NIGEL BEALE NOTA BENE BOOKS

(via Ed Champion)

Copyright activist, speaker, teacher (how about ’speacher’…or ’spreacher’), columnist, science fiction novelist, short story writer, co-editor of  Boing Boing,  and the very manifestation of articulate dynamism, Cory Doctorow was in town recently to promote his novel Little Brother (free download here), a fast paced, current-day 1984-like polemic calling for teens to subvert security measures, especially those used by governments that claim to "defend my freedom by tearing up the Bill of Rights.”

As Austin Grossman puts it in the New York Times:

MY favorite thing about “Little Brother” is that every page is charged with an authentic sense of the personal and ethical need for a better relationship to information technology, a visceral sense that one’s continued dignity and independence depend on it: “My technology was working for me, serving me, protecting me. It wasn’t spying on me. This is why I loved technology: if you used it right, it could give you power and privacy…Little Brother argues that unless you’re passably technically literate, you’re not fully in command of those constitutionally guaranteed freedoms — that in fact it’s your patriotic duty as an American to be a little more nerdy."

I’m clearly not nerdy enough… incarcerated I am in fact by technological illiteracy…incapacitated too…neither machine I used to record my conversation with Cory worked for the full duration of our encounter…they did however capture enough, thankfully, to provide his engaging take on the future of the book, the seeds of its destruction…and mention of a guy with a lemon up his nose. Please listen here:

(For discussion of copyright, please watch this space over the coming days for my interview with the acknowledged giant in the field, Bill Patry).

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Espresso Book Machine.

From the 1984 Books in our Future report., by the Joint Committee on the Library of Congress of the United States:

I met recently with Cory Doctorow to talk [stay tuned for audio] about his latest book Little Brother [free download here], and the future of the book. During our conversation Cory mentioned that he was signatory to a call, led by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, for rejection, or amendment at least, of a proposed settlement in a lawsuit over Google’s Book Search service. Here’s the conclusion to what Cory and the ‘Privacy Authors and Publishers’ had to say to the judge:

"Courts, libraries, and legislatures have fiercely protected the right to read without fear of being watched or reported upon. The Settlement, if approved, may enable Google Book Search to become the world’s largest public library, institutional library, book “purchasing” and ongoing access system combined. It is no understatement to say that this Settlement may create the central way that books are accessed in the future, and the only way to access certain books. Because of its potential to greatly expand book access, Google Book Search is extremely exciting.

Yet that future potential will be undermined if this Court allows Google to collect intimate, invasive and previously unavailable information on readers, aggregate that that sensitive information with information about them collected by and through other Google products, and by doing so create a real risk of disclosure of that sensitive information to prying governmental entities and private litigants. This chilling effect will hurt all authors and publishers, but especially those who write about sensitive or controversial topics. It will also hurt the public interest, as the advance of digitization would come at the cost of reader privacy. The Privacy Authors and Publishers were not adequately represented in the settlement negotiations. They would not have agreed to a Settlement so bereft of privacy protections. Without additional protections, the Settlement is not fair, reasonable or adequate to the class members or to the public. It should not be approved until sufficient privacy protections are put into place."

I’m meeting with lawyer (and Google senior copyright counsel) Bill Patry  this afternoon to discuss his new book Moral Panic and the Copyright Wars…I’ll be talking to him in his capacity not as an employee of Google, but as a citizen concerned about how the copyright debate is being conducted. Topics of conversation: the public good versus private gain, menacing metaphors, and the sanctity of privacy. Let me know if you have any pressing concerns about these issues, and I’ll try to thread them into the questioning.

