EU proposes seven-year limit on Google

An independent panel of arts and communications experts has advised the European Commission to limit the amount of time a private company such as Google can exercise preferential use of digitized materials from the public domain.

Speaking at a press conference in Brusells yesterday, Androulla Vassiliou, EU commissioner for education and culture, said that Google’s current 15-year limit should be halved to seven years in order to encourage competition in both digitizing and commercializing digitized assets.

Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle reports that Google Books is currently the world’s biggest producer of digitized content of public domain works. In the six years that Google Books has been around, it has already digitized 15 million texts.

As the company responsible for the digitization of a work, Google is currently granted an extended period of preferential use throughout which access to the item is limited, in Google’s case, to a library’s website, noncommercial websites, or Google’s website. In pushing for the new limit, the panel is hoping for increased access for not-for-profit organizations, specifically Europeana, an online portal for digitized works of European arts and culture funded by the EU

According to The New York Times, the commission also recommended “direct[ing] more public funds to digitizing those works to increase educational resources and develop new businesses.”

The commission also suggested that that would offer value for money, as the funds needed to build 100 kilometers, or 62 miles, of roads would be enough to pay for the digitization of 16 percent of all available books in E.U. libraries.

Aussie readers asked for input about future of publishing

Last week, the Internet behemoth Google launched its e-book sales site, Google eBooks, in the U.S. The e-book market is now crowded with offerings from Amazon, Kobo, Apple, and Sony, which in turn has spawned a cottage industry for articles about the future of reading and the future of publishing. Amid all this cacophony, it’s small wonder publishers have responded to the rapidly diversifying marketplace with a mixture of fear and confusion.

In Australia, a consortium called the Book Industry Strategy Group is directly petitioning readers about their reading habits, desires, and preferences as a way of gaining clearer insights into the way forward. Writing in the Sydney Morning Herald, Barry Jones, chair of the BISG, states that the group is “seeking ideas from all Australians on how to face the challenges of the digital age, and to turn them into opportunities.” Jones suggests that opportunities lie in the flexibility and ready availability of e-books as against their print counterparts:

Where Amazon and Apple have got it right is the immediacy of purchasing an eBook. Both the Kindle and the iPad come with wireless connectivity to the Amazon and Apple stores, respectively. In the case of the Kindle, if you have an Amazon account, the Kindle comes preconfigured with your details so you can buy a book at 3am if you so desire. New York Times technology writer Nick Bilton calls this Me Economics, which is really just instant gratification in book buying. But it beats late-night television.

And although Jones throws a bone to those of us who still enjoy reading printed books (which he refers to as “pBooks”), it is clear that the digital arena is where he and his group are most invested:

And what about people who like the smell of books or the feel of books, or the cover artwork, or who just want to scribble over the pages? No, these sorts of people will mix up their reading habits and buy both pBooks and eBooks.

Public libraries are starting to offer access to eBooks via downloads or by access, by borrowers, to subscriptions taken out by the library. We want to hear about these initiatives and your experiences with them.

School kids will agree that carrying an eReader with all their textbooks on it beats carrying a heavy school bag with all their textbooks in it. And textbooks form a large part of the book industry in Australia. Can we hear your thoughts?

The public can submit comments and suggestions to the BISG until Jan. 31, 2011. One hopes that they will be slightly more innovative and nuanced than the sort of shopworn analysis Jones allows himself above.

Daily book biz round-up: book hunting on Google eBooks; when Franzen met Oprah; and more

Today’s book news:

• MobyLives goes book hunting on Google eBooks
• Salon’s Laura Miller picks the best fiction and non-fiction of 2010
• WikiLeaks defector writes tell-all book (but it’s in German, so don’t get too excited)
• EW on the long-awaited meeting of Franzen and Oprah
• Lisa Moore and Emma Donoghue make New Yorker‘s best of 2010 list

Jacob Scheier’s first rule of awards controversies: don’t talk about awards controversies

Governor General’s Literary Award–winning poet Jacob Scheier has weighed in on the Ali Smith/Giller Prize controversy on Now Magazine‘s website. As you may recall, Scheier himself was at the centre of an awards scandal after winning the GG in 2008, when it was discovered that jurors Di Brandt and Pier Giorgio Di Cicco had clear ties to both him and his collection, More to Keep Us Warm.

