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Not just authors, but artists in many media, scientists, mathematicians and every one of us with our own unique individual faces ... should read this book' Spectator  This is the story of a relatively simple idea - that authors have rights in the works they create - which through many strange and startling twists and turns has come to frame and to constrain a wide range of things we do, for the benefit not of the many, but of the few.  Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties - making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws covering almost all products of human creativity.  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There has never been a book like it. It is the most widely read and  frequently adapted story of all time, on stage and on film. But why is Les Misérables the novel of the century? David Bellos's remarkable new book brings to life the extraordinary story of how Hugo managed to write his epic novel despite a revolution, a coup d'état and political exile; how he pulled off the deal of the century to get it published, and set it on course to become the novel that epitomizes the grand sweep of history in the nineteenth century. Packed full of information about the background and design of Les Misérables, this biography of a masterpiece nonetheless insists that the moral and social message of Hugo's ever-popular novel is just as important for our century as it was for its own. The Novel of the Century is a book as rich, remarkable and long-lasting as the novel at its heart.  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Copyright’s metastasis can’t be understood without knowing its backstory, a long tangle of high ideals, low greed, opportunism, and word-mangling that allowed poems and novels (and now, even ringtones and databases) to be treated as if they were no different from farms and houses. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, countless revisions have made copyright ever stronger.   Who Owns This Sentence? is an often-humorous and always-enlightening cultural, legal, and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50379839144209,"sku":"CIN1324073713VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51023296561425,"sku":"NIN9781324073710","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52106003513617,"sku":"CIN1324073713G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1324073713.jpg?v=1751018120"},{"product_id":"balzac-book-david-bellos-9780729300926","title":"Balzac","description":"This up-to-date account of the novel's composition, structure, and achievement provides readers with the literary and historical knowledge needed to make sense of the text. Professor Bellos explains how Balzac challenged prevailing nineteenth-century expectations of what novels should be like.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50738321129745,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50738321686801,"sku":"GOR005548707","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52384676151569,"sku":"GOR006210799","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0729300927.jpg?v=1751328212"},{"product_id":"who-owns-this-sentence-book-david-bellos-9781324105091","title":"Who Owns This Sentence?","description":"Copyright is everywhere. Your smartphone incorporates thousands of items of intellectual property. Someone owns the reproduction rights to photographs of your dining table. At this very moment, battles are raging over copyright in the output of artificial intelligence programs. Not only books but wallpaper, computer programs, pop songs, cartoon characters, snapshots, and cuddly toys are now deemed to be intellectual properties—making copyright a labyrinthine construction of laws with colorful and often baffling rationales covering almost all products of human creativity.   It wasn’t always so. Copyright has its roots in eighteenth-century London, where it was first established to limit printers’ control of books. But a handful of little-noticed changes in the late twentieth century brought about a new enclosure of the cultural commons, concentrating ownership of immaterial goods in very few hands. Copyright’s metastasis can’t be understood without knowing its backstory, a long tangle of high ideals, low greed, opportunism, and word-mangling that allowed poems and novels (and now, even ringtones and databases) to be treated as if they were no different from farms and houses. Principled arguments against copyright arose from the start and nearly abolished it in the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, countless revisions have made copyright ever stronger.   Who Owns This Sentence? is an often-humorous and always-enlightening cultural, legal, and global history of the idea that intangible things can be owned, and makes a persuasive case for seeing copyright as an engine of inequality in the twenty-first century.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50913618559249,"sku":"CIN1324105097G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51123212550417,"sku":"NIN9781324105091","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":51201935573265,"sku":"NGR9781324105091","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1324105097.jpg?v=1751145423"},{"product_id":"george-perec-book-david-bellos-9780002720229","title":"George Perec","description":"George Perec is the author of \"Life A User's Manual\". This aims to provide a comprehensive biography including a full survey of Perec's varied oeuvre, portraying an anguished, comical and ordinary man. The story begins in Eastern Europe before World War I and reaches its penultimate chapter in Australia, where Perec began drafting his last work, the thriller, \"53 Days\". The pearl trade, the occupation of France, the shoah, the rise and fall of the intellectual post-war France, art history, forgery, travels to Yugoslavia, Tunisia, Italy and Scotland, the Algerian War, neurophysiology, the book business and the radio, television and cinema industries provide the varied backdrops to a life rooted in historical change.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":51435224891665,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51435225055505,"sku":"GOR003674677","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0002720221.jpg?v=1750778879"},{"product_id":"georges-perec-a-life-in-words-book-david-bellos-9781846554209","title":"Georges Perec: A Life in Words","description":"\"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec\" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times  Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994  George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century and undoubtedly the most versatile and innovative writer of his generation.  David Bellos's comprehensive biography - which also provides the first full survey of Perec's irreverent, polymathic oeuvre - explores the life of an anguished, comical and endearingly modest man, who worked quietly as an archivist in a medical research library. The French son of Jewish immigrants from Poland, he remained haunted all of his life by his father's death in the war, fighting to defend France, and his mother's in Auschwitz-Birkenau. His acclaimed novel A Void (1969) - written without using the letter \"e\" - has been seen as an attempt to escape from the words \"père\", \"mere\", and even \"George Perec\".  His career made an auspicious start with Things: A Story of the Sixties (1965), which won the Prix Renaudot. He then pursued an idiosyncratic and ambitious literary itinerary through the intellectual ferment of Paris in the 1960s and 1970s.He belonged to the Ouvrior de Littérature Potentielle (OuLiPo), a radically inventive group of writers whose members included Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino. Perec achieved international celebrity with Life A User's Manual (1978), which won the Prix Medicis and was voted Novel of the Decade by the Salon du Livre. 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He was born in Vienna in 1887. He studied Romance Philology at the Universities of Vienna and Paris and then taught at Vienna, Bonn, Marburg and Cologne. After escaping from Germany in 1933, he taught briefly at Istanbul and then at The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He died in 1960. He was the author of over 800 books, articles, reviews and notes on the language and literatures of France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Romania, Germany, England and America from the Middle Ages to the twentieth century. This translation brings together for the first time in any language all of Spitzer's work on the literature of seventeenth-century France, including 'Racine's classical piano' (1928) and 'Saint-Simon's portrait of Louis XIV' (1928). Each of the essays demonstrates in practical rather than theoretical terms the essential unity of literary and linguistic study. David Bellos's introduction sets Spitzer's method of textual and stylistic interpretation in its historical context and sketches out the career of this supremely knowledgeable reader for whom knowledge was less important than understanding.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52543862604049,"sku":"NLS9780521289719","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52735531188497,"sku":"NIN9780521289719","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53439036784913,"sku":"GOR014921221","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/9780521289719.jpg?v=1760690480"}],"url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/en-au\/collections\/author-books-by-david-bellos.oembed","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}