San Antonio College Library

Is Amazon good for readers and the book industry? In 2014, Amazon and the publishing house Hachette settled a dispute over who should set the price for e-books. In Amazon's view, lower prices mean more sales and more readers, and that's a boon for business and consumers. But to publishers, the price of an e-book must reflect the costs invested, from the author's advance to the book's production. The conflict raised questions about the value of books,...

"The concept of law lies at the heart of our social and political life, shaping the character of our community and underlying issues from racism and abortion to human rights and international war. But what actually is law? A set of naturally occurring moral principles, or simply rules agreed by a particular society? What is a 'right' and what rights should people actually have? Is law really colour-blind and gender-blind? Can the law truly tell us...

In this work, the author argues that current copyright law is not effective in the digital age and must be revised to encourage creation of new works, increase learning, and enhance access to information. The arrival of the Internet was revolutionary, and one of the most tumultuous developments that flowed from it, the upending of the relatively settled world of copyright law, has forced us to completely rethink how rights to a work are allocated...

In The Death Penalty in America: Current Controversies, Hugo Adam Bedau, one of our preeminent scholars on the subject, provides a comprehensive source-book on the death penalty, making the process of informed consideration not only possible but fascinating as well. No mere revision of the third edition of The Death Penalty in America (1982) this volume brings together an entirely new selection of 40 essays and includes updated statistical and research...

"Fascism is notoriously hard to define. Kevin Passmore unravels the paradoxes of one of the most important phenomena of the modern world - tracing its origins in the intellectual, political, and social crises of the late nineteenth century, fascist movements and regimes in Italy and Germany, and the fortunes of 'failed' fascist movements in Eastern Europe, Spain, and the Americas. He shows how important racist nationalism was to fascism, examines...

Ethics, Evil, and Fiction brings together moral philosophy and literary analysis in a way that offers original new insights for both. Its central aim is to enrich the domain of moral reflection, by showing the value of literary texts as sources of moral illumination. Colin McGinn starts by setting out an uncompromisingly realist ethical theory, arguing that morality is an area of objective truth and genuine knowledge. He goes on to address such subjects...

"Easy to read and understandable, this highly original and engaging book is intended for undergraduate and graduate students, speech-language professionals, people who stutter, significant others, and anyone else with an interest in stuttering. Through personal accounts and informational chapters, topics not addressed in many clinical texts, such as reading and understanding research, stereotyping, dealing with friends and family, and risk taking,...

Demonized by governments and the media as criminals, glorified within their own subculture as outlaws, hackers have played a major role in the short history of computers and digital culture-and have continually defied our assumptions about technology and secrecy through both legal and illicit means. In Hacker Culture, Douglas Thomas provides an in-depth history of this important and fascinating subculture, contrasting mainstream images of hackers...

The last four decades have seen a remarkable revival of interest in the virtues, which lay at the heart of ancient and medieval moral philosophy. This collection is the first general survey of this revival, containing specially commissioned articles on topics central to virtue ethics and virtue theory, written by a distinguished international team of philosophers. It represents the state of the art in this subject, and will set the agenda for future...

"For over 350 million years, thousands of species of amphibians have lived on earth, but since the 1990s they have been disappearing at an alarming rate, in many cases quite suddenly and mysteriously. What is causing these extinctions? What role do human actions play in them? What do they tell us about the overall state of biodiversity on the planet? In Extinction in Our Times, James Collins and Martha Crump explore these pressing questions and many...