A. P. Gets Tough with You, Me and Other Pirates

The Associated Press, a not-for-profit coop owned by its 1,500 member newspapers, is the largest and oldest news organization in the world, boasting 243 bureaus in 97 countries and employing some 4,100 people. It serves about 5,000 radio and television outlets and 850 radio news affiliates. It has won 49 Pulitzer Prizes including 30 for photography. It describes itself as "the essential global news network, delivering fast, unbiased news from every corner of the world to all media platforms and formats. Founded in 1846, AP today is the largest and most trusted source of independent news and information. On any given day, more than half the world's population sees news from AP."

Why am I telling you this? Because I can't think of a better way to tell you it's probably not a good idea to mess with them.

They recently issued a stern warning to webmasters, aggregators, bloggers, scrapers, googlers, binggers, pirates and freemongers that it is determined to limit unauthorized use of A.P.-generated content. To reinforce its edict, the company is embedding software in its articles specifying just how much you are entitled to use. And, according to Richard Perez-Pena of the New York Times, you're entitled to use damn little.

Writes Perez-Pena: "Tom Curley, The A.P.’s president and chief executive, said the company’s position was that even minimal use of a news article online required a licensing agreement with the news organization that produced it. In an interview, he specifically cited references that include a headline and a link to an article, a standard practice of search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo, news aggregators and blogs... If someone can build multibillion-dollar businesses out of keywords, we can build multihundred-million businesses out of headlines, and we’re going to do that.”

In other words, pay the price or pay the price.

If the phrase "Fair Use" just popped into your mind, we're way ahead of you. News aggregators such as yours truly justify their quotations from newspapers and magazines on the grounds that United States copyright law recognizes it as a right - within limits.

And just what are the limits? One hundred words? Okay, but what if the article is 105 words long? Surely eight words constitutes fair use, yes? Yes, unless those words happen to be Robert Frost's unique and immortal, "Whose woods these are I think I know?" A. P.'s Curley ducked the question of what's fair, nor would he say just what the organization would do to perpetrators who step over the line - once he has drawn it, that is. “We’re not picking the legal remedy today,” Perez-Pena reports him saying.

Where I come from, you don't make threats unless you're prepared to back them up, and threats by the media against end users seldom engender good will. We recently wrote about a recording industry lawsuit brought against a lady who had the misfortune to upload some music into her iPod.

Another NY Times article, this one by Saul Hansell, reports on a California startup called Attributor that claims to have "developed an automated way for newspapers to share in the advertising revenue from even the tiniest sites that copy their articles." So far, Attributor's role has been to report to interested media outfits like the Times Company, Washington Post Company, Hearst, Reuters, Media News Group, McClatchy and Condé Nast how extensively their content is being copped by bloggers and others. By showing its clients how leaky their ships are, Attributor hopes the next step will be to bludgeon freeloaders into paying up. How will they do this? One solution is for publishers to bombard websites with demands to remove "pirated" pages, forcing webmasters to spend their valuable time complying with take-down notices.

Before you click away, and especially before you dismiss A. P.'s initiative as another attempt to thwart your sense of entitlement, spend some time reading about Associated Press. It is a very formidable organization and not one at which you want to wave a red flag.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times - and, of course the Associated Press.

Name the Plastic Logic Device, Win a Gift Certificate

Have you submitted your suggestion for Plastic Logic's unnamed device? There's a gift waiting for our favorite one. We have some beauts, but the more the merrier. Here's our original posting.
****************************
As Plastic Logic's device slouches to be born early in 2010, the company has disclosed more and more about about its design, technology and, most recently, its partnership with Barnes & Noble to cooperate with the BN.com e-bookstore. All of which we have chronicled.

What we have not chronicled is the name of the device. Why? Because we don't know what it is, and Plastic Logic hasn't told anybody. You can read Brad Stone's latest reportage about Plastic Logic in the New York Times and you'll see he covers pretty much everything - everything except the name.

I don't think the company's directors realize how frustrating it is for us to refer to the surname but not the given name. Our frustration has reached the tipping point. We don't want to wait any more. So, we're inviting readers to make up their own name. Submit it to us and we'll pick the one we like best and refer to it until Plastic Logic announces the real one.

E-Reads will award a $25.00 B&N gift certificate to the reader who submits the name we like the most. Submit your entries to info(at)ereads.com with the subject "Plastic Logic". Deadline is midnight EST Sunday August 9 2009 (or until Plastic Logic officially releases the name, whichever comes first). Submissions must be fit to print in E-Reads' sole judgment, and we shall also be sole judges of the winning entry.

Here's one to start things off, submitted by a commenter on a prior blog:

"Fantastic Plastic, of course, because everyone attributes fantastic powers to a device no one has seen (except in picture)"

We look forward to your entries.

E-Reads

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

BN.Com Goes Gillette

How many times have we urged the e-book industry to smarten up and heed the wise maxim attributed to King Gillette, inventor of disposable razor blades: "Give away the razor and sell them the blades." We simply can't think of a strategy better designed to advance consumer acceptance of e-books.

Well, someone finally listened to us. Mere days after launching its 700,000 title e-bookstore, which it claims is the world's largest, Barnes & Noble is now offering e-book reading software free. B&N is even throwing in a starter set of six titles. To take advantage of the offer, click on this BN.com ad.

We don't have all the specs, but presumably the B&N software will be compatible with most e-reading devices, especially the forthcoming Plastic Logic NoName Whatsit (see our gift offer for best name suggestion), but not with Amazon's Kindle or Sony's eReader.

RC

Well, It Was Brilliant in Theory: Prog, Print-Digital Hybrid, Ceases Publication

Darn. We were really hoping that Joshua Karp's The Printed Blog, a mule-like hybrid medium that offered printed versions of blogs to subscribers, had a shot at success. Karp figured his publication would resolve the paradox that although people are migrating to the Internet for news, the Web doesn't generate nearly as much ad revenue as newspapers. “We are trying to be the first daily newspaper comprised entirely of blogs and other user-generated content,” the venture's publisher declared at the time.

We had some fun with the story, speculating on the appropriate way to describe this half blog, half newspaper: Blogpaper? Blaper? Newsblog? Prog?

Sadly, the apt word for The Printed Blog is "Flop". The New York Times announced that Karp had run out of money and couldn't raise enough investment capital to carry on.

Perhaps the most valuable part of this venture was the entrepreneur's experience: “I thought maybe this would translate into a new, venture-funded model for newspapers," he told the Times's reporter, Claire Cain Miller, "but no one believes print news will survive. If I had a penny left, I would bet newspapers will survive in printed form.”

There's a penny waiting for you in our offices, Mr. Karp. We're betting on newspapers too.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Are Bing, Chrome Just Macho Displays? Cringely Thinks So

It's tempting to overdramatize Microsoft and Google as engaged in a war to the death between corporate behemoths. Being only human, and loving to spectate a major gladiatorial battle, we ourselves succumbed to the temptation to get hyperbolic (see Google Plans to Toss Chrome through MS's Windows).

Robert X. Cringely, who for many years was technology columnist for PBX and now writes his own blog, has a radically different view of the Microsoft's thrust into Google's Web browsing territory ("Bing") and Google's thrust into Microsoft's PC operating system territory ("Chrome").

He thinks it may be posturing. The same kind of machismo threat display that birds and animals employ to assert their dominance, but not necessarily designed to draw blood."It’s just noise," says Cringely, "a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check."

"Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.

"Neither company really cares because both make so much from their core products that it simply doesn’t matter. But companies, like people, strive and dream and in this case both dream, at least sometimes, of destroying the other. Only they can’t — or won’t — do it in the end, because it is against the interests of either company to do so."

For this offbeat, candid and completely refreshing take Google vs. Microsoft, read Chrome vs. Bing vs. You and Me.

Richard Curtis

A Tree Grows in Slaughter - Mindy Klasky's Season of Sacrifice

Alana Woodsinger was not ready to accept the lifelong responsibility of being the singer but the Great Tree chose her.

In the seaside village of the Headland of Slaughter, the Tree is the keeper of the past and the guardian of the people. Now she must sing the day's events and return from the Tree with its wisdom. Her people count on her to give them hope for the future. During the spring celebration, two of the village children are kidnapped and Alana must find a way to use her unwished-for power to guide a trio of villagers in rescuing the children. But darker forces are at work, great sacrifices must be made and things get worse when the children turn out to wish not to be saved

Season of Sacrifice is the novel that launched Mindy Klasky's fantasy career, a path that carried her and her devoted readers into the magical world of Glasswrights. Her enchantment with enchantment inspired her to try her hand in women's fiction. The result was a series of hit paranormals starting with Girl's Guide to Witchcraft. Whether it be mainstream or romance, there doesn't seem to be any genre Mindy Klasky can't master. But it all started with Season of Sacrifice. To learn lots more, visit her website

RC

Random UK Stiffing Authors, Agents on E-Rights

Despite the fact that most trade book publishers are paying authors a 25% net royalty (25% of what the publisher actually receives after retailer discount), Random House UK is offering considerably less than that - indeed, considerably less than what its own US sister-house is paying. In October 2008 Random House US set its e-book royalty at 25% net and four months later Simon & Schuster followed suit.

Some agents are so ticked off at Random UK that they've stopped offering books to them. "I find it completely ludicrous that one branch of an international publisher is trying to say that 17.5% or 20% is the norm, when every other publisher in the UK has gone public on 25%," Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann is quoted as saying. Another says, "Random House is the only publisher not offering 25% as its best standard rate but not all agents are getting 25% from all publishers." "Industry sources said that a figure of 25% was becoming standard, though some admitted that it could be 'variable'," writes Benedicte Page in the article.

(As a matter of full disclosure, E-Reads pays a 50% net royalty to all authors.)

It's probably a good idea right now to make something clear to authors, agents, and other members of the book community: it is against the law for publishers to collude in the setting of royalty rates, at least in the United States. Though 25% of net receipts may be settling down as the the standard e-book royalty, it would be in restraint of trade for publishers to sit down in a room and agree on that rate. Though we often, in negotiations, agree on a "standard" royalty for an adult hardcover - 10% of the list price on the first 5,000 copies sold, 12.5% on the next 5,000, and 10% on all sales thereafter - there is no written code fixing the royalties at those rates. If there were, it would be considered price-fixing. Same goes for e-book royalties.

Random House UK defends its position by asserting that "The e-book market is still a very young market which will continue to evolve and our royalty rate is just part of an overall very attractive author package."

We can't comment one way or the other on how attractive the rest of Random UK's author package is, but we can certainly support its right to pay 2/3rds of what the rest of the industry calls standard; we will certainly support them if they decide to pay twice what the rest of the industry calls standard. What we don't support is agents and authors rolling over and accepting a "standard" royalty. Any time a publisher tells you "That's the going rate," ask where is that written? I guarantee you won't find it written in the minutes of the American Association of Publishers or any other book industry trade organization.

More importantly, it should not even be an unwritten law.

At any rate, you can read about the fracas here.

Richard Curtis

Surfing for Wars

What would you do if you were rich, bright, vigorous, virtually immortal - and nearly bored to death? You’d invent a thrill sport. You'd surf...wars! You can read about it in War Surf, the Philip K. Dick Award winning science fiction novel by M. M. Buckner, about whom Hugo-winning author Robert Sawyer writes, "M.M. Buckner is the first clear-cut new star of twenty-first century SF."

It's the 23rd century and Nasir Deepra is 248 years old, wealthy, kept young by all-pervasive nanotechnology, a corporate executive and bored with life. To spice things up he has become an Agonist, dipping into war zones--many of them in satellites orbiting the Earth--and filming his daredevil antics. Agonists have a large fan-base who watch them on the Net and they revel in the attention.

A war surf goes badly and the Agonists lose their top ranking amongst surfers, so they decide to up the ante and go to Heaven. Not the kind you're thinking of. Rather, Heaven is a class-10 difficulty war zone, the toughest. Surf it successfully and you're back on top.

"An Innovative and exciting read. A treat."
– C.J. Cherryh

"Buckner hits another homerun...action, character, drama, and great science--it's all here in the latest from the hottest author in this or any other star system."
– Robert J. Sawyer

E-Reads is proud to reissue this extraordinary writer's first three novels. Check them all out.

Reading Fine Print: What Are The Terms For The Books You Buy?

