Scott Turow, president of the US Authors Guild, on a vital change: 'LAST month, the Supreme Court decided to allow the importation and resale of foreign editions of American works, which are often cheaper than domestic editions. Until now, courts have forbidden such activity as a violation of copyright. Not only does this ruling open the gates to a surge in cheap imports, but since they will be sold in a secondary market, authors won't get royalties...'
Links of the week April 8 2013 (15)
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:
15 April 2013
Authors practice one of the few professions directly protected in the Constitution, which instructs Congress 'to promote the progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries'. The idea is that a diverse literary culture, created by authors whose livelihoods, and thus independence, can't be threatened, is essential to democracy. That culture is now at risk. The value of copyrights is being quickly depreciated, a crisis that hits hardest not best-selling authors like me, who have benefited from most of the recent changes in bookselling, but new and so-called midlist writers.
As the DIY approach gains more and more writers and readers, traditional publishers must reinvent themselves, but writers also need to be aware of the changing landscape.
After a boom year in self-publishing the headlines are getting a little predictable. Most feature a doughty author who quickly builds demand for her work and is rewarded with a large contract from the traditional industry. But in our rush to admire, there's a risk we overlook the wider cultural significance of what is going on. As publishers from all over the world prepare for next week's London book fair, here are 10 changes that they ignore at their peril:
8 April 2013
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.
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."