OK, I'm on the fence. Everyone has varying opinions, and that may remain the case after this call-for-feedback. This is a debut story collection and, as such, basically just needs a cover that says, Buy me, I'll blow your mind in a lovely kinda way. (We should be adding some more copy, I hope, a blurb from Colm Toibin, with is rather nice—the book's bloody excellent...)
Anyhow, let me know what you think (still not fixed the blog comments, so email)
Apologies for the slow pace of posting here—I've had a devil of a time having more than 30 seconds to think at any given moment, and so have been spitting out updates via Twitter. So perhaps you'd like to follow us on Twitter? Here's the URL and here's the RSS feed. Alternatively, the Twitter feed also posts as an update to our Facebook page...
More regular posting can be expected in the coming months...
A massive multi-author, multi-strand report has just been issued—Hanging Out, Messing Around, Geeking Out by the Digital Youth Project and funded by the MacArthur Foundation.
Here's Henry Jenkins describing it:
"Hanging Out..." is staggering in its scope and in its implications. The researchers take seriously young people, their lives online, their subcultural practices, their identity play, their nascent civic engagement, their dating and social interactions, their involvement with fan production practices, and much much more. What emerges is a complex picture of how they are living through and around emerging technologies, how they are innovative in their use of new tools and platforms, and how they are struggling with the contradictions of their lives. This report is in no simple way a celebration of the digital generation, though it respects the meaningfulness of their involvement with digital and mobile technologies: it raises questions about inequality of access and participation; it points to conflicts between adults and youth around the deployment of new media; it identifies risks and opportunities which sites such as MySpace and YouTube pose for their young participants. Those of us who care about young people and education will be struggling with some of the implications of their research for a long time to come.
I strongly suggest you just Google around for reaction to this report (outsourcing my blog, I guess!) but here's a couple of things including the aforementioned Jenkins interviewing some of the researchers. And Holy Meatballs gives a slightly more layperson summary, part of which I quote below.
More than anything else, it dispels the myth that youth involvement with the connected, digital world is at best a waste of time and at worst an impediment to their social development. The report outlines the variegated and granular nature of youth habits online, differentiating between those that use technology to "hang out" with friends they already have face to face, those that "mess around" with tech through tinkering and creating, and those that "geek out" through deep engagement with global online communities that are oriented around a common interest.
The CEO of Counterpoint LLC, which is the parent company of Soft Skull and Counterpoint Press, on the Kennedy assassination (Charlie Winton's his name, and he edited Legacy of Secrecy for us):
So one publisher at least has decided to organize itself according to, oh, say, perhaps...the actual content, as opposed to the packaging, of their licensed intellectual property. See, in the Land o' Publishing, a parallel, if not in fact perpendicular world to the one the rest of the world lives in, we frequently our brand according to the type of packaging we use. In the Land o' Publishing, for example, Gillette would have two divisions—one that sold products in cardboard packaging, and the other that sold them in plastic blister packaging.
So I'm getting to teach a four-week masterclass at the Columbia University MFA program in the Spring. Here's the course description (note that the title is borrowed in part from a talk by Harold Augenbraum.)
Forty years ago Roland Barthes announced the "Death of the Author," yet not only are there more authors than ever, but more with more blogs, websites, and YouTube trailers. Now, it is the "Death of Print" that has been announced. Is this obituary greatly exaggerated? Or, if true, is print even mourned?
With the help of a tremendously eclectic reading list comprising philosophy, gossip, true crime, cultural anthropology, poetry, and fiction of all stripes, we're going to examine the evolution of the book publishing industry so as to delineate the possibilities for the cultural and economic role of the writer and editor in the coming decades. Over the course of the four weeks, students will be following a social media feed from me called FriendFeed that provides links to article to read, a kind of real-time syllabus. From those texts and in relation to the class readings and discussion, students will write a short essay or story towards inventing their own definitions of how they are going to act as cultural producers, rather than slot themselves into pre-existing categories.
[This assignment will take the form of Lethem's Ecstasy of Influence but there wasn't enough space in the course description to explain that.]