This week, thanks to the retraction of 1984 from Kindle customers and the uproar/apology that ensued, there are a lot of people raising the flag of consumer rights for ebooks. It seems the corporate expectations for control are revealing themselves to be out-of-step with the popular expectations of ownership. But maybe we get the service we deserve. How complicit are we in enabling the controls that irk us?

When we quoted Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, who said "The real issue here is Amazon's use of DRM and proprietary software. They have unacceptable power over users," we knew that he had touched on a sensitive nerve.

A discussion on the popular site Reddit.com today is a lightning rod for similar sentiment of consumer entitlement: "It's simple: I want the media I buy to play on all the devices I own. I want the devices I own to play all the media I can buy. If your business intentionally makes device-specific media or media-specific devices I want you to fail."

But I'm afraid I disagree with Peter Brown and his perspective of the broader implications. And while the Reddit discussion is engrossing, there's not much being said about one little word.

Liability.

When Peter Brown says Amazon has "unacceptable power," the truth is that we grant companies this power when customers accept the opaque and deliberately over-protective terms of use that we all too often gloss over to get to the good stuff as quickly as possible.

How many Kindle owners have read the terms that state:

Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.

Changes to Service. Amazon reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service at any time, and Amazon will not be liable to you should it exercise such right.

Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees. Amazon's failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.

(Complete terms of use found here.)

It may seem Draconian, but essentially Amazon is stating that it has rights, too, to protect itself from companies or individuals using its service. Without those protections, Amazon and other companies would have little incentive to partner-up with new technologies that are ripe with the opportunity to exploit, harm, and cause serious problems without strict legalese behind them.

I think the digital reading experience provided by the Kindle and Amazon cannot be equated with older notions about ownership and traditional physical books. The digital service industry is built around licenses, permissions, and tacit agreements about copyright. What would the Kindle be without its 3G cell phone service (a special license), or the internet cloud functionality of Whispernet, which is a service with terms of use agreements?

When we buy a book in a system comprised of those complex arrangements, what we're really doing is licensing the book for our use so long as those terms are offered. This isn't how we traditionally think about shopping for goods. But in the last 30 years, our society is increasingly becoming familiar with this arrangement, whether it's music or movies or software. It's renting disguised as ownership. We have a hard time acknowledging that this is in fact happening under our noses while we stick to antiquated ideas of entitlement.

It may not seem fair, especially to those who like to reverse engineer and repurpose everything they purchase, but it is a perfectly valid business objective. However, where the business objective comes undone is in enforcement. DRM and unexpected retractions aren't the only enforcement companies use. It can get much more heavy-handed.

As Stephen Fry recently lamented about copyright law, the prosecutions used to criminalize young users are obviously both overzealous and unfair in most cases. A single teenager stealing music doesn't deserve a worse financial penalty than most white-collar criminals with deliberate intent to profit.

The truth is that the intent of most people breaking their terms of use is not to profit, but to enjoy an experience or connection with artists.

But that's not always the case. It may be the most popular reason, but there are always sneaky deviations. And so enters the legalese of terms of use, which try to foreshadow any and all possible infringements and damages. By inducing you to quickly accept their terms, they try to stave off worse case scenarios that could bankrupt a company with litigation. And there's the rub: we want the toys and media these companies develop but we must risk that accepting their terms might not be in our best interests. Every time we agree to unread terms of use (and we do, don't we?), we may be complicit in feeding that beast that can bite us. And what about the free media that has no such terms - are we all willing to take a risk that we trust free media to cause us no harm, with no recourse if it does? It's a murky problem in these dark days of DRM.

- Michael Gaudet

Jeff Bezos Regrets

Responding to a tsunami of ill will over Amazon's deletion of two Kindle books, the company's chief Jeff Bezos apologized, saying the handling of the matter was "stupid" and "thoughtless". Bezos said that the harm done to Amazon's image was "wholly self-inflicted."

Though the company justified its original action on the grounds that the books had been uploaded into Kindle from an unauthorized source, and though Amazon refunded the price of the zapped George Orwell books to customers, Bezos acknowledged that the affair was a public relations debacle.

Though E-Reads expressed a somewhat contrarian view of Amazon's action, we also recognize that it opened far larger issues concerning the ability of corporations, or even governments, to reach into our homes, businesses and private lives and control what we read, watch, or communicate.

Not everyone is prepared to accept an apology and move on. Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, said "Unfortunately this matter requires more than just changing internal policy. The real issue here is Amazon's use of DRM and proprietary software. They have unacceptable power over users, and actual respect necessitates more than an apology - it requires abandoning DRM and releasing the Kindle's software as free software.

For the full text of Bezos's apology click here.

RC

Reality Not Good Enough for You? Time To Use Your Android

"The world is too much with us," wrote poet William Wordworth. Too bad he didn't have an Android-powered smartphone.

If he did he'd realize how little of the world he'd actually experienced. By strolling through Grasmere, his Lake District hometown, and pointing the device at inns and shops, countless secrets and wonders theretofore hidden from him would have been displayed on his phone's screen.

Wordsworth didn't have a smartphone, but you can experience for yourself the marvels of augmented reality that the smartphone delivers. What's augmented reality? Leslie Berlin, project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford, recently reported in the New York Times that "the real world is overlaid with virtual information." By using your smartphone's global positioning application, your phone can see precisely what you're looking at. "The augmented-reality application then pulls in information about points of interest in that sight line and displays it on top of the camera view."

Football fans have been familiar with an early version of augmented reality: it's the yellow stripe that appears to mark the first down line on the field on game telecasts. In fact it's a virtual line, invisible to spectators attending the game but absolutely real to television viewers. The technology has now been enhanced and adapted to such competitive sports as golf, tennis, baseball and sailing.

And don't forget the competitive sport called shopping. Books, for instance. We recently reported a Google book-text search tool called the Barcode Scanner that works with an Android-powered cellphone. According to Google Book Search engineer Jeff Breidenbach, when you download the software into your Android and point your phone camera at a book's barcode, "it will automatically zoom, focus and scan the ISBN - without you even needing to click the shutter...You'll then have the option to search the full text of the book on Google Book Search right away"

But that's just the beginning. Berlin goes on to write, "Augmented reality will 'reinvent' many industries, including health care and training...Already, researchers at the Technical University of Munich are looking at ways to display X-ray and ultrasound readings directly on a patient’s body. A research project at BMW is exploring how an augmented-reality view under the hood might help auto mechanics with diagnostic and repair work.

"The industry that may have the most to gain from augmented reality is gaming," Berlin concludes. Actually, not. Traditionally, the earliest adapters of technological advances are warfare and the sex trade. The military has for years been developing "wearable computers" employing what it calls a Battlefield Augmented Reality System. Here's an excerpt from a pre-Android paper published in 2002:

Many future military operations are expected to occur in urban environments. These complex, 3D battlefields introduce many challenges to the dismounted warfighter. Better situational awareness is required for effective operation in urban environments. However, delivering this information to the dismounted warfighter is extremely difficult. For example, maps draw a user's attention away from the environment and cannot directly represent the three dimensional nature of the terrain.

To overcome these difficulties, we are developing the Battlefield Augmented Reality System (BARS). The system consists of a wearable computer, a wireless network system, and a tracked see-through head-mounted display (HMD). The computer generates graphics that, from the user's perspective, appear to be aligned with the actual environment. For example, a building could be augmented to show its name, a plan of its interior, icons to represent
reported sniper locations, and the names of adjacent streets.

As for the other application, pornography - well, use your imagination.

Read about recent smartphone advances in augmented reality in Kicking Reality Up a Notch.

“The real world is way too boring for many people,” one game developer declared. “By making the real world a playground for the virtual world, we can make the real world much more interesting.”

Which takes us back to Wordworth:

The world is too much with us; late and soon,
Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers;
Little we see in Nature that is ours;
We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!
This Sea that bares her bosom to the moon,
The winds that will be howling at all hours,
And are up-gathered now like sleeping flowers,
For this, for everything, we are out of tune;
It moves us not.--Great God! I'd rather be
A Pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
So might I, standing on this pleasant lea,
Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn;
Have sight of Proteus rising from the sea...

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Zap Orwell Today, Zap Freedom Tomorrow? Asks Slate Blogger

A visitor to our website recently posted this comment in connection with what we call The Orwell Kindle Caper:

Yeah, I did not see a big problem here. As long as customers got a refund, no big deal. As far as the possibility of Amazon arbitrarily deleting content they actually had a right to provide in the first place - I don't ever see that happening. They do actually want customers, after all.

Sorry, pal - it's a big deal. There are some who not only think Amazon's ability to reach into customers' Kindles is a big problem, they are genuinely terrified by the prospect of far graver abuses. Because it's not just about taking back our e-books but taking back our fundamental liberties. At least that's the way technology columnist Farhad Manjoo sees it, and he's stated the case with chilling logic in a blog posted on Slate.

Here's Manjoo's position in a nutshell:

"The worst thing about this story isn't Amazon's conduct; it's the company's technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader. That's an awesome power, and Amazon's justification in this instance is beside the point. As our media libraries get converted to 1's and 0's, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections.

Manjoo builds on this disturbing premise. Here are a few excerpts to keep you awake tonight:

• "If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you've bought, then surely a court—or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime—could force them to do the same. Like a lot of others, I've predicted the Kindle is the future of publishing. Now we know what the future of book banning looks like, too."
• "Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren't really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else."
• "In Amazon's view, the books you buy aren't your property—they're part of a "service," and Amazon maintains complete control of that service at all times. Amazon has similar terms covering downloadable movies and TV shows, as does Apple for stuff you buy from iTunes."
• "In The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain argues that such "tethered" appliances give the government unprecedented power to reach into our homes and change how our devices function."
• "The difference between today's Kindle deletions and yesteryear's banning is that the earlier prohibitions weren't perfectly enforceable."
• "Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely."

"The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely," Manjoo concludes, "is a power no one should have."

Does he have a prescription for reversing this potential erosion of our liberties? "Here's one way around this," he writes. "Don't buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it."

In light of Manjoo's well argued contentions, a threatened class action lawsuit against Amazon reported by Publishers Lunch might bring some of these issues to the forefront of our consciousness.

So yes, faithful correspondent, the Orwell Kindle Caper is indeed a big deal. It's a very, very big deal.

Richard Curtis

Time to Bring Back Rotary Dialing?

Technology blogger David Pogue serves as a formidable lobby of one, chiding Congress for failure to look after the basic needs of a huge segment of the American populace: cellphone users. In a brilliant and must-read article in the New York Times he writes, "If I were on the Senate Commerce Committee, I think I’d start with things like these." There follows a list of grievances that will make every user want to march on Washington. Here's a thumbnail:

• "TEXT-MESSAGING FEES Why has the price of a text message gone to 20 cents, from 10, in two years? And...isn’t it a little fishy that all four big United States carriers raised their text-message fees at essentially the same time?... And why are e-mail messages (which require much more data) included with basic Internet service, but text messages require either a per-message fee or a separate package?
• "DOUBLE BILLING In Europe, you’re billed only when you place a cellphone call — not when you answer one....Somehow, though, we’ve let the cellphone industry get into the habit of billing both of us. When I call you, a chat that eats up 10 minutes of my airtime allowance also eats up 10 minutes of yours. A text message that costs me 20 cents also costs you 20 cents.
• "THE SUBSIDY GAME...If your monthly fee includes payment for the phone itself, how come that monthly bill doesn’t suddenly drop in the month when you’ve finished paying off that handset?
• "INTERNATIONAL CALLING Using Skype or iChat or Google Voice, I can place a crystal-clear computer-to-computer overseas call for nothing....Why, then, am I still billed an astonishing $1.50 to $5 a minute to call these countries from my cellphone?
• "15-SECOND INSTRUCTIONS This one makes me crazy. When I call to leave you a voicemail message, the first thing I hear, before I’m allowed to hear the beep, is 15 seconds of instructions. “To page this person, press 5.” Page this person!? Oh, sorry, I didn’t realize this was 1980! “When you have finished recording, you may hang up.” Oh, really!? So glad you mentioned that! I would have stayed on the line forever!
• And then when I call in for messages, I’m held up for 15 more seconds. “To listen to your messages, press 1.” Why else would I be calling!?...Is this really so evil? Is 15 seconds here and there that big a deal? Well, Verizon has 70 million customers. If each customer leaves one message and checks voicemail once a day, Verizon rakes in — are you sitting down? — $850 million a year. That’s right: $850 million, just from making us sit through those 15-second airtime-eating instructions."

