I attended a Google Book Search settlement workshop yesterday hosted by the National Writer’s Union (NWU), the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA). The workshop’s panel included representatives of those organizations as well as an agent, a professor who has been studying the issue, and the executive director of the Authors Guild, which is one of the primary parties involved in the settlement. Here are the main themes from the event.

 

“A settlement isn’t the right way to settle this.”

New York Law School Associate Professor James Grimmelmann, who remained a largely non-partisan outside observer (although he has stated he thinks the settlement should be approved, with modifications), pointed out that a class-action lawsuit isn’t the right way to determine an issue like fair use under copyright law. It needs to be addressed by the government and not through private negotiations, he said, because it has huge societal implications.

Grimmelmann also pointed out that if the settlement goes through, it’s likely Google will emerge with a huge market advantage over any potential competitors, which may negatively impact any healthy competition in the marketplace.

Paul Aiken, executive director of the Authors Guild and a lawyer, argued that the risk of losing the lawsuit was too great: if the courts found Google’s scanning to fall under fair use–as Grimmelman and at least one other legal expert think it could–then others would copy Google’s scanning project. “In our view,” he told the hostile crowd, “It would be catastropic.”

Grimmelman responded that the proposed settlement wasn’t the only valid solution, and that there could have been other paths to a compromise.

 

“The settlement is overreaching, and probably untenable.”

Lynn Chu, an attorney, author, and book agent, was the most vocal opponent of the settlement, calling it an “outrageously bad deal as a financial matter” for writers and a “typical entertainment industry scam.” At one point she implied that the Authors Guild had been misled by incompetent legal counsel, which not surprisingly seemed to anger Aiken.

Chu pointed out that the business model proposed by the settlement has nothing to do with the original lawsuit, which was solely about fair use. “You glued a business contract to a waiver,” she told Aiken, and accused the Authors Guild of appointing itself as an agent to the world’s authors.

She also criticized the proposed Book Rights Registry, which is sort of an ASCAP for authors appearing in Google Book Search, noting that it would help Google shift costs over to authors by forcing authors to take care of administrative and publishing tasks on their own dime.

“[The settlement] probably won’t survive an appeal,” she told the crowd, a sentiment that Grimmelmann seemed to agree with. Still, she cautioned, “There’s no reason to be apathetic.”

 

“The settlement isn’t really author-friendly at its core.”

Edward Hasbrouck of the NWU pointed out a worst-case scenario that could happen to an author under the terms of the settlement: You have a book included in the database, but your ex-publisher claims that because it has authorized a print-on-demand version of the book it still owns the rights, so you and the publisher agree to binding arbitration and you lose. Since the arbitration is legally enforceable, you will have permanently lost your claim of ownership over the digital copy in Google’s database.

Chu noted that Google reserves the right to audit the Book Rights Registry, but that the favor isn’t returned because Google claims trade secrets will be compromised. She also noted that authors can make their own deals with Google and don’t need to rely on the settlement.

Note: the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America hosted an online panel discussion this morning. You can read through it at http://sfwa.org/online-google-settlement-panel/.

I’m heading to a workshop today to listen to authors, agents, editors, and who knows what else talk about the proposed Google Book Search settlement. It’s being hosted by the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America.

A lot of authors are having trouble deciding whether the settlement is good or bad for them, probably because it’s a little of both when you get right down to it. I tend to side with Google, but then, I tend to think that making every. single. thing. in. the. world. searchable is a Good Thing and should be done, and I have no faith it will happen in the next 20 years without a for-profit corporation getting involved. (And believe me, I am no sycophant of big business.)
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Everyone who writes or publishes wants to know how to use Twitter as a promotional tool to drive sales, and to that end the British book reading website Lovereading–sort of the ugly UK cousin to Goodreads, only with a smaller membership and more directly tied to big publishing houses–just completed a survey of members to ask them about Twitter. The results weren’t favorable to Twitter as an effective recommendation source or promotional tool, with The Bookseller going so far as to write, “The book-buying public may be largely immune to suggestions from Twitter, Facebook and other sites.”

Uh oh.

But wait! Before you dismiss Twitter as an also-ran in marketing, check out who Lovereading surveyed compared to who uses Twitter the most. As with all online communities, the only way to successfully connect is to figure out what kind of person participates in Twitter, and how he uses the service.

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Last week, the BBC Radio 4 program Open Book focused on the role of the editor in publishing a work. Host Mariella Frostrup interviewed five editors or author-editor combos about what value an editor–whose job didn’t really formally exist until after World War II–provides.