So, you know, any thoughts about the forgoing, the reading list, possible structures to think about etc. fire me an email. (It's looks like I need ot upgrade to the next generation of Movable Type in order to enable comments, and I sadly just don't know how to do that :-(
I'm completely astonished that an era that consisted of white men publishing white men could possibly be described as golden. Frankly, we should be ashamed of ourselves to go along with this hypocritical drivel.
Then again, this from a book that says “There’s no such thing as a poor publisher.” Oh Lord.
(Inter alia, Christ, is anyone watching Madmen? Publishing and advertising were operating with the same mores...)
Although I owe y'all a summary of what I got up to over at Jeff's place, I didn't want to let me delay in doing so interfere with the responsibility to draw your attention to Dennis Cooper's glorious summary of what he's been up to at "Johnny's place", viz announcing the two most recent titles* in the Little House on the Bowery series that Akashic will have hosted for ten books, as of Spring of 2009. Dennis explains all, and offers a superb manifesto from a guy who like our Lynne Tillman has seen the evolution of the processes whereby boundary-testing fiction is disseminated...
*One of those titles being Derek McCormack's, a truly gifted young writer of nasty luscious micronovels, one of which, The Haunted Hillbilly, we had the honor of publishing.
So the wordcount here this week will be skinny, since I'm guestblogging for Jeff VanderMeer. Cross-posting feels a wee bit tacky, plus it's worth most folks time check out his site (and all the other guest bloggers he's had this summer), so I'll post here a little summary of what I've yapped about over there.
Vandermeer, one of the new breed of writer-entrepreneurs made possible by the interweb, has a new column on HuffPo. On political fiction. One of the many things I love about the brave new world of not-entirely-print, not-top-down culture is that writers tend not to have to write down to a perceived lowest-common-denominator audience. The challenge for an artist needing to put food ion the table is being entrepreneurial about venues and audiences—you get that right, you hustle that, and you can write about what you want to write about.
The pre-eminent legal scholar on copyright also happened, until Sunday, to be the pre-eminent blogger on the topic. He was also Senior Copyright Counsel at Google. The state of the debate has become so awful, however, he cannot bring himself to write about it any more.
I regard myself as a centrist. I believe very much that in proper doses copyright is essential for certain classes of works, especially commercial movies, commercial sound recordings, and commercial books, the core copyright industries. I accept that the level of proper doses will vary from person to person and that my recommended dose may be lower (or higher) than others. But in my view, and that of my cherished brother Sir Hugh Laddie, we are well past the healthy dose stage and into the serious illness stage. Much like the U.S. economy, things are getting worse, not better. Copyright law has abandoned its reason for being: to encourage learning and the creation of new works. Instead, its principal functions now are to preserve existing failed business models, to suppress new business models and technologies, and to obtain, if possible, enormous windfall profits from activity that not only causes no harm, but which is beneficial to copyright owners.
Emphasis mine, because in the long run, this intellectual property land grab eventually hurts the owners themselves, even if it allows monopoly rents in the short run...because it is impoversihing the soil from which those cultural artifacts are created. In the material world, the commons is destroyed by overexploitation, but in the creative world, the commons is destroyed by underfertilizing...
Nice item by Michael Beirut at Design Observer.
One of my first bosses taught me an important lesson.Good designers are a dime a dozen, he said. Coming up with a great design solution is the easy part. The hard part, he said, is getting the client to accept the solution.
"But if the work is good, don't the clients know it when they see it?" I asked.
My boss just looked at me silently for a long time. And then, with gentleness and no small amount of pity, he reached out and patted me on the head: Poor kid.
He was right, of course. In any creative activity where clients are involved, you have to make the sale twice. Before you get to the customer, you have to sell the client. And that's what I love most about the AMC series Mad Men, which starts its second season later this month. It gets so many things right about its subject, the advertising business, but it absolutely nails one thing: the art behind the art of the pitch.
Other than that it is a great piece, why do I mention it? Because that too is how we deal with books, for only rarely do we get to present them to the reader—just as the ad men have to sell the client on what will work with the consumer, our job, most of the time, is to sell the retailer. (Of course, in publishing, we also have the author pitching the agent, and the agent pitching us...there's a lotta hustle in this...)
This first one is of the site's creator, Emily Pullen...