Pogue has plenty more to say, and he says it in The Irksome Cellphone Industry. If you think There oughtta be a law, send Pogue a message of support. His email address is at the end of his article.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Reward Offered for Best Name for Plastic Logic Device

As Plastic Logic's device slouches to be born early in 2010, the company has disclosed more and more about about its design, technology and, most recently, its partnership with Barnes & Noble to cooperate with the BN.com e-bookstore. All of which we have chronicled.

What we have not chronicled is the name of the device. Why? Because we don't know what it is, and Plastic Logic hasn't told anybody. You can read Brad Stone's latest reportage about Plastic Logic in the New York Times and you'll see he covers pretty much everything - everything except the name.

I don't think the company's directors realize how frustrating it is for us to refer to the surname but not the given name. Our frustration has reached the tipping point. We don't want to wait any more. So, we're inviting readers to make up their own name. Submit it to us and we'll pick the one we like best and refer to it until Plastic Logic announces the real one.

E-Reads will award a $25.00 B&N gift certificate to the reader who submits the name we like the most. Submit your entries to info(at)ereads.com with the subject "Plastic Logic". Deadline is midnight EST Sunday August 9 2009 (or until Plastic Logic officially releases the name, whichever comes first). Submissions must be fit to print in E-Reads' sole judgment, and we shall also be sole judges of the winning entry.

Here's one to start things off, submitted by a commenter on a prior blog:

"Fantastic Plastic, of course, because everyone attributes fantastic powers to a device no one has seen (except in picture)"

We look forward to your entries.

E-Reads

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

B&N Pitches E-Book Initiative on Morning Joe

Today William Lynch, president of BN.Com, went on Morning Joe, the popular MSNBC television show, to discuss the new BN.com e-book initiative. He also demonstrated on his iPhone how fast anyone can access the site, seek and select a title, order and download it. He did it in front of a camera in about 30 seconds. And what was the book? Lynch cannily chose Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough's own recently published book Last Best Hope. When Scarborough asked if he should buy a Kindle, Lynch replied that the BN store can be accessed by most other devices and especially the forthcoming Plastic Logic (No-Name) reader. However, the one device they don't seem to support is Amazon's Kindle.

You can watch William Lynch's interview here at MSNBC.

Despite his praise for Plastic Logic, Lynch seemed to make a glaring factual error unless he knows something no one else does: he described the new Plastic Logic display arriving in Q1 2010 as "plastic roll-up," which according to Plastic Logic is not going to be the case (Plastic Logic announces upcoming reader device - July 22, NY Times). The yet unnamed device will be larger than the Kindle DX, to attract more business users for professional documents, and have integrated 3G and Wi-Fi compatibility thanks to an agreement with AT&T.

Is BN.com going to win customers back from Amazon? They'll have a fighting chance now that they are looking to streamline the purchasing steps standing between readers and new e-books.

The new BN.com's "Buy Now (read in seconds)" button in their e-book section is suspiciously like Amazon's "One-Click Buy It Now" button, which is a notoriously protected feature that Jeff Bezos sought to patent and license. Currently, Kindle customers only need to press one button at Amazon's website to have the book purchased and immediately accessible to their Kindle or iPhone. Now BN.com customers will have a similar option. But one big difference between the two retailers is that the new BN.com "Buy Now" button is presently only for ebooks, not print books. If the book is going to be delivered by mail, you'd think an extra click or two won't make a difference, but this is where Amazon innovated their impressive market share by making things easier for the customer. It's good to see BN.com making a real effort to catch up in more ways than one.

RC and MG

Kindle Sales To Be Tallied in USA Today BS List

USA Today announced today that its bestseller list will now include Kindle sales in its rankings. “Since October of 1993, USA Today's Best-Selling Books List has provided our readers with a complete picture of sales in the publishing industry,” said Susan Weiss, managing editor of the national newspaper's Life section. “With the addition of sales figures from Kindle, we have created a more robust list which reflects the new platforms consumers and readers are using to purchase books.”

This list will run in Thursday’s edition of USA Today and online at booklist.usatoday.com.

“We are thrilled to be contributing Kindle book sales information to USA Today for their comprehensive bestseller list for books customers,” said Laura Porco, director of Kindle books. “Given the great overlap of taste between Kindle customers and physical book buyers, the USA Today Best-Selling Books List is truly reflective of what customers are buying regardless of format.”

You can read USA Today's release in its entirety here.

Kindle sales don't seem to have been posted yet when we visited the list late Wednesday evening; only hardcover and paperback sales were noted. The top five were
#1 Common Sense by Glenn Beck, #2 Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling, #3 New Moon by Stephenie Meyer, #4 Eclipse by Stephenie Meyer, and #5 My Sister's Keeper by Jodi Picoult.

USA Today's is by no means the first e-book bestseller list. Fictionwise, now wholly owned by Barnes & Noble, has kept one for years and it provides fascinating information on the performance of titles in e-books such as recent bestseller by title and by author, highest rated e-books (rated by fan vote) and all-time highest rated e-books.

The International Digital Publishing Forum (formally the Open eBook Forum), the trade and standards association for the eBook industry, has kept a tally of e-book bestsellers by member publishers. In October 2005 for instance the top five e-titles were:

#1 The Colorado Kid by Stephen King
#2 My Fair Temptress by Christina Dodd
#3 The Lincoln Lawyer by Michael Connelly
#4 It Happened One Autumn by Lisa Kleypas
#5 MindWar by Darrell Bain

The IDPF's list was culled from PDA's, smartphones, eBook readers and PCs. In October 2005 Kindle was a still a gleam in Jeff Bezos's eye.

Richard Curtis

That's All Well and Good, But What the Hell Are They Calling It?

Michael Cader's 's Michael Publishers Lunch passes along an AP story that Plastic Logic "will use AT&T's network to support wireless connectivity for their coming ereader, comparable to Kindle's relationship with Sprint. Since AT&T's network is compatible with cellular carriers and devices in other countries," Lunch goes on to say, "the company could support Plastic Logic's European launch as well as their American initiative."

We've written extensively about this much anticipated device, now scheduled for release in 2010. Here's a thumbnail:

Driven by the same E-Ink technology that powers Sony's eReader and Amazon's Kindle, Mountain View California's Plastic Logic will soon release a large-screen reader designed to carry your daily newspaper, according to Eric A. Taub in the New York Times. The screen will be twice the size of the eReader and Kindle and just about the same weight but two thirds thinner.

With news that Barnes & Noble will be working with Plastic Logic and Rupert Murdoch has been flirting with it, the device is being invested with almost messianic powers. There's only one problem.

WE DON'T KNOW WHAT IT'S CALLED!

Maybe it won't be called anything, just "I'm reading War and Peace on my Plastic Logic." Or maybe their name for it is the best kept secret since Operation Overlord. No one has a clue, and we haven't heard a rumor. Therefore we're inviting readers and bloggers to name the Plastic Logic Whatsis. We'll post any that are fit to print.

Forget about "Kindle Killer", though. We have dibs on that one.

Richard Curtis

Welcome Back, BN.COM

The last big news we heard about BN.com was in the fall of 2003:

"In a surprise move, Barnesandnoble.com (Nasdaq: BNBN) has stopped selling eBooks. The online retailer is in the process of e-mailing its affiliates to let them know of the program's demise this week."

That was written by a blogger, Rick Aristotle Munarriz, who like so many e-pioneers was sent reeling by B&N's pullout from a nascent e-book industry.

"With Barnes & Noble (NYSE: BKS) as BN.com's majority stakeholder," Munarriz continued, "one has to wonder if the company is missing the high-margin potential of the medium or if the sales just aren't there. Or, for the budding conspiracy theorists out there, is BN.com simply refusing to promote a niche where its parent company can't partake or one that promotes a level playing field in an arena where publishing house suppliers are used to the advantages of size? eBook fans would like some answers. Unlike its warehouse-shipped forefathers, an immediate answer would be welcome."

Well, maybe not immediately, exactly, but six years later Mr. Munarriz has his answer. BN.com is being resurrected, and this time we think it will be here to stay. Four months ago the world's largest print-book chain acquired Fictionwise, the world's largest e-book retailer in a $15.7 million deal we declared to be a game-changer. "With this single stroke," we wrote, "B&N comes roaring back into a business it abandoned in 2003.

"Of far greater significance is that B&N is now catapulted back onto a competitive footing with amazon.com in the all-important e-book arena. Though Barnes & Noble doesn’t boast a Kindle or any other proprietary e-book reader, there is a host of devices now available or soon to come on stream capable of carrying the immense body of e-book content that Fictionwise has aggregated."

Barnes & Noble is already billing itself as twice as big as Amazon (700,000 titles vs. 330,000). Of course, most of BN.com's title list will consist of public domain books. Motoko Rich, reporting on the deal in the New York Times, points out that "More than 500,000 of the books now offered electronically on BN.com can be downloaded free, through an agreement with Google to provide electronic versions of public domain books that Google has scanned from university libraries... Currently, Google’s public domain books cannot be read on a Kindle."

So most of BN.com's books will be public domain - big deal! 700,000 books is the kind of scaled-up inventory that industry old-timers (circa 1998) said had to be achieved before the chain reaction became self-sustaining. And don't forget that public domain is the very kind of inducement that Freemongers have been advocating to stimulate e-books over the tipping point. The interaction of all those downloadables with the 1.2 million hard copies offered by Barnes & Noble's website is as tipping-pointy as you can get. (By the way, right now if you click on bn.com you get flipped to barnesandnoble.com, but in time BN.com will be a discrete e-book website.)

There are lots of issues to be worked out before launch such as pricing and compatibility with various devices. As to the latter, right now the company is trying to be device-agnostic but there's lots of talk about it teaming up with the as-yet unnamed (will it EVER be named?) Plastic Logic reading device scheduled for release in 2010. Whether that gadget would become B&N's Kindle, we don't know, but we're not sure why anyone would want to close out any e-readers, especially Sony and Apple. Publishers Lunch pundit Michael Cader says "BN said they have made 'a strategic commerce and content partnership with Plastic Logic' and 'will power the eBookstore for the Plastic Logic eReader device.'" Cader adds that "In further explanations BN said they will be the exclusive vendor of ebooks for Plastic Logic."

E-book aggregators are weaving garlands to strew on BN.com when it opens for business.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

More Kindle-ing for Paper vs. Digital News Debate

Nicholas Carlson, employing a full complement of fingers and toes to perform his calculations, estimates that "it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead," according to his posting in The Business Insider. In all fairness to Mr. Carlson, he does say that asking its subscribers to switch to Kindle is not "anything we think the New York Times Company should do."

If you want to check his math you can take your abacus in hand and click on Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle but here's how he arrived at his bottom line. First, using some publicly known financial information, he estimated the Times's delivery costs at $644 million per year. Then...

"The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: 'We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years.' Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million -- a little less than half as much as $644 million.

And that was before Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle by one sixth to $299, which makes the case for Kindle vs. paper even more cogent. And if that's not cogent enough for you, Carlson points out that "a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we're so low in our estimate of the Times's printing costs that we're not even in the ballpark."

Carlson's bottom line? :"As a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn't just expensive and inefficient; it's laughably so."

Thanks for telling us all this, Mr. Carlson. Now if it's okay with you, we will now return to our laughably inefficient but utterly informative, entertaining, absorbing and indispensable paper edition of the New York Times.

Richard Curtis

Orwell Kindle Caper: Did Amazon Do the Right Thing?

Publishers Lunch's Michael Cader has commented in depth on Amazon's yanking of unauthorized uploads of two George Orwell books, 1984 and Animal Farm. Cader's views are particularly cogent. In fact I've seen a lot of cogent commentary. What I haven't seen is a contrarian viewpoint defending Amazon. Amazon needs defending? Read on.

Despite all the e-ink spilled over Amazon's seemingly high-handed act of reaching into everyone's Kindle and vaporizing their Orwells, nobody seems to be trying to understand Amazon's motivation let alone support it. Amazon certainly didn't help by failing to apologize or even explain, thus turning a heavy-handed gaffe into a public relations black eye. Nevertheless, we owe it to Amazon to imagine what they - or their lawyers - might have been thinking when they sent down the order to zap the Orwells.

