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.

Bookmarks (snobbery edition): judging someone by their books, picking the right reading wine, and more

Some book-related links:

• Judging a mate by his/her books (The New York Times)
• What wine goes with that book? (Stuff)
• Will Internet book piracy cause authors to stop writing? (Times Online)
• Settlement in sight for Greater Victoria Public Library (Times-Colonist)
• California librarian fired for alerting police to child-porn-watching patron (Los Angeles Times)
• Fiction’s famous fools (Brandenton Herald)

Secrets of the Canadian literary cabal

Stephen Henighan, known for his biting, if occasionally conspiracy-minded, commentary on the Canadian literary scene, takes aim at the Scotiabank Giller Prize in this column for Geist. Henighan calls the prize a symptom of the sickness ruining literature, saying, “Nothing signaled the collapse of the literary organism as vividly as the appearance of this glitzy chancre on the hide of our culture.” The column questions the prevalence of shortlisted books coming from publishers owned by the Bertelsmann Group, such as Knopf Canada, Random House Canada, and McClelland & Stewart (in which Bertelsmann has a 25% stake).

Henighan also makes much of Margaret Atwood’s connection to this year’s winner, Vincent Lam. Atwood helped Lam find a publisher and introduced the author at the gala. While his first observation, that “Margaret Atwood does not introduce losers,” holds some credence, he takes the point a little too far with his further comments. “By placing her authority behind Lam, she was giving the equivalent of el dedazo, the crook of the finger with which a Mexican president signals his successor.”

Quillblog’s favourite conspiratorial fact is Henighan’s observation that almost all Giller winners between 1994 and 2004 lived within a two-hour drive of Yonge and Bloor.

(Quillblog had been telepathically instructed by Margaret Atwood not to blog about this, but luckily we were able to briefly block her powerful brainwaves – emanating, of course, from the Yonge/Bloor epicentre – with our homemade tinfoil helmets.)

Exclusive: The 2006 Giller Conspiracy Runs Deep
Below is a photo of Margaret “El Dedazo” Atwood in a lineup with Giller jury member Michael “Mr. Tall” Winter. Was Vincent Lam’s Giller win arranged in the joint? Is Atwood Keyzer Soze?

(OK, it’s just an old Anansi ad, but suspicious nonetheless.)

What changed on the day that changed everything?

Five years ago, Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter declared that 9/11 marked the “death of irony.” Irony has proven rather hard to kill, however, and — somewhat ironically — it is right around this time of year that the little bugger seems to gain strength.

Take, for example, this column in The Australian by Rosemary Neil. Neil chooses to illustrate her thesis — that “in the post-9/11 era, truth has become more compelling than fiction” — with statistics showing “sales of adult fiction fell [in Australia] from 29 per cent of book sales in 2002-03 to 25 per cent of book sales in 2003-04.” (Wasn’t 2002-03 “post-9/11″?) And yet she also includes an interview with a publisher who says that “our fiction figures are better than they have been for a long time,” plus a look at some of the novelists who have incorporated themes of terrorism into their recent works… of fiction.

Even more puzzling is Neil’s conclusion:

“September 11 has highlighted how serious fiction no longer occupies the hallowed position it once did in our culture. Despite attempts by writers of the stature of McEwan and Updike, we still await the great novel about the 21st century’s age of terror.”

If serious fiction is not all that important any more, why are we waiting for that great novel? And if, as she also contends, escapism has become passé, why is it that when newly serious, non-escapist people do buy a novel, it is very often about an obscure Catholic conspiracy or a young wizard’s adventures at private school? And why did fiction wait for 9/11 to give up the ghost, when there were plenty of other, equally calamitous global upheavals throughout the past century that could have finished it off just as easily?

Irony may be flourishing, but perspective has certainly taken a hit.

(Thanks to the equally skeptical Literary Saloon for the link.)

Related links:
Read Rosemary Neil’s piece in The Australian

Mr. Mock-turtleneck and Blazer gets in trouble again

The world just can’t seem to leave its wealthiest conspiracy theorist alone. The latest incident in the Da Vinci Code money grab sees Mikhail Anikin, a Russian art historian, vying for a public apology and a slice of the Brown pie as compensation for Dan Brown’s alleged use of at least two of his theories in The Da Vinci Code. The theories in question hold that Leonardo Da Vinci was both a painter and a theologian and that his most famous painting, the Mona Lisa, is not a portrait so much as an encoded theological message on the state of the Christian Church that combines the images of both Jesus and the Virgin Mary. Anikin told the Agence France-Press that he shared these theories with colleagues in Texas, one of whom asked if he could impart the information to “a detective book author that he knew.” Anikin says he granted permission on the condition that the theory be attributed to him if used in one of the author’s books.

