I was zooming through my inbox in a deleting frenzy, discarding winsome offers from Russian ingenues, fabulous commercial opportunities in the Nigerian oil business and hundreds of prizes that I had apparently won without entering.  The next e-mail was another “Congratulations — You have won..” and I nearly deleted it too.  Luckily I didn’t because it was the announcement that The Public Domain had won the Donald McGannon Book Award for 2008.   The Award goes to books in the field of communications policy, liberally construed. (The McGannon Center also listed Jonathan Zittrain’s excellent The Future of the Internet as “an honored book.”) Here are a few of the prior winners…

Daniel J. Solove, The Future of Reputation, Yochai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks, C. Edwin Baker, Media, Markets, and Democracy, Lawrence Lessig, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace Janet Abbate, Inventing the Internet Whitfield Diffie and Susan Landau. Privacy on the Line, Tom Streeter, Selling the Air..

If you just bought the last 20 years of McGannon award winners, you’d have a really good library on communications policy.  Being on that list is an honour.