Best publicity stunt of the day: Lemony Snicket and Seth collaborate on new series

Quill & Quire is not in the habit of publishing emails, but this one demands sharing.

This afternoon, Q&Q was blind-copied on a correspondence between Vikki VanSickle, marketing and publicity coordinator at HarperCollins Canada, and the curmudgeonly children’s author Daniel Handler, better known as Lemony Snicket. The email revealed the “confidential” news that HarperCollins Canada is publishing a four-book series by Snicket, with illustrations by Canadian artist Seth.

From Lemony Snicket:

From: LemonySnicket
Sent: Wednesday, February 08, 2012 11:43 AM
To: Vansickle, Vikki
Subject: RE: Lemony Snicket Announcement – CONFIDENTIAL

My Dear Ms. VanSickle,

As I have already explained at length to you and others in this publishing conspiracy: no.

Take this press release back, please. I have attached it here. I have sympathy for anyone wanting to promote my work, but none of this information can be released.

In particular, I do not want to see this press release distributed to the list of people I’ve taken care to blind copy above. May they remain forever blind to any information about myself or my work.

These books are questionable and contain questions. I, for one, question why anyone would be interested in reading them.

And have the decency to leave Seth out of it. He has enough trouble as a celebrated artist imprisoned in a basement studio in some wretched university town, not to mention the fact that he’s Canadian.

I would appreciate it if you didn’t contact me again. I’ll be in my office until 4.

With all due respect,

Lemony Snicket

The email was accompanied by a “press release” with a placeholder for a quote from Seth (“if and when he recovers from the trauma of your last encounter”), and a marked-up version of the cover.

The official press release, which arrived 15 minutes later, confirmed that the first book in Snicket’s series, Who Could That Be at This Hour?, will be available in ebook and print formats on Oct. 23.

Publishing at the polls: federal parties respond to arts and culture questions

The Canadian Conference of the Arts sent leaders of the five federal parties a series of questions pertaining to arts and culture, and have posted the responses on its website. All of the parties responded, except for the Conservatives.

The answers are published without edits, and in a handy table format so you can compare responses. Of particular interest are questions pertaining to the Copyright Modernization Act:

Which elements of Bill C-32 will your party keep, and which elements of the bill will your party remove or change in a new bill to modernize the Copyright Act?

Bloc Québécois: The Bloc Québécois will ensure that the new bill is fair to both creators and consumers. This balance must be achieved, most notably through: an upgraded system for private copying, applying to Mp3 players and other digital music players; reasonable royalties to artists for redistribution of their works; the abolition of the education exemption and fair recognition of the resale rights of visual artists.

The Bloc Québécois is committed to fostering a regime requiring ISPs to pay royalties, which will go towards a fund to pay creators in Quebec who have been harmed due to the illegal downloading of artistic works.

Conservative Party:

Green Party: The Green Party of Canada strongly supports artists’ rights to guaranteed fair compensation through fair patent and copyright laws. At the same time, we consider the digital lock provision in Bill C-32 to be excessively restrictive in that it will not allow students and journalists to properly create and conduct research.

We will work with the CCA and other stakeholders to sharpen the definition of “educational uses” to find the right balance to give researchers this ability in a manner consistent with a thriving information commons, fair dealing principles, and moral rights.

Liberal Party: Recent studies have shown that Canada’s out-of-date Copyright Act translates into major economic loss (up to $965 million lost last year due to piracy, according to an Ipsos/Oxford economics study) for Canadian creators all across the country; the Liberal Party will thus start working on presenting a modernized copyright act as soon as we form government. Bill C-32, the latest Conservative attempt to modernize copyright, was unbalanced and unfair; a Liberal government will work with all stakeholders to ensure creators rights and their sources of revenues are protected under the Copyright Act.

Digital technology offers many new opportunities, but enjoying content without compensating its creators shouldn’t be among them. A new Liberal government will introduce technology neutral copyright legislation that balances the needs of creators and consumers and reflects the principle that our artists and musicians should be paid for their work. We will stand with Canadian creators as they navigate both the opportunities and challenges of the new digital society.

During the debate on copyright legislation in the last Parliament, it was the Liberal Party that developed a practical solution to providing musicians with compensation through a new private copying compensation fund rather than a levy. A Liberal government will look to develop similarly innovative solutions to ensure that the Copyright Act protects creators’ existing and future rights and revenue streams in a digital age. Likewise, the Liberal party believes that any exception under fair dealings must be clearly defined with a clear and strict test for fair use so that creators are fairly compensated for their work.