"About publicity…it should not be difficult  – you may suppose – to achieve the simple feat of telling a few thousand intelligent people that Mr. A’s book has been published, is worth reading, and costs seven and six. But it is difficult…and becomes more difficult every year…According to the English Catalogue of books…in the year 1923 there were 7,992 new books published in England – something over 150 a week. That was bad enough. Ten years later, in 1933…the number had risen to 9,905 – or 190 a week…Of this total, by the way, fiction accounts for 1,950. Every week, therefore, on the average throughout last year, there were something like 40 new novels and 100 new books of more or less general interest competing for the attention of the public…

The most valuable publicity that a book can have is  – talk; one reader’s enthusiastic recommendations are worth weveral inches of newspaper advertisement….Next to talk, in the publicity scale, probably ranks reviews. Here again, the publisher’s influence is small. he can sometimes draw the attention of a literary editor or a reviewer to a particular book; but that is about all that it is prudent for him to attempt…Theoretically, the publisher’s influence should be nil. Actually, it is not quite that. His reputation goes for something. If it is good, books bearing his imprint will stand a better chance of serious attention…

There remains, however, one form of publicity which the publisher can influence and which is of very real value – the distribution of his books in the bookshops…The wise publisher will take every opportunity of making friends with those who sell his books; not only because, if he as well as his travellers is known and liked and trusted by the trade, the trade will do its best to give his books a good showing; but alos because he can learn a great deal from the intelligent bookseller, who stands in a far closer relationship than himself to his ultimate customers…

All is, in fact, very far from being well with publishing…What is wrong with publishing is that there are too many publishers, and far too many books. 

If every intelligent man and woman in this country could be made to realize that the responsibility for the future of English letters is ultimately his or hers, the whole outlook would be completely changed. It is the scantiness of intelligent, sympathetic, discriminating response on the part of the public which compels publishers to cheapen their ideals. If, instead of borrowing books you would buy them; if you would, especially, buy the books of unknown authors; if you would buy books speculatively – not for a possible first-edition value but on the chance of their containing something of value; if you would use your own judgment and discrimination, instead of going with the herd – why, then the face of publishing would be changed…the future of English literature depends on the private buyer of books. All that publishers can do in the long run is to give the private buyer the opportunity of exercising his judgment…Perhaps some energetic member of the Oxford University English Club will be moved to start an Anti-Best-Seller League. If so, I, for one, should be delighted to become a subscribing member."

          Excerpts from "Are Publishers Any Use?" A paper read by Geoffrey Faber to the Oxford University English Club, February 15, 1934. Published in A Publisher Speaking (Faber & Faber, 1934).

Wikipedia reports that there were 206,000 new books published in the United Kingdom in 2005.

• A few quick notes on what he said:
  
  
• ‘How much cheaper will the Kindle DX make university text books? ‘Substantially’ is all we get at this point. First though, you need to buy one for $489  – which includes a 3G wireless radio ($359 for the regular Kindle).
• Kindle ebooks are designed to work on iphones and other platforms, devices. With 9.99 price point for all books sold on Kindle. 
• Bezos prefers to keep book selling and device selling businesses separate. 300,000 titles now available on Kindle. Adoption rate has been high.
• ‘We humans do whatever is easiest.’ ‘We change our tools our tools change us.’ You can buy a book 60 seconds after hearing about it.

This from The Toronto Star: 

"…rights holders will receive a lump sum payment of between $60 and $300 (all figures U.S.) for each title now on Google Book Search and as much as 63 per cent of future revenues generated from digitized sales. Google is required to contribute an initial $125 million to an independent Book Rights Registry, which will disperse the payments."

And this from an astute commentator:

On the one hand, Google’s Book Search could turn out to be an excellent way of reviving out-of-print texts while providing authors with some revenue. On the other hand, the way that Google went ahead and digitised MILLIONS of books without seeking some sort of consent is appalling, and the idea of a monopoly controlling so much intellectual property is extremely unsettling. The best that an author can expect from all this is to end up a very small cog in a very big machine, and that should worry anyone who is concerned about art and intellectual freedom. When Grady says "The mood among writers is that it’s inevitable…" he might as well quote Star Trek and state the obvious: resistance is futile.

Submitted by DGM (our very own DG Myers?)