And this one of her boss, Kerry, at Skylight Books.
You can send in your own too, via email.
Two smart and concerned leading citizens of the world of books use the occasion of a leaked document from the Tribune company to suggest that the barbarians at the gate might have some good ideas...
Mark Athitakas: The good news here is that Abrams recognizes that there’s a small but passionate readership for book reviews—one that can potentially be monetized—and that covering the literary world is part of the mission statement of any media organization. (At least that’s how I interpret “one of those things you had to have for completeness.”) I’m not even especially troubled by the notion of more coverage of popular/Christian/celeb books. In fact, let’s expand it—make the books editor at the daily paper the ideas person, the person who’s able and willing to jump on the blog and round up the relevant books and call the relevant authors regarding the issues of the day. That’s across the paper—world, national, local, sports, etc. (Slate and the Washington Post work together on something like this, compiling reading lists on varied subjects, and the print version often winds up in the Sunday Outlook section.) Five essential books on NASA; the two best books on the neighborhood that’s about to be re-zoned for a strip mall; a handful of books on gun control; a top-ten reading list of best baseball stories, and talk to the person out in the city who wrote one that maybe didn’t make the list. All of this supplementing the regular Sunday review.
Mark Sarvas: And so we repeat a call we've made on stages and on panels before, something we've even suggested to a few well-placed folks at the Los Angeles Times Book Review: Rather than calving the book pages yet again, and grafting the limp remains onto Calendar's derriere, let's fold the print Book Review entirely. Stop it cold. Spare it further indignities. And take the budget of that hard copy review - including all physical costs (printing, a share of distribution) - and use those funds (with perhaps a bump if you're really committed) to create a web-only Book Review. Get the best contributors, stop worrying about length, innovate and create a vital resource. Get creative - don't say it can't make money or break even, figure out how to do it. Look, fifteen million people travel around the world on their computers to read the Guardian - because the Guardian offers something that is indispensable to anyone who cares about books: Inarguable quality. (Their blogs notwithstanding.) So why not bring in a team of the best web designers, of writers and editors who could create the most exciting new book section seen in this country since the New York Review of Books set up shop?
{Also, missed this, as I've been a bit behind, Sarah Weinman also weighs in.]
Galleycat: Now that we've all had a chance to read Jon Karp's WaPo brief on the state of publishing, which, as Leon Neyfakh notes, is in many ways a Twelve mission statement "to invest in works of quality to maintain [a] niche," I've got a question for you editorial types out there:
Which of the growth strategies Karp identifies are you feeling the most pressure to achieve?
( polls)
As Karp points out, the first strategy has generally proven popular, but I'm guessing that y'all are getting pulled in plenty of other directions, too. But you tell me—and feel free to elaborate in the comments section.
(And, by all means, feel free to make the argument that Karp's "quality rather than quantity" approach is already being successfully deployed by smaller independent presses in service of creating and distributing "the one product that only they can deliver better than anyone else," excellent books that speak with perfect clarity to an audience ready—eager, even—to read them. If you do, though, help us figure out: Is that solution scalable to the level of the big houses? If so, how radical a reorg will it require?)
Soft Skull: It really wouldn't be very hard since they're already doing it in children's books, they're already doing it by providing client distribution services to other publishers and they're already doing it in sales by establishing corporate-wide organizations to supply sales services to the existing imprints. The corporate publishers have to convert themselves into distributors akin to Perseus/PGW, Consortium, etc except that they also provide editorial, design and production services, and they provide office space and human resources support. But editorial and and marketing/publicity gets disaggregated into multiple imprints. Each has a budget, anyone can get fired for not staying within budget or not have a plausible explanation as to why budget will be made, and then some, in the subsequent fiscal year. (That is, approximating the fiscal discipline of the average independent publisher.)
To make this work there would be one critical adjustment to make, which is to ignore those agents who play publisher egos off one another and convince them when they've overpaid for yet another debut novel that they've "won," that they "beat" the other house. However, I believe that having the smaller imprints will render more transparent those who know how to reach an audience, and be profitable, compared to those who just know how to "win" auctions. As a result, kudos will go to those folks who are reaching their audiences, rather than to the editor whose strengths lie in talking the suits into writing big checks.
