Publishing at the polls: Copyright reform

As Canadians head to the polls on May 2, Q&Q looks at key federal policies affecting the publishing industry. Stay tuned for upcoming features on federal funding, mass digitization, and foreign-ownership regulations.

After nearly a year of parliamentary hearings and heavy industry lobbying, Bill C-32, the Copyright Modernization Act, succumbed to a sudden death on March 26, when the latest Canadian federal election was called.

For nearly a decade, publishers, authors, and other content creators have lived without a copyright act that takes into account the realities of a digital economy. Bill C-32 was the federal government’s third attempt to update the legislation. To get a sense of how outdated Canada’s current laws are, the last copyright reform, passed in 1997, instituted a levy on cassette tapes. It will now be up to the new government to table yet another copyright bill — and successfully get it passed for there to be meaningful reform.

As Canadians head to the polls once again on May 2, Q&Q spoke to several publishing copyright advocates about the lessons learned from Bill C-32.
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Daily book biz round-up: March 18

• The Globe and Mail’s Doug Saunders’ Arrival City “couldn’t be more timely” according to The New York Times
• How I wish this were an Onion headline
• Novelist Alison Pick proves some authors are still loyal to their publishers in Open Book Toronto’s Questionless Books interview
• Ten Canadians make the LAMBDA Literary Awards shortlist
• Looking at earthquakes through literature
• Margaret Atwood on e-books

Links round-up: Atwood circa 1975, Rumsfeld, and more

Today’s links round-up, video edition:

• TVO launched its digital archive this week. Check out Mike McManus’s 1975 interview with Margaret Atwood about her book Lady Oracle. An Atwoodian gem from the video: “Remember I’m old. I’m 36”
• Donald Rumsfeld was on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart to talk about his new memoir, Known and Unknown. Things got awkward, sidestepping ensued
• MacMillan has made this promo to show how their enhanced textbooks work in the Inkling app
• Remember The Great Gatsby Nintendo game? Check out its sister, Waiting for Godot: The Video Game
• Warning: if you watch “organizing the bookshelf” you’ll want, nay need, a dance break

Daily book biz round-up: Oprah likes Dickens; Atwood likes Wilkie Collins; and more

Today’s book news:

• Oprah chooses two Dickens classics for her book club
• PW names the notable newsmakers of 2010
• Borders may take over Barnes & Noble
• Margaret Atwood likes Wilkie Collins
• A new web hub for teenage authors is launched
• Natalie Portman wears Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, a handbag

Daily book biz round-up: Costa Book Award nominees; world’s best bookstores; and more

Today’s book news:

• Costa Book Award nominees announced
• Joyland Books, the e-book only imprint of ECW Press, releases its first Canadian-authored title: Chris Eaton’s Letters to Thomas Pynchon
• Lonely Planet names world’s 10 best bookstores
• Grand Central to publish Dan Rather memoir
• George Murray pesters Margaret Atwood (and demonstrates why interviews require questions)
• NPR on writing in exile

Atwood-bashing begins over “Fox News North”

Margaret Atwood is once again lending her name to a worthy cause, and like her support for the environment, brown-bag lunches, and stay-at-home book tours, the celebrated novelist’s actions have generated some mild controversy in the Canadian media.

The latest episode erupted on Tuesday when Atwood announced (via Twitter) that she had added her name to a petition protesting Sun Media’s efforts to launch a Fox TV-style news channel in Canada (the channel is being dubbed “Fox News North” and “Tory TV”). That immediately prompted a response, also via Twitter, from Sun Media national bureau chief David Akin accusing Atwood of supporting “an anti-free speech movement” and effectively accusing “me and my colleagues of hate speech.”

Atwood in turn replied that the issue isn’t about free speech per se, but rather Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s meddlesome involvement with the CRTC, which recently denied the network a top-tier broadcast licence. As Atwood puts it in fewer than 140 characters, “we shouldn’t B Forced to Pay for it, & CRTC chair should be arms’ length, not Harper tool. Fox free 2 set itself up.” She elaborates her position in The Globe and Mail:

“Of course Fox & Co. can set up a channel or whatever they want to do, if it’s legal etc.,” she told The Globe and Mail in an email. “But it shouldn’t happen this way. It’s like the head-of-census affair – gov’t direct meddling in affairs that are supposed to be arm’s length – so do what they say or they fire you.