I said lawyers and that's the key. If I were Mr. Amazon (hmm, who could that be?) I would be gravely concerned about my company's liability for infringing on someone else's copyright. Furthermore I would be concerned that those who purchased the copyrighted work from my website might be liable as well, and my actions - simply offering the books for sale - might be responsible for my customers getting sued. Were these infringements inadvertent? Sure. Would that exculpate you and me from a legal action brought by an aggrieved copyright owner? Not necessarily. Ignorance of the law has never shielded the innocent from being drawn into lawsuits. Would you like to be named as a John Doe in an infringement suit? I don't think so. Would I (Mr. Amazon, that is) want to show good faith to the copyright owners by recalling the unauthorized product? My mouthpieces say Yeah, do it now and apologize later.

I haven't seen the communications between Amazon and Kindle owners informing them their books had been yanked, but had Amazon emailed customers saying "We're doing this for your own good so you don't get sued," it might have gone far to snatch some good will from the jaws of intense embarrassment. As it was, Amazon's conduct was lead-footed clumsy, and offering credit towards another purchase just didn't make up for the sense of violation most Kindlelach felt when they woke up to discover their Orwells had vanished. It's still not too late for an explanation (I've just given them one) and apology.

There. I've defended Amazon. But it was damn hard work. Can I go back to picking on them?

Richard Curtis

Jeffrey Carver's First Star Rigger Novel, and the Farthest

Seas of Ernathe was Jeffrey A. Carver's first novel, and the first full-length tale of what was to become his popular Star Rigger Universe. Set farthest into the future of all the Star Rigger stories and thus sixth in the internal time sequence in the series, Seas of Ernathe sets the stage for a new cycle of history. A touching story of love and personal discovery, it leads the way to the rediscovery of the mode of star travel that once knit galactic civilization together.

E-Reads has published a number of Star Rigger titles as well as his Dragon novels. Each book is a complete and satisfying novel in its own right, so you can take them up in any sequence. But here's how the author has ordered them in time:

Panglor (Star Rigger 1)
Dragons in the Stars (Star Rigger 2)
Dragon Rigger (Star Rigger 3)
Star Rigger's Way (Star Rigger 4)
Eternity's End (Star Rigger 5 - free ebook from Starrigger.net)
Seas of Ernathe (Star Rigger 6)

And, to set them all in the context of Carver's grand vision, you'll want to read his e-essay, "Of Consoles and Dragons' Claws".

Subsequent to the Star Rigger and Dragons books Carver launched The Chaos Chronicles for Tor. The latest in the other series is Sunborn, and the author has transformed into the auteur of a beautiful, lilting, mysterious video to promote it. Not only did he take a hand in every aspect of the production but that's his voice narrating it as well. How are we going to keep him at his desk when Hollywood beckons? View the video and you'll see what we mean.



Here's what Publishers Weekly had to say about Sunborn:

The long-anticipated fourth entry in Carver's Chaos Chronicles (after 1996's The Infinite Sea) is space opera at its most agreeably and classically science fictional. Someone or something is plotting murder on an interstellar scale, and a small company of exiles led by human John Bandicut may be the galaxy's only chance of salvation. The prospective victims are sentient stars living in the Orion Nebula; half the challenge is simply opening communications. Luckily, Bandicut's allies and sponsors include robots, noncorporeal symbiotes and the incredibly ancient multidimensional entity Deeaab. With such a large cast and a parallel plot involving a threat to Earth itself, character development is necessarily sketched broadly. Some may find the narrative overly stage-managed, but Carver skillfully rotates viewpoints and weaves the choreography directly into the plot. This installment is a cut above the earlier books and will be entirely accessible to any reader who appreciates high-powered stellar and n-dimensional physics blended with old-school space-faring.

Not Satisfied with Fifteen Minutes of Fame? Immortalize Your Name in a Novel

Those of you fortunate enough to have enjoyed what Andy Warhol coined fifteen minutes of fame know that celebrity is too intoxicating to relinquish after so brief a time. Like a single crystal of an addictive drug, a mere taste makes most of us long for immortality. It's just that most of us don't want to work that hard to achieve it.

There is, however a shortcut: have a famous author name a character after you. All you have to do is outbid the competition. Frederick Forsyth, author of such blockbusters as The Day of the Jackal and The Dogs of War, is inviting offers for naming rights to a character in his next novel, according to Guardian.co.uk. The money will go to a charity.

But wait! Before you reach for your checkbook, shouldn't you be asking whether the character is good or evil? In Forsyth's case, it will definitely "be a goodie rather than a baddie, representing the forces of law and order!" But if you want to appear in a Stephen King novel, you take your chances. A few years ago a number of famous authors including John Grisham, Dave Eggers and Neil Gaiman agreed to auction off naming rights on behalf of The First Amendment Project, a free speech organization. King was among them. But, he warned, "Buyer beware." The novel, Cell, "is a violent piece of work, which comes complete with zombies set in motion by bad cellphone signals that destroy the human brain. Like cheap whisky, it's very nasty and extremely satisfying. Character can be male or female, but a buyer who wants to die must in this case be female. In any case, I'll require physical description of auction winner, including any nickname."

If the bidding is too rich for your blood (Forsyth's minimum is pegged at £990) there's a far cheaper alternative, but one that guarantees your name will appear in a branded author's book. It's called SharedBook™, a publishing platform that enables you to customize and personalize books.

Founded in 2002, SharedBook™ "sprang from the founder's early belief in the collaborative nature of the web," the company's website informs us, "and his realization that the user's interest in having control over the type and method of content he consumed would require an adaptable and powerful application."

Our trade publishing partners use SharedBook to provide consumers with the opportunity to make their favorite books even more valuable and special through the addition of personalized pages. These custom creations maintain the artistic and creative integrity of the underlying work while allowing the reader's affinity for the work to increase with the new version, an on-demand one-of-a-kind rarity. One example: the addition of a personalized dedication page to the Golden Books classic Poky Little Puppy in our store devoted to personalized titles for children.

E-Reads has teamed up with SharedBook™ to produce 20 novels by such bestselling authors as Greg Bear, Janet Dailey and Hannah Howell. Fans can order them to be printed with their own unique dedication messages and photos.

Unique dedication pages are one thing; having an author name a character after you is quite another, requiring the author's permission, and it will no doubt cost you a pretty penny. But the technical part of it is a piece of cake thanks to the SharedBook's innovative applications.

Richard Curtis

You Mean You Can Make a Living Being Honest?

It's a story about the music industry but the implications for the book business are obvious. Eric Pfanner in the New York Times reports that most of those who copy music from pirate and file-sharing websites would not do so if there were a legal and convenient way to buy it.

"Over the past year," Pfanner writes, "as sales of CDs have continued to fall and paid-for downloads from services like Apple’s iTunes have fallen short of hopes, record companies have moved to embrace casual file-sharers. Legal services offering free, unlimited streaming of music, rather than downloads, are proliferating. According to a survey published last week, they are taking some of the wind out of the pirates’ sails.

'Consumers are doing exactly what we said they would do,' said Steve Purdham, chief executive of We7, a service that says it has attracted two million users in Britain in a little more than half a year by offering unlimited access to millions of songs. 'They weren’t saying, "Give me pirated music"; they were saying, "Give me the music I want."'

The result is a sharp decline in the number of teenagers who downloaded unauthorized streamed music, according to a British poll. Pfanner's conclusion? "Rather than cannibalizing existing digital businesses, they say, the new services are often attracting people who previously shared files illegally."

The key to profitability of the service is either a cheap subscription, advertising revenue, or a combination of both. We'll be watching these services closely to see if they make money or if, instead, human nature reverts to the something-for-nothing mentality that has driven so many well-meaning people into the arms of pirates.

Read Music Industry Lures ‘Casual’ Pirates to Legal Sites and see what you think.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

First Self-Publishing Book Expo Slated for Fall in NYC

Karen Mender, co-founder of the Self-Publishing Book Expo (SPBE - I think they're calling it "Spibbee" for short) has announced that the conference - the first of its kind ever - will take place at The Sheraton New York Hotel & Towers (811 Seventh Avenue at 53rd Street)from 10 AM to 5 PM on Saturday, November 7, 2009.

Mender says it "will bring national focus and attention to the fastest-growing segment of today’s publishing industry. Unlike any other book exhibit, the Self-Publishing Book Expo will be the only event of its kind to highlight the books of self-publishing companies and their authors, and give them the prominence and prestige they deserve."

Booked for panels are such prestigious names as Janet McDonald, VP Client Acquisitions at Ingram Publisher Services, Inc.; M.J. Rose, who launched her mainstream career as a self-published author; Eric Kampmann, President of indie distributor Midpoint Trade Book; and Mark Coker, founder of Smashwords.

For registration, exhibitor, panel and other information, visit the SPBE website.

RC

Cosmetic Surgery for Your Brain

Hyperthought recounts the adventures of a young man who trusts an unscrupulous doctor to enhance his brain function, and of a young woman who tries to save him. You can read it in this completely absorbing science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick Award winning author M. M. Buckner, about whom Hugo-winning author Robert Sawyer writes, "M.M. Buckner is the first clear-cut new star of twenty-first century SF."

The year is 2125, and the Earth has undergone drastic climate change due to global warming. People crowd in sealed underground habitats to avoid the stormy, toxic surface. Feisty little Jolie Sauvage leads extreme surface adventure tours for rich executives. Her friend, Dr. Judith Merida, is peddling a new cosmetic neurosurgery, which she claims will wake the brain's latent, unconscious senses.

Jolie introduces Dr. Merida to one of her wealthy tour group clients, Jin Sura, an arrogant but troubled young man with a terrible desire for knowledge. That proves to be a disastrous mistake.

E-Reads is proud to reissue this extraordinary writer's first three novels. Check them all out.

The Great Orwell Kindle Caper.

Big Brother is alive and well and living inside your Kindle.

Technology blogger David Pogue informs us in the New York Times that Amazon reached into everybody's Kindle and snatched back George Orwell's classic novels “1984” and “Animal Farm.” "This morning," he writes, "hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by [Orwell] had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned."

Well, I guess it depends on what you mean by "owned." In the good old days it meant you had paid for it and possessed it. But, like so many other definitions in the digital era, like "Free", this one seems to have gone by the wayside. Amazon at least gave everyone that paid for the books a credit. To buy what? Books that can be taken back again?

Are owners bewildered and outraged? Here are their comments. But it would be hard to top Pogue's own: "As one of my readers noted, it’s like Barnes & Noble sneaking into our homes in the middle of the night, taking some books that we’ve been reading off our nightstands, and leaving us a check on the coffee table."

To understand why and how it happened, read Pogue's Post.

What's puzzling to me is, aren't Orwell's books in the public domain? I couldn't find them on Project Gutenberg, but a google search for 1984 and Animal Farm brought them up quickly, easily and...free!

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

How Safe Are Clouds?

Here's an email you hope never to receive:

Dear Subscriber:
We send greetings to you and to your mother, whose maiden name is Tondelea Farbstratten and whose birthday you celebrate on February 19th. Also greetings to Pippsie, the first pet you ever owned. And is The Maltese Falcon really your favorite movie? We like Witness for the Prosecution ourselves. And is the combination to the safe in the false wall behind your boiler still L-34, R-15, L-2? Oh, and more thing - do you want to use another password besides your spouse's birthday? It's a good idea, because the next time you hear from us it will be to learn that we've stolen your identity, emptied your bank accounts and purloined your company's trade secrets."

Can't happen here? Actually, something along those lines recently befell Mrs. Evan Williams. Who is Mrs.Evan Williams? She happens to be the wife of the CEO of Twitter, whose personal Internet, Amazon and PayPal accounts were also hacked. The New York Times's Claire Cain Miller and Brad Stone report that "A hacker calling himself Hacker Croll broke into an administrative employee’s e-mail account and gained access to the employee’s Google Apps account, where Twitter shares spreadsheets and documents with business ideas and financial details."