Anikin is threatening Brown with a lawsuit if compensation and an apology are not promised within the next couple of days. Keep up to date on the news with In Other Media, who finds that a happy side effect of all these lawsuits is that she can intelligently discuss DVC at cocktail parties, despite never having read the book.

Related links:
Click here for the story on the Book Standard website
Click here for the report on CBC.ca

Milk it!

With sales of upwards of 25 million copies and a broad readership that even includes In Other Media’s mother, who, as a rule, does not read books written in English, The Da Vinci Code truly is ubiquitous. As part of the media blitz leading up to the book’s North American paperback release on March 28, CBC Arts correspondent (and Q&Q contributing editor) Craig Taylor reports on the latest commercial venture to milk the popularity of Catholic conspiracy: a Da Vinci Code-themed walking tour through London.

The excursion is just one of 300 put on by London Walks, London’s premier touring company. Taking participants to landmarks featured in the book, the tour is not without its quirks. For example, Taylor writes of a tour guide named Tom who told “a story about the crowds when the walks first began. Fans with open copies of the book stood in front of him, ready to refute and point out any slight misquote….”

“As we move up to Fleet Street, I walk with Kevin Miller, a student from Philadelphia, who is looking confused. Is he struggling with the symbolic ramifications? ‘My whole trip has been a bit of a blur,’ he says. ‘Part of me thinks I’m still in Greece ’cause that’s where I was yesterday. I read the book ages ago and this seemed like a way of doing something I could tell my parents about.’ Are they conspiracy theorists, too? ‘No, it’s just I have to have something to tell them. I’m not going to be mentioning a lot of what I did in Greece.’”

Related links:
Click here for Taylor’s piece on the CBC Arts website

Authors Guild sues Google for copyright infringement

Representing more than 8,000 writers from across the United States, the Authors Guild is suing Google for “massive copyright infringement,” claiming damages and “demanding the search engine stop uploading the contents of library books,” James Sturcke of the Guardian reported yesterday.

“This is a plain and brazen violation of copyright law,” said the Authors Guild president, Nick Taylor. “It’s not up to Google or anyone other than the authors, the rightful owners of these copyrights, to decide whether and how their works will be copied.”

Google’s product management vice-president, Susan Wojcicki, says authors will be the ones losing out in the end. She claims the project will encourage the sales of books by making out-of-print, obscure, and lightly marketed titles accessible to millions of potential buyers, while preventing piracy with safeguards that include disabled copy and print functions. Says Wojcicki: “At most we show only a brief snippet of text where their search term appears, along with basic bibliographic information and several links to online booksellers and libraries.”

Related links:
Click here for the full story from the Guardian
Click here for a press release from the Authors Guild
Click here to access Google Print

From Giller glitz to Da Vinci decoding

With award season now having wound fully down, readers who missed Toronto Star columnist Philip Marchand’s post-Giller musings will find them worth a look. He writes: “Literary scholars have a word for those little parts of a book that really aren’t part of the book – footnotes, prefaces, indices, dedications. They call them ‘paratexts.’ In the same way, all this talk about books, prizes, public readings, is para-reading. Para-reading may coincide with the actual reading of a book, or may overlap a bit, or may entirely replace it.” From there, he’s off to a discussion of the biggest publishing phenomemon since Harry Potter – The Da Vinci Code. “If you took a survey of the guests at the Giller Prize dinner I would lay odds 80 per cent of them had read The Da Vinci Code. That’s more than the percentage of guests who had read any one of the six books nominated for the prize, you can be certain.” The reason for the book’s staggering success, Marchand suggests, is the spirit of the times, which are unusually friendly to conspiracy-minded imaginings of sinister governments and shadowy cabals of power.

In yesterday’s Star, publishing reporter Judy Stoffman looks at the latest attempt to extend the Da Vinci brand — a new, second hardcover edition, this one illustrated and selling for even more than the first. Random House of Canada’s Brad Martin tells Stoffman the company is “well under way to selling a combined half million copies in Canada of the two editions.”

Related links:
Philip Marchand’s Toronto Star column
Judy Stoffman’s story on The Da Vinci Code