i want to be popular success like scott turrow wamp and selling it under my name, so i acknowledge and sell copies except for the title page, because the memoir. so i would be a copyright infringement by wouldn't be a plagiarist. on the other hand, if a copy of work that is out of copyright i don't acknowledge the copyright and and not a plagiarist. it's not illegal to be plagiarist. it's strongly disapproved. it didn't used to be. it used to be that the concept of creativity in the renaissance in shakespeare and shakespeare's england was that he were free to

copy anything without acknowledgment, the you had to add something and improve it and if you did that, then that was fine and you wouldn't be accused but it wasn't a secret that shakespeare was taking his plots and plot details and so on from the previous authors. but now we have this notion, sort of a romantic notion, 19th century notion that the on the creativity is originality. and taking an existing work and improving get to improve it presents of the that is not creative. and so if you don't it, you are guilty of sin which gets you fired and so on. >> i wrote a book on plagiarism,

and there was a student of forgot the name now, it's an indian man who had written a check what novel and was described she had a 500,000-dollar movie deal, and it looked like a tremendous success. benet turned out that she had plagiarized part of her novel for the well-known author petraeus she lost her father's contracts and so on. with the passages turned out it was interesting every passage she had revived come so she had

improved the original maybe because she had taken stuff from the predecessor and should be forced to pay a fee or something. if she said i like your book and i would like to take some stuff out of that i don't think the book is well written, however and i'm going to revise it so this doesn't work. if you allow this unauthorized copy of improvement you lose some genuine creative work but not the sort that we regard as proper in our culture apparently. is that i would like to circle back to something you're talking

about earlier. i named library and and i will get a law firm, so why have access as do most of the people that are here. but ayman intentional on the weekends i do not have a computer at home and i choose not to have the option to choose not to but there are any number of people in this culture increasingly more of them who do not have that option so when i go to the library on the weekends i see what it's like for people who don't have access how do you respond to people who don't have access. >> people who don't have access to the internet. >> [inaudible] >> you don't need money to --

why there should be a price to accessing a book on the internet -- >> how much a month? >> computers now are very expensive, and so we are talking about a few hundred dollars. if you want to subsidize the access for poor people don't have an objection with that. the cost of electronic

distribution that access is very low. if you want to lower it more with the subsidy for people who can't afford it, fine with me. >> i have alluded to this before. it's the function that the library has always played in our society, and i do believe in free access to knowledge but i think it's important that there be a portal for society who either can't afford it or have some scruple against it were.

libraries are being rendered anachronistic by a lot of technological developments i worry very much about the problem that you are talking about prejudice and it shouldn't be the case the world acknowledges close to those without resources. >> i would like to express on behalf of newberry my thanks to the conversationalist this evening, mr. turow and judge posner and i would end by saying i wish we have assembled this the manuscript at the newberry library, and i'm going to chicken to that tomorrow. thank dewaal, and we will see you back here the next time. [applause]

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>> what are you reading this summer, booktv wants to know. >> i am just finishing -- i reread it since the first of the trilogy that she's going to do on thomas cromwell. i know a lot about the suitors. it's an area i've been interested in. she does a masterful job of telling a story, telling it in a brand-new way. and this summer i'm probably going to read a new novel called the age of wonders, that has been getting a lot of attention. and i haven't