NDP: In reviewing Bill C-32, New Democrats would closely examine a number of key issues contained in the proposed legislation, including (but not limited to) ISP liability, Technological Protection Measures (TPMs, or so-called “digital locks”), statutory damages, private copying and reproduction for private purposes, broadcast mechanical licensing and fair dealing.

In order to arrive at an equilibrium between the interests of rights-holders and those of consumers, New Democrats would likely begin developing new copyright laws, beginning by consulting widely with stakeholder groups with the aim of creating a legislation that is – unlike C-32 – truly technology-neutral, balanced and flexible enough to ensure its adaptability to new platforms and technologies in the years to come. We would also determine definitively Canada’s obligations as a signatory to various international treaties governing copyright and intellectual property.

And when you’re done reading all the responses, reward yourself with a visit to vintagevoter.ca.

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.
(more…)

Book biz round-up: Canada’s poor copyright rep, and more

• Canada lands on the International Intellectual Property Alliance’s priority watch list as “haven” for international piracy organizations
• All-nighter term papers just got a lot trickier: design flaw at University of Calgary’s new state-of-the-art library leaves book stacks off-limits until end of summer
• Saudia Arabian book club’s discussion of Blink a sign of impending youth revolt?
• Authors’ #whyIwrite hashtag trends on Twitter
• Funny or Die will launch publishing arm this summer. Fingers crossed for tell-all memoir by Pearl the landlord

Iraqi books reintroduced abroad

An established Iraqi bookseller and publishing house, al-Muthanna Library, has released its 2009—10 list of titles for sale abroad. Publishing Perspectives reports that new Iraqi books have not appeared on international markets for years.

Al-Muthanna — like much of Iraq’s once-thriving bookselling industry — suffered in the last decades, from the 1980-88 Iran-Iraq War, to the Gulf War, a decade of sanctions, an unexplained fire that burned down the [store] in 1999, and the chaos and violence in Iraq since 2003. As of last year, there was some uncertainty about how much of their distribution business they could eventually recover.

Now, al-Muthanna offers 609 new titles in Arabic (with some Kurdish and Syriac) for shipment from Baghdad to North America, Europe, and the U.K.

Daily book biz round-up: Lansens on 24; iPad bolsters piracy; and more

• Lori Lansens proves it certainly doesn’t hurt sales to have a Hollywood husband
• Amazon’s Kindle division gathers the troops to compete with Apple
• Does the iPad encourage e-book piracy? Wired says, “Kinda”
• MobyLives picks the five best indie book trailers
• Digitalbookworld analyzes how much money can be made from book-related iPhone apps
• Katherine Govier on how to keep in touch while writing

The publishing industry – this week in quotes

“We are not going to be stripped of our heritage for the benefit of a big company, no matter how friendly, big or American it is. We are not going to be deprived of what generations and generations have produced in the French language just because we weren’t capable of funding our own digitisation project.” – Nikolas Sarkozy, on France vs. Google, in The London Telegraph

“Poets always react to one another’s work. One generator of great poetry is the response of one poet to a provocative poem by another. That’s how the conversation with the past and tradition occurs, but it’s also how the conversation with the present occurs.” – poet A.F. Moritz, on editing The Best Canadian Poetry (Tightrope Books) in the National Post

“Numerous books, which aren’t available electronically, end up pirated. Attempting to prevent piracy by not making a book electronically available won’t stop the book from showing up as a pirated material, but it will show a lack of willingness to meet the demands of a hungry audience.” – P. Bradley Robb, responding to Sherman Alexie’s appearance on the Colbert Report, on Fiction Matters

“Doug may not recall this, but I remember him strolling into our art department at St. Martin’s Press in New York, looking (aside from the preppy sweater) like any of the other young, jeans-clad designers there. He was quiet spoken and it was the most casual of exchanges, but seeing him added a slight electrical charge to the project: he was our age. One of us. Books quite like this – about, conceived and designed by twentysomethings – hadn’t come around very often. Let’s face it, ever. There was a moment of glee as I realized the possibilities. I could go to town with the design or deliberately underplay, knowing that the team would’”get’ whatever cultural references I toyed with.” – Book designer Judith Stagnitto Abbate on designing Generation X, from the CBC Canada Reads blog

As e-book sales soar, so does piracy

“Hardcover sales of my last book were down 20 percent, while e-book sales were up 300 percent.” That’s what thriller writer John Lescroart told the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently, although he also referred to himself as “a hold-a-book-in-your-hands kind of guy.” The Post-Gazette article also quotes Cinthia Portugal, a spokesperson for Amazon.ca, as saying that the company now sells 48 Kindle books for every 100 physical books, which is up from 35 for every 100 in May. Moreover, a representative of Forrester, a business consulting firm, predicted sales of e-readers would reach three million this year, compared to one million last year.