Corporate publishers have the talent, the sales force, the publicists, the management information systems, they just need to realize that while things are not yet fucked in the publishing business and while it might seem for each senior management person that they've more to lose by rocking the boat than by holding tight, you don't want to be trying to turn the aircraft carrier into the flotilla of destroyers while sales are down 10% like in the music business and you're getting strafed from above, forgive the militaristic metaphor.
Kim Pearson, from the BlogHer network, on how some of the contributors to our book Be a Father to Your Child: Real Talk from Black Men on Family, Love, and Fatherhood edited by the super high-octane April Silver have issued a "Statement of Black Men Against the Exploitation of Black Women."
OK, so I was trying to figure out how to properly report on BEA but not making much real progress. Until I started to read other folks' reports, especially the official ones, with quotes from multiple participants avec soundbites and such. And so many of them were expressing the fundamental pointlessness of the whole endeavor. (I'll skip the links, since some nice people were quoted saying very silly things...)—the LA Times and Publishers Lunch had a chunk of them, if you must know whereof I speak.)
Which made me wonder: are the participants in this business really so solipsistic (autistic, even?!) that they would pass up the primary annual opportunity to lay eyes on one another? To have personal contact? I bloody love BEA. I love giving personal, eyeball-to-eyeball thanks to the bookseller, journalists, writers, sales reps, who keep me in business. I love trying to give them good reason to continue doing so. I love the drinking, dancing, schmoozing, yapping, flirting, ass-kissing, whining that is the massive conversation that is BEA.
So my report will consist of periodic mentions of the people I typically meet only virtually, if that, during the year, but whom, in some cases for the very first time, I got to lay eyes on at Book Expo America last Thursday to Sunday.
Starting with Kassia Krozer, aka Booksquare, (two excellent BEA posts: (Online) Myths Overheard at BEA 2008 and The eBook Problem and The eBook Solution) and the person who turns out to be her husband, Kirk Biglione, of Medialoper. Both seriously wise folks on the future of publishing and new media.
As some of you have heard, cause you know these sorts of things, Shannon Burke's Black Flies will be reviewed on the cover of the upcoming New York Times Book Review. (A review by Liesl Schillinger, whom I particularly admire, making it extra-special.)
But that is not what this post is about. I discovered a rather intense conversation about the book amongst Shannon's former peerd in the paramedic/EMT community. And reading through the whole thing, I felt really proud to have anything at all to do with the seriousness of purpose with which they discussed this novel.
It starts with one paramedic blogger's post, which in turn generates a bunch of comments which that blogger discusses, and then Shannon responds.
Keep in mind, as you read this, what these folks' day job is—life and death, nothing less. It reminds you that fiction actually does matter. It really fucking matters.
New book blog arrives, ThreeGuysOneBook—on the one hand, just three guys who like books, on the other hand, they represent a good chunk of the literary consciousness of an enterprise called Bookazine, a company that occupies in interesting position in the book ecology/supply chain. I wish I were better educated about the history of book distribution because these guys are basically the last of a breed of wholesaler called the "jobber"—so far as I can tell, their genius was a combination of their ability to manage same-day delivery, and be able to provide pretty personalized advice to booksellers.
Anyhow, so far, they've been at it three weeks and have given us Sarvas, Benioff, and a debut called Outtakes From a Marriage.
You can pay someone lotsa money to do a book trailer no one will watch cause it's so damn obviously a marketing gimmick, or you can just try t o publish the best books you can, and if you're doing a decent job, someone will make one for you:
The flipside of the eBook is this, the gorgeousness of this. [Via MJ]
Amy Guth, of the Pilcrow Festival, has another project going on. Rebuilt.
We're asking authors to take a copy of their own book, destroy it, and rebuild it into a piece of art. Sculpture, on canvass, whatever. Just art. Recruit a team, if you must. Let us know if you're down to destroy your book, magazine, whatever. As long as it's yours in some way.
They'll then auction them at a shindig Saturday, May 24th to help rebuild New Orleans Public Libraries. Ron Biava, campaign coordinator of of NOPL will be onhand. If you're up for it, e-mail them.
