Seen Reading busted by Indigo

In what has to qualify as the most absurd power-trip this Quillblogger has seen in a long, loooooong time, an overzealous Indigo employee apparently prevented Julie Wilson, administrator of the popular blog Seen Reading, from copying out a 50-word excerpt from one of the store’s books for her site.

For those unfamiliar with Seen Reading, Wilson, a publicist with House of Anansi Press by day, notices people reading in public, makes a note of the book and the approximate page number, goes to the store to copy a short excerpt from the text, and then posts the info, along with imagined pieces about the reader’s own life, on her site. For her troubles, she’s been profiled everywhere from rival literary site Bookninja.com to CBC Radio.

None of this counted for anything today, though. Wilson’s Facebook status, posted around noon, read “Julie Wilson just got schooled at Indigo for doing SR research. It’s a copyright vs cultural crisis. Simply can’t do it w/out them. What’s a girl to do?” When someone questioned her about it, she provided this explanation:

I’ve been questioned before, and the reaction to my explanation ranges from shrugging and walking away, or “Cool!!!” I’m always left alone. I’m discreet, and always go to a quiet corner. Today, I was told it’s illegal. Not untrue, but it’s a roadblock, for sure. (You can use passages for review purposes from purchased books only.) Clearly, not an option for me to buy hundreds of books a year.

Seems Wilson was caught up short by the Indigo staffer’s allegation that what she was doing was “illegal.” When she explained that excerpting 50 words from a novel-length text for the purpose of review or commentary falls under the fair dealing provisions of the Copyright Act, she was informed that it was only fair use if copied from a book that she owned. It’s illegal to do so from a book on Indigo’s shelf. (Which, by extension, would mean that it would also be illegal for Wilson to copy a passage from a library book, but let’s not split hairs.)

Wilson points out that she spotlights hundreds of books on her site each year, and that it’s not within a publicist’s budget to actually buy that many books. The independents have never given her a hard time, but don’t always have copies of the more mainstream material that often appears in the hands of the reading public.

The big blue monster of Canadian bookselling has been known to throw its weight around before, but this is just ridiculous. Wilson’s project helps sell books. Surely that’s something that even the folks at Indigo can support.

UPDATE: This post contains material that has been corrected. A number of commenters have pointed out that the provision in Canada refers to “fair dealing,” not “fair use,” as was originally written. Quillblog regrets the error.

Surprise! Fairy tales are not PC

According to an article in the Telegraph, a poll of 3,000 British parents found that parents are refusing to read “traditional” fairy tales to their children because they fear their kids will be “emotionally damaged.”

Little Red Riding Hood is avoided by a third of parents, because the heroine walks through the woods alone and is eaten by a wolf — irresponsible and nightmare-inducing. The Gingerbread Man is too scary because he, too, is eaten; dwarf references in Snow White are not PC; and Rapunzel is “too dark.”

Two-thirds of parents said traditional fairytales had stronger morality messages than many modern children’s stories.

But many said they were no longer appropriate to soothe youngsters before bed.

Parents instead prefer books like Eric Carle’s The Very Hungry Caterpillar (about a caterpillar with a voracious appetite), the Mr. Men series by Roger Hargreaves, and Aliens Love Underpants! by Claire Freedman (about aliens who want to steal pants, as there are no pants in space). It’s a relief to know that while these kids may grow up to be gluttonous, messy, lazy pants-stealers, at least they won’t be emotionally damaged.

Publishers fail to snap up book on Sarah Palin

In a vivid example of the dangers of writing history while it’s being made, the New York Observer reports that right-wing broadcaster Hugh Hewitt’s proposed book, How Sarah Palin Won the Election… And Saved America, has failed to land a publisher.

When the erstwhile Alaskan governor and Tina Fey lookalike was first named as Presidential hopeful John McCain’s running mate, her anti-abortion, pro-gun credentials made her the great white hope for the Republican party’s right wing nut jobs ultra-conservative base. But subsequent gaffes in media interviews and the vice-presidential debate have diminished Palin’s glow, and called into question whether she can save her own political skin, let alone the entire country. This has made publishers understandably reticent to sign up a book with a title that presupposes a Republican victory on Nov 4.

Literary agent Curtis Yates, who has stopped trying to sell the book for the moment, said that the change in Palin’s fortunes have played a role in the book’s marketability:

“The book obviously presumed [a McCain-Palin victory],” Mr. Yates said, “but the theory was that her impact on this election will have a lasting effect regardless — that she’s not gonna go anywhere, that she’s just gonna be a figure in G.O.P. politics going forward.”

The title of the book, Mr. Yates said, “went through a couple of different iterations.”

At one point it was How Sarah Palin Won the Election. At another point it was How Sarah Palin Won the Election … And Saved America.

“If they were to lose the election it would have just been How Sarah Palin Saved America,” Mr. Yates said. “We were trying to cover our bases depending on what may happen.”