Wait a minute - did they say Google? We were under the impression that our information and documents are completely secure with Google, home of cloud computing. Well, they are - but with an asterisk. If you click on the Google page entitled Is It Safe to Upload Private Documents on Google Docs? you'll get this answer from Neil Fraser, Official Rep,

There are two tips which can greatly improve your safety:
1) When using an unencrypted wireless connection or some other network you don't really trust, use https://docs.google.com instead of http://docs.google.com. The extra 's' means 'secure'; all traffic is encrypted. The only down-side is it's a little bit slower.
2) When you use someone else's computer (especially at an Internet cafe or at a hotel), don't forget to logout of your Google account. And when logging in, don't check "remember my password". Pretty obvious.

Here at Google we use Docs to store all our confidential documents, spreadsheets and presentations. We use the same servers and we have no worries about people being able to see our data.

Official Rep Fraser assures us these precautions are "pretty obvious," but if they weren't obvious to the CEO of Twitter, what makes Google think they are obvious to us lesser mortals? Twitter's security firewall does not appear to have been breached by some fiendish Russian geek hackster. Instead, says the Times, " the Twitter hacker managed to correctly answer the personal questions that Gmail asks of users to reset the password." In other words, while everyone was barricading the back door, Hacker Croll strolled in the front, sauntered past the empty security desk, and walked out with the family jewels.

Evan Williams probably should have read the Google page instructing Docs users on how to change your password. Good idea for you to read it too, and read it often.

For details of the Great Twitter Heist of 2009, read Twitter Hack Raises Flags on Security.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Publisher of Bran Hambric Makes The Case for Timed Release of Eprint Edition

Sourcebooks publisher Dominique Raccah (pictured below), who pitched herself into the eye of a storm when she decided to delay the e-book edition a major book, has articulated her reasons for the decision. In a statement published on Booksquare, blogger Kassia Crozser's website, she takes pains to express her strategic thinking about holding back the e-edition of Bran Hambric by Kaleb Nation when Sourcebooks publishes it in September. (Above right, the youthful author signs advance reading copies at BEA,)

Her conclusion?

"I agree with Kassia that it’s dangerous to expect consumers to play by the rules of last year’s business model. I’ve taken action in this one situation and I certainly wonder if there are other options that are neither mine nor the $9.99 option. And I also agree that we need to experiment, and I see our industry beginning to do that. But this pricing and release-date situation doesn’t feel like an experiment. This actually seems more like a dictate that could have enormous ramifications, perhaps not today, perhaps not tomorrow, but certainly long-term on the future of authors and books. And I think all I’m saying is, let’s think about this. It’s too important. As a publisher, we have to be strategic, book by book (and it’s important to remember that we’re talking about 1 book; Sourcebooks has 850 ebooks available). These are big decisions for our authors and ourselves. So in situations where the e-format release could hurt the author’s launch, what if we were to wait?"

For a cross-section of debate, be sure to read the comments below Raccah's statement.

Richard Curtis

Slash the Advance, Double the Royalty, Author Urges

Years ago I found myself sitting at a banquet table with Isaac Asimov and decided to take advantage of his proximity to ask him something I'd wondered about for years. Asimov had authored upwards of 400 books, and was represented by literary agents on many of them. Yet he never settled down with any particular one. I wanted to know why.

"The problem with agents," he explained, "is that they get too much money."

Naturally, as an agent whose clients have never complained to me about getting too much money, I felt his statement merited some amplification. The garrulous Asimov was happy to oblige: "Publishers that lose money on a big unearned advance don't invite the author back. The editor gets into trouble for overspending and sometimes even gets fired. Bookstores order half as many copies for the next book as they did for the first one. Everybody loses...except the agent. So, I just handle my own deals, accept modest advances and get rich on royalties. Everyone looks good and everyone makes out fine. Am I right or wrong?"

To help you judge whether he was right or wrong, read author John Greene's comparison of an author's earnings on a big-advance contract versus a deal for which he gets one-tenth of the advance, but twice the royalty.

I wonder what Asimov would have thought of the double royalty offered by Vanguard Press, Roger Cooper's Perseus Books imprint. Billed as "A Unique Collaboration Between Publisher and Author," Vanguard doesn't just offer half or even one-tenth of the advance paid by traditional publishers; it offers no advance at all. Cooper, whose imprint boasts such authors as David Morrell, Kat Martin, Mary Balogh, Eileen Goudge and Greg Bear (full disclosure: Bear is a Curtis Agency client and E-Reads author), reasons that the savings on front money can be invested in publicity and promotion. That means that each book must pay as it goes, and from its track record, Vanguard's books are doing just that. Another virtue of Vanguard's business model is that it pays royalties on a monthly basis, whereas most publishers issue statements only semi-annually.

Another approach is the one instituted by Robert Miller in his recently launched HarperStudio imprint. Perhaps inspired by the reported deal between Stephen King and Scribner, Miller offers a profit-sharing deal to authors. Publication expenses are defined, then pooled. The author receives nothing from the book's sale unless and until the expenses are recouped. Thereafter author and publisher split the profits. Miller's daring business model includes bookstore sales on a nonreturnable basis, a plan that at least one chain, Borders, has embraced. Had Asimov lived to see the day, he might have joined such illustrious HarperStudio authors as John Lithgow, Michael Eisner, Robert Greene, and Leonard Maltin (full disclosure again; Maltin is a Curtis Agency client)

Cooper's and Miller's business structures are not for every author, agent, or indeed for every publisher. But colleagues are watching their performance with great fascination, seeking not just a new way of doing business but a way to break the blockbuster mentality that has impoverished all but a few behemoth publishers, authors and agents. (Full disclosure: I'm not one of them.)

Richard Curtis

What a DIfference A Year Makes: May E-Sales Leap From $3.9M to 11.5M

International Digital Publishing Forum and the Association of American Publishers have released sale stats for May 2009 and they nearly tripled to $11,500,000 from $3,900,000 in the same month of 2008.

As always, the IDPF reminds us that...

• This data represents United States revenues only
• This data represents only trade eBook sales via wholesale channels. Retail numbers may be as much as double the above figures due to industry wholesale discounts.
• This data represents only data submitted from approx. 12 to 15 trade publishers
• This data does not include library, educational or professional electronic sales
• The numbers reflect the wholesale revenues of publishers
• The definition used for reporting electronic book sales is "All books delivered electronically over the Internet OR to hand-held reading devices"

The graph depicted here shows sales only through the end of March, 2009.
RC

Lunch Weighs In On E-Book Pricing Controversy

Publishers Lunch, the online book industry newsletter, has contributed some sage observations about the controversy currently raging about the timing of e-book releases, triggered by Sourcebooks' decision to hold back its ebook edition of Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse by Kaleb Nation (pictured here).

Here's a nugget from Lunch's editorial. Though unsigned, Lunch's founder and editorial director is Michael Cader.

"Publishers could make the same (or better) short-term profits [by publishing a Kindle edition simultaneously with the print edition], but they're looking out for what they believe to be their long-term interests--and are trying to protect the entire system of physical book retailing which supports the whole industry. Those aren't bad things for your customers and readers to hear--but if no one says them, then the message doesn't get transmitted."

For the full editorial, click here.

RC

Barack Obama Stands at Door of No Return Through Which Slave Girl Ama Passed

"I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave, inside me here and here, I am still a free woman.”

This defiant declaration is made by Ama, the eponymous heroine of a stunning novel of the Atlantic slave trade by Ghanian author Manu Herbstein which E-Reads published as an original - one of the few originals it has ever undertaken - in 2002. In validation of our judgment, it was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book of that year.

We immediately thought of Herbstein's heroine, who has drawn comparison to Kunta Kinte, protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots, when we learned that President Obama planned to travel to Ghana. There he and his family visited a site known to every African American family that has investigated its African origins. Here is how the New York Times's Peter Baker reported it:

"His one-day stop blended his vision of the future with echoes of the past. He stood in the Door of No Return at Cape Coast Castle, a notorious slave port perched on the windswept sea here where men who looked like him were once held in dungeons until they were marched in shackles to waiting ships. He brought his wife, Michelle, a descendant of slaves, and their daughters, Malia and Sasha.

"Mr. Obama, rarely one to display emotion, seemed especially sober. He said the castle reminded him of the Buchenwald concentration camp and underscored the existence of “pure evil” in the world.

“'Obviously, it’s a moving experience, a moving moment,'” he said. “'As painful as it is, I think that it helps to teach all of us that we have to do what we can to fight against the kinds of evils that, sadly, still exist in our world.'”

As Barack Obama toured Ghana he was greeted by chants of "Yes We Can!" We wonder what he would say to Ama if he had a chance to bring her back through that door. Perhaps it would be the same thing he said to the people of Ghana: “You can do that. Yes, you can. Because in this moment, history is on the move.”

We asked Manu Herbstein, author of Ama, to record his personal impressions of President Obama's visit. You may read his thought-provoking essay here.

Richard Curtis

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Ama

Thrust into a foreign land, passed from owner to owner, stripped of her identity. This is the life of Nandzi, who was given the name Ama, a name strange to her and her tribal culture. A life of struggle and resignation, bondage and freedom, passion and indifference, intense love and remorseless hate. Though forced into desperation, Ama never lets her soul be consumed by fear. While the stories of individual slaves have been blurred into one mass, Ama’s story personifies the experience of eighteenth-century Africans in an unforgettable way. Her entrancing story of defiance and spiritual fire starts from the day she is brutally seized, raped, and enslaved, and ends with her breathing the pure air of freedom. Ama is a deeply engrossing and colorful novel, packed with violence, sex, and action. The resiliency of her spirit will grip readers from the first page to the last of Manu Herbstein’s spellbinding novel. One reviewer said she wished she could award Ama six stars. Read this and other stunning reviews of Ama.

To read an unforgettable scene from Ama, click here.
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Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Are E-Books The New Cheap Paperback Reprint Edition?

Last March we stirred up some dust with an article called Penetrating the Mysteries of E-Book Pricing. Sort Of. We pointed out that one of the problems that have hindered the progress of the digital revolution has been e-book pricing. "No one really knew how much to charge to download a book," I pointed out, "and the fact is, we're still not sure."

A piece in today's New York Times by Motoko Rich and Brad Stone may release an even bigger dust storm as major publishers and agents weigh in on the merits of holding back e-book publication to give print editions a chance to sell. Do e-books, priced at a serious fraction of the print edition retail price, boost sales, cannibalize them, or make no difference whatever?

"No topic is more hotly debated in book circles at the moment than the timing, pricing and ultimate impact of e-books on the financial health of publishers and retailers," the Times reporters write. "Publishers are grappling with e-book release dates partly because they are trying to understand how digital editions affect demand for hardcover books. A hardcover typically sells for anywhere from $25 to $35, while the most common price for an e-book has quickly become $9.99."

If you'd like to play publisher, tell me how you would time your e-book edition of the new Dan Brown novel with its first hardcover printing of five million copies. Are you going to shrug and say well, e-books represent only 1 or 2% of total book sales, so what's the harm?

Think again. In a recessionary economy, it's entirely possible that a lot more than 1 or 2% of potential buyers will opt to download. But even if the downloaders do not exceed that 1 or 2% figure, that's a possible loss of revenue of $1 million or more.

Our own agency figures in the controversy. Jeff Trachtenberg and Geoffrey A. Fowler of the Wall Street Journal broke the news that Sourcebooks will publish Bran Hambric: The Farfield Curse by Kaleb Nation, a novel for young readers, as a hardcover in September but the e-book will not come out at the same time. Sourcebooks CEO Dominique Raccah wants to hold the e-book up until as much as six months after print publication, and we support her decision. Raccah told the Times, “If you as a consumer can look at a book and say: ‘I have two products; one is $27.95, and the other is $9.95. Which should I buy?’, that’s not a difficult decision.” Delaying the release of an e-book, she said, was like publishing a cheaper paperback edition months after a hardcover edition. She likened the e-book reprint to a mass market paperback reprint, which usually occurs a year or longer after hardcover publication.

Read A New World: Scheduling E-Books and decide. What you may ultimately decide is that playing publisher isn't as much fun as it's cracked up to be.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

And a Child Shall Lead Them - 15-Year-Old's Report on Teen Tastes Stuns Media Bigshots

When Morgan Stanley analysts asked 15 year old intern Matthew Robson what his peers liked and disliked in the media, he wrote up a long report that is astoundingly precocious and perspicacious. It's as if you walked into your teenage kid's room expecting the usual trash heap and discovered a solution to the Goldbach Conjecture or the Riemann Hypothesis on his desk. Robson's insights, which made front page news in the Financial Times. pulled the rug under many shibboleths that we presumably smart grownups take for granted.

