In a well-informed article on the Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society site, Danuta Kean asks if Google is doing enough to deal with the copyright infringements of file-sharing sites.
Links of the week April 1 2013 (14)
Our new feature links to interesting blogs or articles posted online, which will help keep you up to date with what's going on in the book world:
8 April 2013
When bestselling crime writer Mark Billingham signed up to Google Alerts, the web monitoring service, he expected the alerts to be about discussions of his books or of Tom Thorne, the lead character in his novels. But what he received made shocking reading. Listed were a torrent of filesharing sites offering ripped-off copies of his novels. "75 percent of the sites I was alerted to were piracy sites," he says. "... Dealing with the pirates is like fighting the Hydra. As soon as you shut down one link, another three spring up elsewhere."
For Billingham, like other authors, the monitoring service has turned into a monthly catalogue of copyright theft. Infringements are passed to his publisher, Little, Brown, and removal orders - known in the trade as "take down notices" sent to Google so that the link is removed. "But it is never for long", says the crime writer, his voice edged with frustration: "Within weeks fresh links appear."
Every public tweet and Facebook entry in the UK could eventually be archived. Material on 1bn webpages from nearly 5m .uk websites, plus public tweets and Facebook entries, are to preserved for the historical record at six libraries in the UK and Ireland. The archive project, aimed at preserving a digital record of events and cultural and intellectual works to match traditional print archives, begins on 6 April.
"If you want a picture of what life is like today in the UK you have to look at the web," said Lucie Burgess, head of strategy at the library. "We have already lost a lot of material, particularly around events such as the 7/7 London bombings or the 2008 financial crisis." Social media reactions to the Queen's diamond jubilee celebrations were among other information that had fallen "into the digital black hole of the 21st century because we haven't been able to capture it," she said. "Most of that material has already been lost or taken down."
1 April 2013
Veteran agent Sterling Lord: 'What have I learned from my long experience? What wisdom can I impart? Sometimes it's the unanticipated moments that clarify and offer a larger meaning...' A fascinating long look at the relationship between agents and authors.
I realized, shortly after starting my literary agency in 1952 and after making a few sales, that my knowledge of what a New York literary agency does and how it works was very thin. Yes, an agent sells books to book publishers and articles and short stories (not much anymore) to magazines, but the day a friend who was editor-in-chief of all the Time Life magazines told me he didn't know what an agent did, I began to think.The agent has to know good writing and what is a good, interesting-to-the-publisher idea at that moment in order not only to judge what he can sell and what he can't, but also because often writers tried and untried will seek his advice. And he must know.
An agent is successful if he can attract and hold effective writers; these are two different talents. You have to know and understand the lives and problems of writers and devise how to help them with their lives. If you take on a young or new writer and his first book is a rousing success, you have a different problem: other alert agents - and there are a few around - may suddenly approach him or her offering to do more for him or her than you do, a situation you need to be ready for if you are an accomplished agent.
It's a time of re-invention, re-education, and revolution in children's nonfiction publishing - at least in the United States. New US Common Core Standards require children at every grade to read and respond to at least 50% nonfiction. At high school level it is 70%! In parallel, digital technology is changing information books into transmedia presentations to read or interact with on tablets, smartphones, and smartboards.
Patricia Stockland, Editor-in-Chief of Lerner Publishing Group and a Faculty member at the conference says: "This is an excellent time for writers, illustrators, and editors to find work in children's nonfiction publishing, and to bring their creativity to a burgeoning market. They may find themselves working with digital technicians alongside publishers and be challenged to learn new computer skills, but the rewards will be great - both in gaining an expanding skillset and in learning that we're no longer working in a publishing field or in digital fields, but in digital publishing for multiple platforms."
James Herbert, the author, who has died aged 69, sold more than 50 million horror novels, a tally bettered in the genre only by his friend Stephen King; Herbert wrote 23 books but was always - rather to his frustration - best known for his first two, The Rats (1974) and The Fog (1975).
Despite the commercial success of The Rats and his later novels, Herbert remained dissatisfied with his literary status, feeling that the "literary snobs" should take him more seriously. I've always suffered from being labelled a horror writer - just because I didn't go to university, just because I still talk in my natural voice, just because I'm not as articulate as Martin Amis. We like to kid ourselves that we're in an equal society, but we're not." In an interview with The Sunday Telegraph, Herbert referred to a men's style magazine's recommended reading list of 20th-century novels that one should read by the age of 30: alongside books by Joyce, Salinger and Heller was The Rats, by James Herbert. He also pointed out that his fourth novel, Fluke (1977), had found its way on to the GCSE syllabus, and that a professor at an American university had written to him to say that he was analysing the Herbert oeuvre.