I [want] to draw a significant parallel between that controversy and this year’s Giller uproar, a parallel that holds true for many, if not every, literary award controversy.

What happens in these ‘controversies’ is the mainstream media jumps on conflict, regardless of the facts (or lack thereof), and stamps the words  ‘scandal’ in a big bold writing. They use these words, of course, to get us to read about it. If they could, with any legitimacy, add the word ‘sex’ to the headline, they would.

But I don’t blame media outlets for that. I blame the fiction writers and poets, the ones who fuel these dust-ups, by writing their speculations on their blogs and Facebook pages for the media to pick up.

[...]

I would urge all writers when they hear the siren sizzle of juicy gossip to stay off Facebook and blogs, and, if you have to, put that gossip where it belongs: into a good story.

Happy birthday, John le Carré

John le Carré, known for spy thrillers such as The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, turned 79 this Tuesday. According to MobyLives:

He’s since gone on to write some of the finest thrillers in the literature. And now, in his eightieth year, he’s still going strong. His new book, Our Kind of Traitor, is receiving rave reviews. In a review in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it, “a bullet-train of a thriller”, saying it’s “the author’s most thrilling thriller in years.”

Google Editions to launch before year’s end

Representatives from Google met with publishers at the Frankfurt Book Fair this week and revealed that the long-awaited Google Editions will debut (in the U.S., at least) this year, despite rumours to the contrary. According to The Bookseller:

Abraham Murray, product manager on Google’s Books team, said at launch in the U.S. there would be over 400,000 paid-for titles available from “publisher partners,” along with two million public domain titles, but that more titles would be made available once the service opened internationally [in 2011]. He said the company was working with more than 35,000 publisher partners, in more than 100 countries, and added that he hoped to launch in “much of Europe in first half of the following year.”

However, there are already signs that Google Editions might not be the saviour publishers were hoping for. Though Google plans to use the publisher-preferred agency pricing model, the Google rep admitted this was not a model Google had sought out and hinted that it might be subject to change:

“We will meet the needs of the market, and we are accepting the agency model in the U.S., but we haven’t gone after it, and as that plays out we will follow,” he said.

Daily book biz round-up: Oprah’s arrow points to Franzen again; Google mangles your literary faves; and more

Today’s book news:

• MobyLives says that Oprah is picking Freedom (We don’t know who to trust anymore!)
• President Obama to write dull-looking children’s book
• Amazon attacks iPad for being too shiny
• David Foster Wallace archive debuts today
• How Google Voice mangles literature’s most famous opening lines

Daily book biz round-up: Dorchester gives up; DeLillo speaks; and more

Today’s book news:

• Holy Cow! Dorchester Publishing goes digital-only
• Yikes! HuffPo takes on the 15 Most Overrated Authors
• Speaking of overrated: Don DeLillo gives rare interview
• Children’s book fund created in P. K. Page’s name
• R.I.P.: Tony Judt
• Google’s big book count? Probably bogus

Daily book biz round-up: Google counts books; Arsenal Pulp moves; and more

Today’s book news:

• Q: How many books are there are in the world? A: 129,864,880
• Is Amazon any different than the robber barons of old?
• Arsenal Pulp moves to new offices
• How Stieg Larsson turned Quercus into a playah
• ChiZine editors named guests of honor at World Horror convention
• Richard Price to adopt pseudonym for presumably trashy thriller series

Daily book biz round-up: Amazon’s bombshell, Kafka exposed, and more

• The news that e-books have topped hardcover sales at Amazon is rocking the publishing world…
• … But MobyLives questions some of the figures
• Andrew Nikiforuk becomes The Tyee‘s first writer-in-residence (via Canadian Magazines)
• Frank Kafka archive opened to prying eyes
• Disgraced historian Orlando Figes settles over fake Amazon reviews
• The BookLiberator allows every citizen to launch a Google-style mass digitization scheme