The essence of his report is that given a choice, kids his age - most of whom have little money - will choose a free application every time, and not necessarily a legal one. With a snap of the fingers he dismissed Twitter. "Teenagers do not use Twitter," he wrote. "Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realize that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting Twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). They realize that no one is viewing their profile, so their tweets are pointless."

"His report," Guardian.co.uk tells us, "came as media moguls gathered at the Allen & Co conference in Sun Valley, Idaho. This annual event is a chance for the likes of Rupert Murdoch, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates to discuss the latest business and technology issues in a relaxed atmosphere." It will be interesting to see how relaxed it is when these muckamucks read Robson's analysis.

For a full copy of Robson's notes, click here. But below is a summary of his conclusions:

Radio - Most teenagers nowadays are not regular listeners to radio...With online sites streaming music for free they do not bother...

Television - Most teenagers watch television, but usually there are points in the year where they watch more than average...Teenagers are also watching less television because of services such as BBC iPlayer, which allows them to watch shows when they want. Whilst watching TV, adverts [advertisements] come on quite regularly (18 minutes of every hour) and teenagers do not want to watch these, so they switch to another channel, or do something else whilst the adverts run.

Newspapers - No teenager that I know of regularly reads a newspaper, as most do not have the time and cannot be bothered to read pages and pages of text while they could watch the news summarised on the internet or on TV...The only newspapers that are read are tabloids and freesheets (Metro, London Lite…) mainly because of cost; teenagers are very reluctant to pay for a newspaper (hence the popularity of freesheets such as the Metro).

Gaming - Whilst the stereotypical view of gamers is teenage boys, the emergence of the Wii onto the market has created a plethora of girl gamers and younger (6+) gamers...Most teenagers with a games console tend to game not in short bursts, but in long stints (upwards of an hour).

PC gaming has little or no place in the teenage market...PC games are relatively easy to pirate and download for free, so many teenagers would do this rather than buy a game. In contrast, it is near impossible to obtain a console game for free.

Internet -Teenagers do not use twitter. Most have signed up to the service, but then just leave it as they realise that they are not going to update it (mostly because texting twitter uses up credit, and they would rather text friends with that credit). In addition, they realise that no one is viewing their profile, so their 'tweets' are pointless...Some teenagers make purchases on the internet (on sites like eBay) but this is only used by a small percentage, as a credit card is required and most teenagers do not have credit cards. Many teenagers use YouTube to watch videos (usually anime which cannot be watched anywhere else) and some use it as a music player by having a video with the music they want to listen to playing in the background.

Directories - Teenagers never use real directories (hard copy catalogues such as yellow pages). This is because real directories contain listings for builders and florists, which are services that teenagers do not require. They also do not use services such as 118 118 because it is quite expensive and they can get the information for free on the internet, simply by typing it into Google.

Viral/Outdoor Marketing - Most teenagers enjoy and support viral marketing, as often it creates humorous and interesting content. Teenagers see adverts on websites (pop ups, banner ads) as extremely annoying and pointless, as they have never paid any attention to them and they are portrayed in such a negative light that no one follows them.

Music - Teenagers listen to a lot of music, mostly whilst doing something else (like travelling or using a computer). This makes it hard to get an idea of the proportion of their time that is spent listening to music.

They are very reluctant to pay for it (most never having bought a CD) and a large majority (8/10) downloading it illegally from file sharing sites...Almost all teenagers like to have a 'hard copy' of the song (a file of the song that they can keep on their computer and use at will) so that they can transfer it to portable music players and share it with friends...A number of people use the music service iTunes (usually in conjunction with iPods) to acquire their music (legally) but again this is unpopular with many teenagers because of the 'high price'...

Cinema - Teenagers visit the cinema quite often, regardless of what is on. Usually they will target a film first, and set out to see that, but sometimes they will just go and choose when they get there. This is because going to the cinema is not usually about the film, but the experience –and getting together with friends...It is possible to buy a pirated DVD of the film at the time of release, and these cost much less than a cinema ticket so teenagers often choose this instead of going to the cinema.

Mobile Phones - As a rule, teenagers have phones on pay as you go. This is because they cannot afford the monthly payments, and cannot commit to an 18-month contract. Usually, teenagers only use their phone for texting, calling...Teenagers do not upgrade their phone very often, with most upgrading every two years. They usually upgrade on their birthday when their parents will buy them a new phone, as they do not normally have enough money to do it themselves.

Television - Most teenagers own a TV, with more and more upgrading to HD ready flat screens. However, many are not utilising this HD functionality, as HD channels are expensive extras which many families cannot justify the added expenditure.

Computers - Every teenager has access to a basic computer with internet, but most teenagers computers are systems capable of only everyday tasks. Nearly all teenagers' computers have Microsoft office installed, as it allows them to do school work at home. Most (9/10) computers owned by teenagers are PCs, because they are much cheaper than Macs and school computers run Windows, so if a Mac is used at home compatibility issues arise.

Games Consoles - Close to a third of teenagers have a new console

What is hot?
• Anything with a touch screen is desirable.
• Mobile phones with large capacities for music.
• Portable devices that can connect to the internet (iPhones)
• Really big tellies

What is not?
• Anything with wires
• Phones with black and white screens
• Clunky 'brick' phones
• Devices with less than ten-hour battery life

Matthew Robson is to be commended. But there is one medium that doesn't seem to have occurred to him: Books. What about books, Matthew? What about books?

Richard Curtis
The Child pictured above is not Matthew Robson, but a six year old prodigy named Ainan Celeste Cawley, here seen writing chemical equations.

Charles Brown, 72

Charles Brown, whose Locus Magazine chronicled and influenced the world's fantasy and science fiction community, passed away peacefully in his sleep on July 12, 2009 according to representatives of the magazine.

A brief obituary prepared by Locus is below. A more extensive one will be published in the next issue of Locus. The magazine will continue under the direction of his executive editor and an experienced staff.

A quick personal note: Charles Brown was my friend. He knew everything about everyone in the field, and though he was a conduit for every piece of gossip confirmed or unconfirmed, he was discreet enough to gain and hold the confidence of all who worked with him. His friendship and generosity were legendary, and so were his love of life and all of its pleasures. He was a scholar, a wit, a world traveler, a writer, a chronicler, a photographer, and gentleman. His publication has been a beacon for all who toil in the genre. Charlie Brown was also my publisher, offering me a forum for a column that ran for twelve years and was the basis for four of my books. For that alone I will be forever grateful to him.

The fantasy and science fiction community mourns his passing.

Richard Curtis

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Locus publisher, editor, and co-founder Charles N. Brown, 72, died peacefully in his sleep July 12, 2009 on his way home from Readercon.

Charles Nikki Brown was born June 24, 1937 in Brooklyn NY, where he grew up. He attended the City College of New York, taking time off from 1956-59 to serve in the US Navy, and finished his degree (BS in physics and engineering) at night on the GI Bill while working as a junior engineer in the '60s. He married twice, to Marsha Elkin (1962-69), who helped him start Locus, and to Dena Benatan (1970-77), who co-edited Locus for many years while he worked full time. He moved to San Francisco in 1972, working as a nuclear engineer until becoming a full-time SF editor in 1975. The Locus offices have been in Brown's home in the Oakland hills since 1973.

Brown co-founded Locus with Ed Meskys and Dave Vanderwerf as a one-sheet news fanzine in 1968, originally created to help the Boston Science Fiction Group win its Worldcon bid. Brown enjoyed editing Locus so much that he continued the magazine far beyond its original planned one-year run. Locus was nominated for its first Hugo Award in 1970, and Brown was a best fan writer nominee the same year. Locus won the first of its 29 Hugos in 1971.

During Brown's long and illustrious career he was the first book reviewer for Asimov's; wrote the Best of the Year summary for Terry Carr's annual anthologies (1975-87); wrote numerous magazines and newspapers; edited several SF anthologies; appeared on countless convention panels; was a frequent Guest of Honor, speaker, and judge at writers' seminars; and has been a jury member for various major SF awards.

As per his wishes, Locus will continue to publish, with executive editor Liza Groen Trombi taking over as editor-in-chief with the August 2009 issue.

When Did "Free" Become a Four Letter Word?

A popular tune reminds us that "The best things in life are free." It lists among other benefits the moon, the stars, the flowers in spring and the robins that sing. Omitted from the lyrics is information, because there are a lot of people who don't think free information is one of the best things in life. In fact "Free" has become one of the nastier four-letter words in the English language, or at least one of the most controversial.

Two authors, Chris Anderson and Cory Doctorow, have invested a good deal of their time (and ours) attempting to redefine free, not merely as an abstract concept but as a template for action. I'll state my view upfront: I agree with economist Milton Friedman who said "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Free always has a price, and anyone who believes otherwise will end up either paying it or sticking someone else with the bill. I will even go so far as to say this is an immutable law.

But read on and judge for yourself.

As digital media mature and the financial stakes in the e-book industry soar on a double-digit trajectory, a task force of businesspeople, entrepreneurs and managers, backed by righteously indignant writers, musicians and artists is confronting a generation of Web users that stubbornly refuses to pay for content.

Some members of this generation grew up with a strong sense of entitlement; some simply have little or no comprehension of copyright; still others, taking Robin Hood as their role model, deliberately and defiantly hack protected files or download pirated content to get around the law, asserting their right to liberate it from capitalist exploiters. And still others are, simply, thieves. They all march under the banner "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE" or sport the "Copyleft" symbol displayed here (I'm not sure if Copyleft is copyrighted). Media news reports daily clashes with content providers tired of seeing the fruits of their creativity dissipated, given away or stolen.

The slogan, the movement and the tension between free and commercial date back to the dawn of the modern computer era, indeed to the dawn of copyright protection itself when the conflict between content creators and legitimate users (like scholars) was resolved in a complex body of law that governs intellectual property rights to this day.

Standing between these clashing armies is a contingent of men and women dedicated to understanding the relationship between content given away and content sold. Their observations - some scientific, some anecdotal - have begun to yield some thought-provoking hypotheses that might shape e-business strategies in the next generation. Few of them have as much to say as Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and bestselling author of The Long Tail. Anderson's book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, has just been published, and an interview with him conducted by Publishers Weekly's Andrew Richard Albanese reveals just how complex the word - and the concept - is. Free, Anderson states, is "a word with economic, psychological, historical meaning, a word with incredible misunderstanding and paradoxical diversions in definition."

The first thing that strikes you about the book's title is its subtitle. Free is a price? That's hard enough to absorb, but free as a radical price is a real head-scratcher.

Anderson says the definition of free as the opposite of paid is an artificial one. If it were not, how do we explain that people are making money giving products and services away? The answer is to view free as adding value to products that are offered for sale. We've often referred to the Gillette Razor model of giving away the razor but selling the blades. That concept can be applied to just about any product or service, and indeed that's just what is happening. Anderson employs a word we've heard a lot of lately, "freemium," meaning "using free to market paid." The biggest misunderstanding of my work," he tells Publishers Weekly, "is that I believe everything should be free. Not the case! Free should be a price point in the marketplace, but the free stuff should market the paid stuff. "

You would think so. But as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his review of the book in The New Yorker, "...in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.

"Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other."

In other words, free is simply the glamorous side of capitalism that we prefer to see. But it's really an illusion. In capitalism as in Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you're getting something free, someone else is paying for it.

Another name heard most frequently in connection with free is Cory Doctorow, the Canadian science fiction author, blogger and (depending on which side of the controversy you're on) either a hero or a subversive. His articulate efforts to shake up the traditional publishing establishment have placed him on the leading edge of the digital paradigm shift. By putting his money where his mouth is he has singlehandedly altered our thinking about what works and what no longer works in the book industry.