All Soft Skull authors, consider this an explicit encouragement—we'll replace your copy two-fold if you do it...
The LitBlogCoop Read This! has been announced: The Farther Shore by Matthew Eck. I wish I could tell you I'd read it, but I read nothing that's not a Soft Skull/Counterpoint (or would-be so) project. What I can say is that I'd heard all about it because Milkweed is blessed with one of the finest publicists in the business, Emily Cook—she knows how to put galleys in people's hands. It might be Vintage's publicist that gets the ink in NYC; but, you know, it's a little more challenging to be a one-woman-PR-band from Minneapolis promoting writers most no-one has ever heard of than to be promoting new Vintage paperbacks.
...and you've got the latest in online literary interview audio. The inestimable Donna Seaman has taken many of the interviews she's done for the Chicago radio station WLUW (once a sister station of WBEZ) and put them on Open Books Radio for your delectation. (I should add that she's one of these people whose qualities as a critic match her level of influence, in that she's the Associate Editor of Booklist and is trusted by America's libraries to help them pick the books they must have in their collections...) Browse around, there's so much to choose from—it's like Ed Champion posted 100 shows at once, or it's like you only just discovered Michael Silverblatt's Bookworm...
To my mind, on of the most important new moves in the world of bricks-and-mortar indie bookseller retailing is the Page 23 program launched by Changing Hands in Tempe AZ. Here's their spiel on why they did it:
Changing Hands Bookstore spawned Page23 in 2005 in response to the NEA's "Reading at Risk" report--a study showing readership plummeting at an alarming rate (especially among those in their 20's and 30's). Our mission is to support writing that speaks to this elusive generation of readers, as well as those hungry for books outside the mainstream. We identify and promote edgy and unusual fiction, nonfiction, poetry and art books--titles that too often fly under the radar of the Sunday book pages and the big box stores. At Page23, we see ourselves as a tool for readers and booksellers alike, working to connect people with books that might otherwise go unnoticed and unread.
You might notice, if you check out the link on Page23 that their home page is a MySpace page—one of the things they're doing with that is a series of interviews and I'm pleased to report that the current one is with Lydia Millet. herewith, Lydia on our reissue of her 2002 novel, My Happy Life.
The main character in My Happy Life, a woman left to die locked in an abandoned mental institution, is pleasantly nostalgic about her considerably awful past. What made you want to devote a whole novel to her?LM: I don't know that I'd say "pleasantly nostalgic," though I get that maybe you're trying to be succinct for people who haven't read the book. That phrase makes it sound light, even, dare I say, fatuous. In fact, in her memory, everything is imbued with empathy. Everyone gets the benefit of the doubt—even inanimate objects. Pardon is extended infinitely. I wanted to write about a person like her partly because I'm so unlike her—I'm judgmental, I'm opinionated, and though I hold empathy in high esteem I feel its limits everywhere, pressing. And partly I wanted to write the book in an affective, almost philosophical gesture, one I wanted to feel for myself as well as offer to the reader. She's clearly an extreme portrait. But not for nothing, I wanted the reader to be involved in this magnanimous empathy—this refusal to objectify or distance.
1. Never attempt to go on vacation before the biggest deal in your life and in the history of your company is scheduled to close. You will have insomnia; you will be trying to buy phone cards to make phone calls across nine time zones in a town with no shop, no cellphone coverage, and one public pay phone; you will be doing royalty statements on your laptop; and various things will go down that will constitute serious obstacles to your deal that you will overcome, somehow...
2. Using a variant on the word "fuck" in an interview with Salon will triple your company's website traffic.
3. "Nouns are the body, verbs are the life. Adjectives are the bloody dress they were found in after the accident."
4. Podcasts are truly wonderful things—when this deal goes through, there'll be more. For now: Matt Sharpe on NPR's Booktour, with a podcast from his reading at Politics & Prose.
Another great piece from the LA Times on publishing, this one on the Perseus shuttering of Carroll & Graf and Thunder's Mouth.