You can listen to the half-hour show here; the first 10 minutes alone are worth it just to hear Diana Athill talk about the unique editing requirements of Updike, Naipul, and Rhys. But here’s a summary of key points from the full episode:

• An editor can help shore up a writer’s weaknesses. Some writers may be masters of language, but need help shaping something into a finished work. Other writers may be great writers but lousy at taking care of other essential life tasks, so they would otherwise never write or publish without someone’s help.
• An editor is a guaranteed, and perhaps the only, extremely attentive reader a writer will have. Diana Athill says, “What one learns when you’re working with an eidtor, is that actually very few peole get their books read extremely attentively by anybody. A writer is dying to have his or her work read with complete attention. And here is this editor person, and the one thing they have done is they have paid full attention to your work, which is very gratifying.”
• An editor may act more like an agent or a music producer. Some editors will work closely with writers to help them determine career steps, going so far as to advise on what sort of book to write next. Others, like Raymond Carver’s editor Gordon Lish, will manipulate the original manuscript so much that their role becomes something more collaborative, or even borderline Svengali-like, as with music producers.

Open Book for Thursday, 31 Dec 2009 [BBC]
(Photo: Nic’s events)

Earlier today, I read a post on Teleread.org about Blue Leaf, a company that will scan your book and send you a searchable PDF file. The service costs about 4 cents per page, plus a flat $15 fee to cover operating costs and return shipping.

I immediately wondered whether this was the answer I’ve been looking for to convert the small collection of books I have that aren’t available digitally. I’m too lazy to do all the book scanning by hand, as I suspect most readers are, so these books have remained on my To Do list for years now.

An affordable way to convert a personal library? MAYBE.

I decided to try out the service on an out-of-print book that the publisher has yet to make available as a digital file; in fact, it was never even published in the United States. I bought it from Amazon UK back in 1997, and physical copies of it now go for $50 or more on various websites. It’s listed on the Google Books site, but of course you can’t preview it or purchase it digitally there because so many authors and publishers don’t want Google to sell their books.

I deliberately picked a book that’s written in English but uses lots of accented characters and foreign names (it’s about Hungarian history), and that has photographic inserts, a bibliography, and an index. As soon as it’s returned, I’ll post a follow up about how well the service worked.

There are three things I realized as I clicked the button to proceed with the order, and I think they may impact how useful Blue Leaf can be for readers who want to convert their private libraries:

1. It’s emotionally hard to send off a physical book. I’m not a fan in any way of physical books, and yet I felt a twinge of fear as I slid my book into a padded envelope to ship to Connecticut. What if it gets lost? What if I never see it again? What if it’s returned in pieces? I know it’s irrational, but it’s what I felt.
2. I’m not sure I’m brave/foolish enough to try the service on the few books I do consider precious. I have an oral history of one of the few survivors of the Jonestown massacre in Guyana in 1978. I would love to have a digital copy, but I’m not sure I would ever be able to willingly part with my copy. Even with postal insurance, I don’t know that I’d be able to replace it if it went missing. I’ll probably have to scan this by hand myself or never do it at all.
3. It’s just too expensive to convert an entire library. To convert the <300 page book I chose, the total cost was just under $28, not counting the extra $5 or so I'll spend on shipping supplies and fees. I'm going to end up paying about $33 for a digital copy of this book. I have another one I wanted to try, but at 400 pages it became too expensive for my test. One could argue that if you value your free time at more than a few bucks an hour, Blue Leaf still works out to be far cheaper than doing it yourself. On the other hand, you can just leave those books alone and hope that someday they'll be made available in the marketplace

Realistically speaking, unless you’ve got a big pile of cash, Blue Leaf is best for special editions you just have to have in digital format.

An affordable way for authors to convert their own out-of-print works! YES.

The real beauty of the service may be for authors. David Rothman on Teleread noted that Blue Leaf offers an incredibly cheap way for individual authors to convert their own out-of-print titles into digital formats.

This could be a helluva a deal for individuals and small publishers. Talk about the potential for getting back lists into E and POD!

An average book would cost someone around $30-50 to convert into a basic PDF or Word doc that you can then adapt into various ebook formats. If you’re really anti-DIY, you can even pay Blue Leaf extra for them to create the device formats for you. (Note however that to get all the formats delivered on CD, plus an audio version using technology similar to Amazon’s text-to-speech functionality on the Kindle, you’ll be paying closer to $100.)

In fact, I hope the author of the book I’ve sent in for conversion takes note, and converts his book on his own for digital distribution. I’m sure services like Blue Leaf will continue to appear, and between those and various ebook retailers (yes, including Google Books), there’s no reason for any author’s older works to languish in “not for sell” exile.

[www.BlueLeaf-Book-Scanning.com via Teleread]