If two years of Trump have taught me anything, it’s not to underestimate just how stupid a leader can be. Unlike intelligence, stupidity in the Age of Trump seems to be an inexhaustible resource.
If Boris Johnson truly is “the UK’s Trump”, I wouldn’t bet anything I couldn’t afford to lose on any course being “too stupid to happen”?
Yes, but Johnson hadn't struck me as that particular kind of stupid (then again, malice or incompetence can look frightfully like one another sometimes) It just seems as if he has decided that to have a political carreer he wants, a non-EU UK is the way to go, never mind what it is going to cost the UK in the process.
Call me old-fashioned but I like to believe that some politicians look for the benefit of the nation they represent, not their own political carreer, or at least not so obviously and blatantly go against the best interest of that entire nation.
That said, I never understood
why the Brits didn't run Farage and Johnson out of town (not that we'd want them) in tar and feathers because of their gross misleading of the public during the referendum. 300 millions for the NHS a year, was it? How that's looking these days?
I wonder, though, about e-books? Will it prove more difficult to buy e-books due to where the publishers are vs the buyers? Or even the readers of books already purchased -- if you as a UK buyer own a Kindle edition published in France, will you still have the rights to read that copy?
Makes me kind of wonder whether these days there is something is the e-book license when you buy it, that details what to do in case of seccession of your nation out of the EU. I suspect most publishers have neglected that scenario when they started selling ebooks...
A speculative response: I imagine that copyright may not be on the table in the BREXIT deal / renegotiation. If copyright is there, that's only a minefield of galactic proportions amongst the minefields of all the points that need to be addressed. Would hope copyright would be affected, though. Although, if it is, I wonder how the governmental reading rights would be handled then...
Copyright is internationally sorted, isn't it? Berne Convention? I think it actually predates the EU, but I reckon EU regulation may have expanded it since then. If the UK has ratified the Convention, that much shouldn't change even in the hard Brexit.
I think the bad news will be for British authors, not for Continental authors... Are there more than 20 continental (living ones) authors published and read in the UK?
How many British authors (mostly professors) are there published and translated in the other 26 countries of EU?
Make the calculation now who is going to lose from Brexit (I refer here only matters of book-selling... if and only if Brexit will affect book sales).
The UK still has a ready-made market in the USA. I know the English market is fairly present in Belgium but I haven't got a clue how much the EU as a whole represents as a market for UK books. Although I wonder whether the UK will get much useful in ways of new trade treaties with Trump. He doesn't seem to understand negociations and feels like every treaty needs to have a loser and it ain't going to be him if he can help it...
That said, the EU-based writers that get translated in English also can have the USA as primary market.
In the case of Brexit, I'd worry that this might be treated as a move w/r/t books purchased from EU publishers?
Guess we'll all find out.
Eh, good question. Normally ordinary goods like books that are purchased are subjects to the rules of the place and moment of the purchase.
But then ebooks have to be all special with their 'you're not buying an ebook; you're buying a
licence to that e-book, one that we can change anytime and to anything
we want to.' I guess we'll indeed have to find out. Maybe I need to go and check if I have UK-bought e-books and back them up somewhere safe...
As such, the present situation is simply a pretentious and blatantly argumentative Bruxelles attitude trying to get their own back. [...]
... are you blaming the EU for the fact that Ireland and the UK share a border on the same island?
Okay then!
I know blaming things on Brussels is popular, and I'm not always a fan (hah!), but you know, I believe in blaming Brussels for the things Brussels actually done.
I'm also not sure how much the UK and Switserland compare, but hey, first time for everything.