Doctorow's latest experimental venture exemplifies his philosophy. According to Locus, the trade publication of the fantasy and science fiction world, Doctorow's latest short story collection, A Little Help, will be self-published in at least four different editions: "A free Creative Commons-licensed online edition in various formats; a free audio-book 'featuring high-quality readings by a variety of voice-actor friends'; a print-on-demand trade paperback with five variant covers; and a limited edition hardcover to be sold in the $100-$250 range'...in batches of 10. The hardcover will feature bound-in SD cards or USB sticks including the e-book and audiobooks, and unique-to-each-volume endpapers made of signed and annotated paper ephemera by Doctorow's writer friends," Locus reports.

He will also produce a "super-premium" edition of one copy, including a story written specifically for the purchaser, for $10,000 (don't bother, it's already sold!). He will offer custom editions for conferences and other events with cover art of the organization's choice, for a premium price. He will donate 10% of income from the book to Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the licensed sharing of creative works.

"There're plenty of reasons to do this," says Doctorow, "but for me, the most interesting one is the ability to empirically test some of the oft- bandied hypotheses about 21st century publication, the spectrum that runs from 'Self-publication is a narcissistic money-pit that absorbs your time and money without returning as much as a real publishing deal could' to 'Publishers are obsolete dinosaurs and writers can do just as well going it alone.'"

Though some of this sounds positively Marxo-communo-anarcho-iconoclasto (Wikipedia says his parents were Trotskyist activists and he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and Greenpeace as a child), we cannot overlook the good old capitalistic enterprise underlying his experiment. By interweaving free and paid - freemium - Cory Doctorow is the poster child for Chris Anderson's theories.

Richard Curtis

A Bank Account for Storing Your Mind

What is Neurolink? It's a new kind of bank account for storing a person’s mind. You can read it in Coin-Giver, a striking science fiction novel by Philip K. Dick Award winning author M. M. Buckner, about whom Hugo-winning author Robert Sawyer writes, "M.M. Buckner is the first clear-cut new star of twenty-first century SF."

Richter Jedes, the rich powerful CEO of ZahlenBank, wants to live forever - so he makes two copies of himself. One is an evolved Artificial Intelligence imprinted with his personality. The other is a perfect clone named Dominic, whom he raises as his son. When Richter suddenly dies, his son Dominic is left to deal with a terrible crisis which threatens ZahlenBank. And though Dominic loathes the egotistical A.I. masquerading as his father, they need each other’s help to save the bank.

Which of them is the true copy, and which is fake? Do they have free will, or are their destinies programmed in their source code? And most important of all - does individual identity still have any meaning?

Coin-Giver was originally published under the title Neurolink

E-Reads is proud to reissue this extraordinary writer's first three novels. Check them all out. They're available both as e-books and paperbacks.

RC

Damien Broderick's Quipu Now in Paperback

We're happy to announce that Damien Broderick's Quipu is available in paperback.

In Quipu Caroline is about to go psychotic - and with her family, no surprise. Joseph can't talk to women even if he is a certified high IQ clever dick trying to take snapshots of the end of the universe. Ray and Marj have their own hassles with in-laws, but student terrorists get in the way. Meanwhile Brian, misogynist and wit, appalls everyone in the quipu world. Quipus? They're the scandalous fanzines that hikes traded before blogs were invented. Hikes? High IQ clever dicks, of course.

In Quipu (appearing for the first time as an E-Reads publication), Australian writer Damien Broderick reimagines his prize-winning 1984 novel Transmitters as the surprising saga of a "family" of genius-level one-of-a-kind individuals.

Damien Broderick is Australia's dean of science fiction, with a body of extraordinary work reaching back to the early 1960's. Like the late George Turner, he captures the distinctive flavor of his native country while reaching out to American and European readers. The White Abacus won two year's best awards. His stories and novels, like those of his younger peer Greg Egan, are drenched with bleeding-edge ideas. Distinctively, he blends ideas and poetry like nobody since Roger Zelazny, and a wild silly humor is always ready to bubble out, as in the cosmic comedy Striped Holes. His award-winning novel The Dreaming Dragons is featured in David Pringle's SF: The 100 Best Novels, and was chosen as year's best by Kingsley Amis. It has been revised and updated as The Dreaming. In 1982, his early cyberpunk novel The Judas Mandala coined the term 'virtual reality.' His most recent novels are Godplayers and K-Machines.

With David G. Hartwell, he edited Centaurus: The Best of Australian SF for Tor in 1999.

Like one of his heroes, Sir Arthur C. Clarke, he is also a master of writing about radical new technologies, and The Spike and The Last Mortal Generation have been Australian popular-science best sellers--both books strongly recommended in Clarke's millennial revision of his famous Profiles of the Future.

"Schrödinger's Dog" was chosen for Gardner Dozois's SF: Year's Best 14.

His homepage is The Spike, and you can read a great interview with him in Missions Unknown.

Quipu is also available in all popular e-book formats.

Incidentally, E-Reads publishes another book of Broderick, this one in collaboration with Rory Barnes: The Hunger of Time. Check it out!

The Faster His Books Go Down the Crapper, the More Money He Makes

Bestselling Japanese horror novelist Koji Suzuki has brought out his latest thriller, entitled Drop, on toilet paper rolls, according to the New York Times's Rocky Casale, who reports that a friend of his was so terrified by the story, "she was frightened to be alone in the bathroom." The print job was provided by a company that makes paper products for public restrooms.

If you're wondering how you bookmark the story, Casale explains that "each roll contains several copies of the novella so that you can easily pick up the narrative where you left off."

As a publishing professional I'm in favor of any medium that generates revenue for authors. But Suzuki's story, about a goblin who dwells in a public bathroom, is not going to be of much comfort to those who are already terror-stricken about toilets such as Jody Morse, whose account on the website Associated Content, Toilet Phobia: My Unusual Fear of Toilets, makes some of Stephen King's toe-nibbling under-the-bed imps look absolutely benign by comparison.( Suzuki has been described as the Stephen King of Japan.)

"When I was about four years old, my cousin told me that a scary clown lived in the toilet," Morse explains. Just when she thought she'd outgrown it, a sixth grade health teacher told her class that you can contract pubic lice from public toilet seats. From that point on she did everything she could to avoid going out or from going to the bathroom when she did. The last straw was a nature show portraying how "snakes can crawl up through your pipes and into your toilet. In this case, the snake was some type of Python. Once again, my childhood fear is back.

"After watching this special, I did a little bit of research on how often people find snakes in their toilets. Although I only could find three cases in which families have found snakes (mainly pythons) in their toilets, there are other people who have found other types of animals in their toilets. For example, there was one case in which an iguana climbed into the toilet. In another case, a squirrel, who had also somehow managed to climb up through the pipes, ended up scratching a lady when she sat down on the toilet."

If you think Suzuki's Drop is going to scare the shit out of you, maybe you'd better read it in a library.

RC
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Google Plans to Toss Chrome Through MS's Windows

A major clash is shaping up on the battlefield called netbooks, the compact, stripped-down, lower priced portable computers that are thriving while larger PCs falter. The combatants are Google and Microsoft, and the prize is dominance over the consumer's choice of operating systems.

It will truly be a clash of titans. Microsoft sits like a Goliath on the throne, but none too securely as Google seeks to unseat Windows. Google's Web browser strategy (which they dub "cloud computing") has caught Microsoft flat-footed in a number of skirmishes but this is nothing less than full-out war because it determines which operating system businesses will choose. So, if you have a storm cellar, proceed to it and stay there until you hear the all-clear.

Google's weapon of choice is called the Chrome Operating System, and two of the company's executives posted a statement on the company's blog characterizing Chrome's virtues as "Speed, simplicity and security," according to Miguel Helft and Ashlee Vance of the New York Times. "Google released Chrome last year, describing it as not only a Web browser but also a tool to let users interact with powerful Web programs like Gmail, Google Docs and online applications created by other companies."

An open-source license a la Linux (or Google's own Android) will enable outside programmers to work their ideas into the OS.

"To combat these efforts," the Times writers point out, "Microsoft began offering its older Windows XP operating system for use on netbooks at a low price. In addition, the company has vowed that its upcoming Windows 7 software, due out this fall, will run well on the tiny laptops, which have stood out as the brightest part of the PC market during the global economic downturn. Microsoft’s current Vista operating system is designed for more powerful machines."

Here's the full story: Google Plans a PC Operating System.

Richard Curtis
Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by New York Times.

First Half of '09: Borders Up 820%. No Typo. No Decimal Point. No Kidding.

In one of the most astounding turnarounds in recent memory, Publishers Weekly's Stock Index soared 23.9% in the first six months of 2009 according to Reed Business Information. The Dow Jones Average for the same period dropped 3.7%.

Leading the recovery from the Death Valley Days of '08's holiday season was Borders. Had you been shrewd enough, or crazy enough, to buy Borders stock at the end of last year when it lay moribund at 40 cents, you'd have been sitting pretty on June 30th with shares valued at $3.68, a bounce of 820%. Other retailers prospered too. Books-A-Million shares rose 178.8% and Barnes & Noble 37.5%. The latter is ironic, given B&N Chairman Len Riggio's lament in November that the holiday season was the worst he'd seen in three decades, and he saw little light in the tunnel for 2009.

It's hard to say what accounts for the rebound. Obviously, financial pundits underestimated the staying power of printed books. That's an understandable error in view of activity in the high-flying e-book sector, which may have instilled Print Is Dead pessimism in investors. Or it may simply be that retailer stocks were simply way underpriced and primed for a correction.

Whatever the explanation, the numbers are encouraging if not inspiring, and we're particularly happy to welcome Borders back to the land of the living. Hey publishers, you can start shipping to Borders again!

Check out the stats in Retailers Enjoy Big Bounce.

RC

Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Reed Business Information and Publishers Weekly.

Google Decides Gmail Works, Drops Beta Notice

If they told us that the National Academy of Sciences had finally adopted Archimedes' Principle, we could not have been more surprised to learn that Gmail was still in beta until yesterday. Google's fine-print notice that Gmail was still in beta had become so much a part of the screen's landscape that we stopped noticing it. Like the Londoner who awoke with a start one night when Big Ben failed to toll and exclaimed "What the hell was that?", a colleague shouted "Something's wrong!" yesterday when he gazed at his Gmail screen. He finally realized the beta notice had, at long last, disappeared.

What's behind it? Miguel Helft, writing about it in the New York Times, notes that there are two answers. The obvious one, stated by Matthew Glotzbach, a product management director at Google, is that "we haven’t had a consistent set of policies or definitions around beta.”

With Google, however, things are seldom simple or obvious, and Helft sussed out a more cogent underlying motive:"It could help the company’s efforts to get the paid version of Google Apps adopted inside big companies, where Google is trying to compete with rival offerings from Microsoft and others."

The word "compete" must be taken with a grain or two of salt. "Mr. Glotzbach said Google Apps was being used by roughly 1.75 million businesses," Helft writes "though most have little more than a handful of users. In all, Google claims that about 15 million people are using the service and that several hundred thousand of those pay for it at a cost of $50 a year for each user. By comparison, Microsoft Office has more than 450 million paid customers." [italics ours]

In case you failed to notice the removal of Google's beta notice and want to to learn what's behind it, click on After Five Years, Gmail Finally Sheds the ‘Beta’.

Richard Curtis
Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by New York Times.

Photo: Reuters/Jim Young

Inscribe-It: Personalized Paperbacks From E-Reads

This summer, E-Reads is proud to announce that 20 of our best-selling titles are now available in very special editions where you can order them to be printed with your own unique dedication messages and photos, thanks to the Inscribe-It services by Shared Book™, a new E-Reads distribution partner.

E-Reads uses Shared Book to provide consumers with the opportunity to make their favorite books even more valuable and special through the addition of personalized pages. These custom creations allow the reader's affinity for the book to increase with the new version, an on-demand one-of-a-kind rarity. Simply type your own dedication and upload a picture from your computer when you shop for your book online at our Shared Book print-on-demand webstore.

What does the service cost? Actually, nothing! It's included in the regular price of the book, and they have free shipping in the U.S.!

Among the titles presently available are our best-selling books by Greg Bear, Janet Dailey, Bill Dietz, Dave Duncan, Hannah Howell and John Norman. What are you waiting for? Buy your personalized, one-of-a-kind editions today! (Click here)

Siren Song of Subscription Lures Investors to Their Dooms

We know that information is gold. But for those who believe they have found a way to sell information that can be accessed for nothing, the ore may be fool's gold. And the list of alchemists trying to do it is pretty impressive: News Corp boss Rupert Murdoch, NBC Universal CEO Jeff Zucker, ACI CEO Barry Diller, MediaNews Group CEO Mary Junck, and a whole host of magazine, press and media lords for whom experience does not seem to have triumphed over cockeyed optimism. Diller categorically assets categorically that "People will pay for content. They always have...I absolutely believe the Internet is passing from its free phase into a paid system."