There is no word on the future potential of the book, or of the other books in Yates’s stable, which are rumoured to include How Conrad Black Won His Case… And Saved American Justice and How the U.S. Army Uncovered WMDs in Iraq… And Saved the World.

Nobel jury head slams U.S. authors

According to The Guardian, Nobel jury head Horace Engdahl has got a bit of a hate-on for U.S. authors, describing U.S. writing as “insular and ignorant”:

Permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy Horace Engdahl told the Associated Press that U.S. writers were “too sensitive to trends in their own mass culture,” which he said dragged down the quality of their work. “The U.S. is too isolated, too insular. They don’t translate enough and don’t really participate in the big dialogue of literature,” Engdahl said. “That ignorance is restraining.”

Engdahl appears to be backpedalling a bit now, but he hasn’t offered any apologies. And we’re not saying he should: he’s entitled to his incredibly sweeping, pretentious, pointy-headed opinion.

The Nobel jury is expected to announce this year’s winner sometime over the next few weeks, and Engdahl’s comments have oddsmakers predicting that contenders like Philip Roth, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates needn’t bother to clear space on their mantles.

Oh, and for an alternate opinion of U.S. writing, the L.A. Times contacted Harold Augenbraum, executive director of the foundation that administers the National Book Awards, who said he wanted to send Engdahl a reading list of U.S. literature.

“Such a comment makes me think that Mr. Engdahl has read little of American literature outside the mainstream and has a very narrow view of what constitutes literature in this age,” he said.

Sarah Palin vs libraries

There is already more than enough troubling and tawdry whoop-de-doo surrounding Sarah Palin, John McCain’s pick for the vice-presidential slot, to make the whole circus worth watching, but this paragraph from a long article in Time magazine about Palin’s tenure as the mayor of Wasilla, Alaska, should have some special resonance for Quillblog readers:

[Former mayor John] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

This just gets better and better.

CNN commentator calls books for boys “emasculating”

Glenn Beck, a conservative political commentator who appears regularly on CNN Headline News, recently welcomed U.S. children’s book author Ted Bell to his show, in order to sing the praises of Bell’s new adventure title, Nick of Time. However, it seems clear from the lack of interest Beck shows in Bell that the whole point of the interview is simply to expound on the need for more manly books for boys.

“Try to find a book today that’s aimed at young male readers – they are emasculating!” says Beck. “They’re no longer about values, or virtue, or the spirit of adventure, or sticking up for your little sister or yourself. [...] When was the last time the heroine did not save the brother, but the brother stood up and saved the girl? It doesn’t happen anymore.”

You can see the full, inane interview here.

As an aside, at one point Bell observes that, when he was growing up, “we had Treasure Island, Captain Blood – all those wonderful adventures. We don’t have them anymore.” To which we respond: what the %#*&^? Those books were published in the late 1800s. They weren’t remotely his generation’s books. And last time we checked, those books are still around, and still being read by appreciative youngsters.

James Lipton memoir: worst book evah?

The U.S. publishing house Dutton is about to release a memoir by James Lipton – host of Bravo’s Inside the Actors Studio – and the folks at Gawker have already proclaimed it possibly the “most gloriously horrendous book ever written”:

You have to love a man who starts the memoir of his middle-brow career with an epigraph by Chaucer, from The Canterbury Tales: “And gladly wolde he lerne and gladly teche.”

For anyone who isn’t familiar with him, Lipton is that celebrity interviewer with the pretentiously pointy beard and irksomely wire-rimmed glasses, the one who sits on a New York theatre stage with, say, Sally Field, asking her to elucidate the socio-political meanings of The Flying Nun. According to Amazon, Lipton’s other major book is a 1968 reference title called An Exaltation of Larks, which pretty much says it all. For a more trenchant critique of Lipton’s peculiarly irritating manner, however, see this Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Will Farrell.

Knopf’s illustrious rejection pile

Every year or so – in an act designed to expose all publishers as poorly read hacks, we suppose – someone sends out a manuscript taken directly from some renowned literary classic or other and sits back to record the inevitable rejection slips.

In a related example of schadenfreude, every once in a while we get a peek at the classics publishers turned down the first time they were submitted.

The latest is an essay by David Oshinsky in the The New York Times that digs through Alfred A. Knopf’s editorial archives, now housed at the University of Texas. The results are illuminating and constitute red meat for the conspiracy-minded:

In the summer of 1950, Alfred A. Knopf Inc. turned down the English-language rights to a Dutch manuscript after receiving a particularly harsh reader’s report. The work was “very dull,” the reader insisted, “a dreary record of typical family bickering, petty annoyances and adolescent emotions.” Sales would be small because the main characters were neither familiar to Americans nor especially appealing. “Even if the work had come to light five years ago, when the subject was timely,” the reader wrote, “I don’t see that there would have been a chance for it.”

Knopf wasn’t alone. The Diary of a Young Girl, by Anne Frank, would be rejected by 15 others before Doubleday published it in 1952. More than 30 million copies are currently in print, making it one of the best-selling books in history.