Though certain market segments have predictably rushed to embrace the new technology, others are just as predictably suspicious of it. Guess which of the following, also quoted by the Post-Gazette, is a retired computer trainer and which is a retired librarian:

I bought a Kindle e-reader last year and really love it…. I can adjust the text size, [the screen] causes no eye strain. It’s lightweight and very portable. And it’s almost too easy to buy a new book. I will never go back to paper books.

vs.

I cannot bear the thought of technology to read a book…. I love bookstores and libraries too much. Ingesting the words off the pages and enjoying even the smell of books are wonderful sensations. Truly, books rule!

The group that remains resistant to electronic books may have one legitimate area of concern: according to a recent article in The Times, U.S. publishers estimate they lost $600 million to digital piracy last year. The article states that even before Dan Brown’s new novel, The Lost Symbol, was published, there were pirated versions available for download. Within days of its official publication, the novel had been illegally downloaded more than 100,000 times. The Times article continues:

George Walkley, digital strategy director for Hachette Livre U.K., the biggest publisher in Britain, said that while the e-book business was booming, with a 300 per cent increase in titles available in the last year, so was piracy.

Some books, such as the Harry Potter series, were being pirated because they were not available in digital format and there was “frustrated demand,” he said. But all popular authors faced the prospect of illegal copies of their works being circulated on the internet.

Digital evangelists would likely say this is just the cost of doing business online, but publishers can be forgiven for worrying, particularly given the experiences of the music and movie industries. But if e-books aren’t going away, neither are the digital pirates. Russell Davis, president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America was quoted in The New York Times last May as saying, “It’s a game of Whac-a-Mole…. You knock one down and five more spring up.”

Bookmarks: porn, piracy, and the Google book settlement

Some book-related links:

• Best thing about an e-reader? You can read smut, and no one has to know
• On a similar note: the top ten most pirated e-books of 2009 (#1: the Kamasutra; #2: Adobe Photoshop Secrets – ewww…)
• Sony and Amazon fight the Google Book settlement
• Google’s Book Search is crap for scholars, by the way
• CBS developing new sitcom set in the publishing industry (insert punchline and canned laughter here)
• Model’s autobiography tops Travelodge’s “books left behind index” (just ahead of Barack Obama’s Dreams from My Father)
  

Arrr! J.K. Rowling and John Grisham fall victim to pirates

Two of the planet’s bestselling authors, J.K. “I’ll kick Stephenie Meyer’s ass” Rowling and John Grisham, are among several authors whose books have apparently been illegally uploaded to a San Francisco-based website that promotes itself as “YouTube for books.” Scribd.com was launched by a couple of twentysomething Harvard students, and has since become an attraction for a reported 55 million visitors each month. While the site boasts a number of legal uses – the Obama campaign used it to upload policy material and thereby sidestep media filters – it now looks to have succumbed to the “Napster effect,” whereby copyrighted works are uploaded without permission and distributed for free.

An article in The Times online reports:

A search of Scribd by The Times yesterday found copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Ken Follett’s most recent novel World Without End among many bestselling titles, raising fears that the piracy affecting the music industry may have spread to books.

When presented with a list of links to various Harry Potter books, Neil Blair, J. K. Rowling’s lawyer at the Christopher Little literary agency, said that Scribd did not have permission “and what you have identified are infringing listings which we were aware of and actioning”.

The online culture of disseminating information online for free (Quillblog finds it interesting that the word “crib” appears in Scribd’s name) has also been taken on recently by The Globe and Mail‘s Peter Scowen. Scowen writes that the culture of “free” threatens the traditional means by which authors and other content creators earn their living, which seems irrefutable, but it’s open to debate as to whether the solution is to rage against the machine or try to adapt traditional methods of doing business to the new reality.

Scowen’s specific target is the upcoming Book Summit, “Giving It Away: Books, Business, and the Culture of Free.” The conference, sponsored by Humber College and the Book and Periodical Council, is an opportunity for publishers, writers, booksellers, and other interested parties to “learn about the opportunities, the pitfalls, the marketing techniques, the delivery methods, the creators, the readers” that can be tapped by properly utilizing the “culture of free.” The cost of the summit is $145.