Jon Fine, blogging in Business Week's MediaCentric online column, describes two new ventures, Journalism Online and ViewPass, whose founders seem confident they can roll back the Information Wants to be Free tide that is swamping the newspaper and magazine businesses. Though he approaches the schemes with some well founded skepticism ("Too good to be true?"), Fine nevertheless sees how a subscription model just might work this time. The key is something called Freemium, which sounds like a blend of gasolines but is actually a blend of concepts:

" The preferred terms du jour describe "premium" offerings, or even, forgive them, 'freemium,' given the blend of free and paid. The dream dancing through some executives' heads involves a hybrid model: maintaining much or all existing free traffic while charging some subscribers fees for certain offerings, then using data from these users' browsing habits to help sell ultra-targeted -- and thus higher-priced -- advertising."

Fine points out that for any of these "moonshots" (his word) to work, "publishers would have to agree on a platform, consumers would have to use it, and then, most importantly, companies would have to buy ads." What he leaves out is the most important condition of all: ironclad security against the predations of hackers and file-sharing freemongers. If a digital illiterate can penetrate a subscription website (see A Google-Fu Master Unlocks the Wall Street Journal. Or, How I Know Subscription Model Won't Work), what can an army of determined geeks accomplish?

Nevertheless, we wish these enterprising business men and woman success and godspeed. I have instructed my stockbroker to buy shares in the first newspaper or magazine that can demonstrate a truly foolproof subscription model. As he's fond of reminding me, though, there are an awful lot of fools out there.

RC
Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Business Week.
Painting by Herbert James Draper

Can't Sue for Libel in US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World

Next time you visit London, if you have an hour or two after visiting London Bridge, Westminster Palace and Big Ben, drop by a solicitor's office and sue someone for libel. It will more than pay for the cost of your vacation.

When you do, you'll be participating in the blood sport known as libel tourism, a legal ploy so appalling that victims have described it as a form of terrorism.

What's it all about? "Unlike in the United States, where plaintiffs have to prove that the defendant's statement is willfully false and defamatory," writes Salil Tripathi in Wall Street Journal Europe, "the burden of proof is reversed in Britain. According to U.K. libel laws, the plaintiff has to show only that the statement harms his reputation -- which is the case with almost any accusation, true or false. It is the defendant who must then prove that his allegations were not libelous."

Because of this radical difference between the British (guilty until proven innocent) and American (innocent until proven guilty) approaches to libel, American authors and publishers and their lawyers have deliberately withheld UK publication rights to many books that might give offense to rich and/or powerful persons or entities that might bring a lawsuit in a British court. If you have any doubts that this is a sword hanging over the neck of every author and journalist, some examples will erase them. You can find them in Tripathi's article or this one in the New York Times, Britain, a destination for "libel tourism" by Doreen Carvajal.

If you're wondering why I've refrained from identifying the plaintiffs it's because, frankly, I'm afraid of being sued. This blog is read worldwide and it's all too likely that some litigious bastard who objects to being called - well, a litigious bastard - would take offense and haul me into a British court, tie me up for years and bankrupt me with legal bills (including the plaintiff's) and damages.

So, you see, this cruel, stupid and toxic provision of English law has done its job on me, just as it will do on you should you venture over the line. And what does "venture over the line" mean? It means that if even a single copy of your US edition finds its way to English soil, you're potentially liable.

Recently, two New York State officials proposed a bill that would render foreign libel judgments unenforceable "unless," as it was reported, "the country in which they are made had free speech protections similar to the First Amendment." And the New York Times ran an editorial supporting such a measure. "If authors believe they are too vulnerable," the editorial concluded, "they may be discouraged from taking on difficult and important topics, like terrorism financing, or from writing about wealthy and litigious people. That would not only be bad for writers, it would be bad for everyone."

The citizens of our nation have made terrible sacrifices, include the shedding of their blood, to defend our Constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech. That a foreign country, let alone the very one in which the foundations of democracy were forged, could have a license to reach into our homes and workplaces and deprive us of our most sacred right is intolerable and unconscionable. I wish I could say it is also unimaginable, but in fact this outrage is being perpetrated on our countrymen - on your fellow authors - as I write this. Every writer, agent and publisher organization must combat it. The British laws that foster this disgrace must be repealed. What is the Authors Guild, the American Publishers Association, the Association of Authors' Representatives, the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN and other rights organizations doing about it?

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

Mutant Pirates Test a Space Diplomat's Skills to the Limit

Thousands of years in the future, Paula Mendoza, an adventurous woman diplomat from Earth, takes on mutant space pirates in an effort to bring peace to the solar system. Devious and practical, she plunges herself into the mutant world, where people like her are slaves and brute force is everything, and triumphs by her wits. Cecilia Holland's Floating Worlds, first published in 1976 and heavily influenced by the Cold War, still reads like right now, in the clash of personal ambition and cultural values, the underhanded politics and the threat of a collapsing environment.

RC

A Posy of Western Romances by Heidi Betts

Heidi Betts began her love affair with the romance genre in junior high school, where she used to sneak romance novels into study hall when she should have been doing her homework. It didn't take long to decide she wanted to write a few romances of her own, so she set out to do just that. Her first book, Cinnamon and Roses, was released by Dorchester Publishing in January 2000, with five more western historicals following in the next three years. E-Reads is happy to bring them all back to you, both as e-books and paperbacks.

In Cinnamon and Roses, Caleb Adams find himself out of Rebecca's league. She's a fatherless seamstress with no business in the wealthy, extravagant city life of Caleb. Yet, the more he scandalizes her small Kansas cowtown, the more she pines for his raw male allure. Now Caleb finds himself less interested in the beautiful rich women of his past and more obsessed with Rebecca's innocent scent of cinnamon and roses. Will her fear of mothering a baby doomed to a fatherless upbringing and his fear of entrusting his heart to women be erased when their mutual desire is fulfilled?

In December 2003 Heidi began writing her sexy contemporary romances for Silhouette's Desire line, and last year she launched a delightful trilogy of contemporaries for St. Martins. Visit her website HeidiBetts.com.

Is Gazing at Your Blackberry Grounds for Divorce?

Let's test your RQ - your rudeness quotient. On a scale of 1= No Problem and 10=Hanging at Dawn Without Benefit of a Trial, rate the following:

• You go to a business lunch and your dining companion puts a BlackBerry on the table and checks it compulsively throughout the meal.
• While you're conducting a seminar you notice that half the attendees are staring at smartphones and some are working them with their thumbs.
• You're out on a date and you reach out to grasp your lover's hand, but there's a cell phone in it.
• Your wife is discussing resort plans for your second honeymoon. She asks you something important. You ask her to repeat what she said because you were too absorbed checking fantasy baseball scores on your Palm Pre.
• The bored concertgoer beside you is checking his email during a tender pianissimo passage of your favorite symphony.

These vignettes exemplify an evolving crisis in etiquette prompted by a new generation of smartphones and other handheld communication devices. New York Times reporter Alex Williams has chronicled the challenge of holding the social fabric together while gamers, bloggers, tweeters, and email checkers succumb to the temptation, if not the compulsion, to indulge their private pursuits in public.

Obviously your RQ depends on which side of the device you're on. "A spirited debate about etiquette has broken out" Williams writes. "Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril." Like it or not, the field is tilting in the direction of the techno-evangelists. Williams reports that a third of some 5300 workers pulled by a job listings website said "they frequently checked e-mail in meetings." However, out of those that do, "Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices."

You may be lucky to get away with mere castigation. Employees have been fired when caught using their device frivolously. Business leaders instruct attendees to turn off all electronic devices at meetings on pain of ostracism or worse, and visitors to President Obama's Oval Office are required to leave their BlackBerrys with his secretary (though its well known the President himself is addicted to his). Fistfights have broken out in theaters over cellphones ringing at critical moments in a performance.

And inappropriate use of a device can be fatal. A growing number of car crashes involved drivers talking on cellphones or looking at text message screens, and these practices are being banned in several states. A fatal train accident in California was traced to the engineer's being distracted by text messages.

And concentration on the screen of your gadget instead of the eyes of your beloved is wreaking havoc in relationships and can contribute to breaking up. On the other hand, if you're determined to break up with someone, a cell phone can come in handy. A Malaysian government official notified his wife that he was divorcing her - via cell phone. (An Islamic court overruled him, but nice try, huh?)

You can read both sides of the debate in Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners. Then let's review the score on our RQ quiz. How'd you do?

Richard Curtis

Every blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Authors: Are Your Readers Zoning Out on You? It May Not Be Your Fault

Like many publishing professionals I've trained myself to step outside of my mind while I read a manuscript and monitor the intensity of my involvement in the work. In a perfect reading experience my disbelief, in the famous phrase of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, will be willingly suspended from beginning to end and I will never become conscious that there is a world outside of the one I am reading about. Unfortunately, perfect reading experiences are as rare as perfect experiences in every other field of endeavor.

And so, sooner or later as I turn the pages of a manuscript, I will become aware of a police siren or the sound of a television program in the next room, and the spell of the book I'm reading will be broken. If it's a good book I'll plunge back in and soon lose myself again. If it isn't, my monitor will sound with growing frequency. I will make a mental note of the places where my attention flagged so that I can help the author analyze where he or she lost me.

Non-professional readers - the public at large, that is - may not have the same powers of self-observation, but they have little trouble speaking up when a book fails to hold their attention. "Boring." "Couldn't finish it." "Put it down, never picked it up again."

In most cases the responsibility for failure to keeping readers interested rests with the author. But not always. An article by Carl Zimmer in Discover magazine informs us that distractability is far more normal than we may realize. Zimmer cites an experiment conducted by a team of University of California Santa Barbara psychologists led by Jonathan Schooler. The test had to do with a book, and not just any book: "In 2005 he and his colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opeing chapters of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On average, the students reported that their minds wantered 5.4 times in a 45-minute session."

Wandering minds are one things, but zoning out completely is quite another. Here's what Schooler and his colleagues discovered:

"Schooler and Smallwood, along with Merrill McSpadden of the University of British Columbia, tested the effect of zoning out by having a test group read a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which a villain used a pseudonym. As people were reading the passages discussing this fact, the researchers checked their state of attentiveness. Just 30 percent of the people who were zoning out at the key moments could give the villain’s pseudonym, while 61 percent of the people who weren’t zoning out at those moments succeeded."

One of the most striking discoveries repoat imbibing a moderate amount of alcohol actually sharpened concentration. However, before you reach for the vodka bottle, note that there is evidence that a wandering mind offers many significant benefits. "The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks," Zimmer explains. "One is known as the executive control system. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals."

"The other regions belong to another network called the default network. In 2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered that this network was more active when people were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future."

So, next time you find your mind drifting off while reading a book, it is appropriate for you to ask yourself whether it's the author's fault for failing to keep you involved; or is it, rather, just you reflecting on a matter of great importance or solving a problem you couldn't master before you started reading.

For the full story, read Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Discover magazine.

How Swede It is! Pirate Site Sold, New Owners Vow To Go Legit

Global Gaming Factory has acquired buccaneer file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, whose operators were sentenced to fines and jail terms after being convicted of copyright infringement. Both companies are Swedish.

The price is close to $8 million. The fines levied on the four owners of the pirate site totaled $14 million, suggesting that crime does pay but not enough to cover losses. The pirates generated enough public sympathy to win a seat in the Swedish legislature, however.

Eric Pfanner, writing in the New York Times, reports that the new owners hope "to turn it into a legal source of free music, movies and other content, using a novel, untested business model." The model? "He envisions charging Internet service providers. The Pirate Bay could also generate revenue from advertising." The new company's owner assures us there will be no further violation of copyrights: “'It has to be legal from Day 1,'” says Hans Pandeya. “'We are on the stock market; we can’t start playing games.'”

Well, Mr. Pandeya, as the old Swedish proverb goes, lots of luck.

RC

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.