“It’s part of the ‘I make the rules around here,’ Harper-is-a-king thing,” she wrote.

In today’s National Post, columnist Kelly McParland hits back with an editorial deriding Atwood for “sign[ing] onto this silliness.” Atwood, McParland writes, “stands for good stuff like freedom of speech and freedom of the press, except when it comes to the case of people who don’t agree with her…. Right Peggy? Because you can’t be a good Canadian if you’re a Conservative. Everyone at the CanLit festivals agrees, so it must be true.”

The Post‘s paranoid speculation about a left-leaning CanLit cabal is nothing new. Assuming that at least some of Quillblog’s readers will want to follow Atwood in rejecting Fox News North, you can do so by adding your name to the petition here.

Daily link round-up: Kindle regenerates, Atwood sings, and Pullinger prognosticates

Book links, getcher book links:

• To the surprise of absolutely no one, Amazon announces a new generation Kindle
• Margaret Atwood, indie rock star
• Gabriel Josipovici to McEwan, Rushdie, and Barnes: “You’re not worthy!”
• Carolyn Kellogg on The Great Gatsby video game: it’s no Grand Theft Auto
• National Library of Medicine gets grant to digitize 300,000 works from around the world
• Kate Pullinger on the future of the short story

Margaret Atwood among Edinburgh book fest headliners

Margaret Atwood is one of the big-name authors set to appear at this year’s revamped Edinburgh International Book Festival, which takes place Aug. 14–30. In a cross-festival program with the Edinburgh film festival, Atwood will engage architect Norman Foster in a conversation exploring the techniques used by filmmakers and writers for biographies, the Guardian reports. There’s a catch, however: in addition to the fact that Atwood and Foster are not, strictly speaking, biographers, the ever experimental Atwood will not appear in person, but via video hookup.

The popular fest, founded in 1983, is under the new direction of Nick Barley, who invited four guest “selectors” – Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, poet Don Paterson, literary editor Stuart Kelly, and Ruth Padel, the poet and great-great-granddaughter of Charles Darwin – to program this year’s event. From the Guardian:

Barley unveiled his first programme today, which features 750 authors. It includes a rare public appearance by Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau in conversation with Guardian cartoonist Steve Bell, three Nobel prize winners, including Joseph Stiglitz, the poet Seamus Heaney, the hairdresser Vidal Sassoon and an opening debate on Jesus between the atheist author Philip Pullman and former bishop of Oxford Richard Harries.

Other Canadians in attendance will include Emma Donoghue, Marina Endicott, Linden MacIntyre, Lisa Moore, Miguel Syjuco, Annabel Lyon, Doug Saunders, Jan Wong, Gwynne Dyer, and Leanne Shapton.

Daily book biz round-up: iPad security breach; on reading New Yorker fiction; and more

Book news pour vous:

• Early iPad adopters exposed to massive security breach
• Barbara Kingsolver wins Orange Prize
• Atwood to headline Frye Festival in 2011
• Only female candidate for Oxford professor of poetry position withdraws from race, citing “serious flaws” in election process
• Some Kindle titles more expensive in U.S. than in Canada
• Better writing through not linking
• On the joys and perils of reading The New Yorker‘s fiction selections
• The top ten bathroom reads

Etcetera and Otherwise wins book trailer award

The novel Etcetera and Otherwise, written by Sean Stanley and published by Tightrope Books, won Best Foreign Book Trailer at last week’s Moby Awards for book trailers, held in New York and hosted by Melville House and MobyLives blog owner Dennis Loy Johnson.

The novel tells the story of bookstore owner Otherwise, who embarks  on an erotic road trip with love interest Etcetera.  The New York Time’s books blog Paper Cuts describes it as:

A violently comic assault on Canadian literary lions done in a style that brings Margaret Atwood into a kind of north-of-the-border “South Park.” (Blame Canada indeed!)

That trailer also includes a line that itself deserves an award for Best Blurb: “This book decapitated Michael Ondaatje!”

Other book trailer award categories included Trailer Least Likely to Sell the Book, won by Sounds of Murder by Patricia Rockwell; Most Annoying Performance by an Author, won by Jonathan Safran Foer for Eating Animals; and Most Annoying Music, won by children’s book, New Year’s At the Pier by April Halprin Waylan.