Has anyone noticed that in the past five-six months, Josh Getlin and Scott Timberg have together done most of the smarter features on book publishing? They pick more substantive topics than Motoko Rich, they interview more people, and the diversity of background of the people interviewed is far broader. Getlin also gave by far the most even-handed account of the print vs blog fracas, while spending the kinda time I guess an LA Times staffer has to spend on the ICM vs. Endeavour agency lawsuit and Scott has done some great ones on post-apocalyptic fiction, the PGW bankruptcy, and Akashic's City Noir series.
So one of the casualties of the book coverage carnage is to be Peder Zane, soon-to-be-former Books Editor of the Raleigh News & Observer. He's got this to say about the books he's loved since assuming that about-to-be-discontinued position.
If I could burst through this page, I'd give you a copy of With. Donald Harington's 2004 magical novel about a kidnapped girl who grows up in an Edenic (and haunted) patch of the Ozarks is one of the best books I've read since becoming the N&O's book review editor in 1996.On top of "With," I'd hand you Cloud Atlas (2004), David Mitchell's dystopic tour de force that tells six related stories, stretching from the 19th century to the distant future, in six different literary styles. Then I'd add "My Happy Life" (2002 [but now out in paperback from yours truly]), Lydia Millet's quirky masterpiece, narrated by an abused and forgotten young woman who makes Candide seem like Chicken Little.
(Parenthetically, we got sent Harington's With back in 2003, and oh boy did I want to publish that book. But Soft Skull only pays $1K advances, and he said he got more than that in pre-inflation 1972 dollars for his first book. Eventually Toby Press picked it up, and re-issued his backlist, so all was well for him)
But, more generally, Peder's situation is quite interesting, in that while the paper is dropping the Books Editor position, he will now be the paper's Ideas columnist. Now, in the midst of the rightful concern about the collapse of book coverage, and the laying off of editors and such, we might, as some have surmised, be wise to not insist on the retention of the status quo ante—Peder could do more for Books as an Ideas columnist than a Books columnist. It is, after all, standard in book publicity to prefer "off-the-book-page-coverage" to the regular book review pages because it sells more books.
Now, I believe that newspapers should be devoting more time, intelligence and column inches to dealing with books overall (the demographics of book consumers and newspaper consumers overlaps to a great degree), but isolating that coverage in a stand-alone section with a sequence of one-person-says-a-few-things-about-one-book isn't necessarily the best way to engage readers OR writers.
The problem, of course, is that there is little sign amongst management in the larger newspapers that they will respond to the pressure for more advertising dollars and cost reductions by doing this. So I grasp why a good short-run tactic is to demand that book review sections will be preserved. But if, in certain circumstances, management will trust the dynamic editors and writers who know books to sprinkle throughout the paper, something great could be accomplished, and the current activist sentiment might well be well-directed in the long run to advocating for this more holistic approach. Could some of the articles that would otherwise be about the annual March-April flood of baseball books be incorporated into the fat start-of-the-baseball-season-sports supplement? Could self-help books being in Living sections? Current Affairs books by in the National or International pages? And could Arts & Ideas be a forum for novelists and poets to be discussed alongside filmmakers and dancers and philosophers and political scientists?
And then, could we abandon the absurd false distinction between newspaper and blogs. Y'all're writers, fer cryin' out loud. That's it. Bloggers are not the Barbarians at the Gate, and the individuals working in print media are not inside the Gate fiddling and fussing while Rome burns. There's a natural continuum, exemplified by newspaper critics blogging, and bloggers writing print reviews. The single most boring thing for me to read, on- and off-line, is the carping about the Other Side.
Anyway, a long lost for what originated as a way for me to tell everyone that we just put Lydia Millet's My Happy Life out in paperback (can you believe this book, which won the PEN-USA Award for Fiction, was never put out in paperback? Mad, mad, mad...)
The following from John Freeman, President of the National Book Critics Circle. Needless to say, we've signed.
I've started an online petition to protest the AJC's decision to
eliminate the book editor job (and with it Teresa Weaver). Here's the
link.http://www.petitiononline.com/atl2007/petition.html
Would you please sign this ASAP and forward it to as many people as
possible? I think if we can up with many, many signatures this would
get the Cox executives' attention.Yrs,
JF
Scott McLemee has a great interview with Danny Postel, Senior Editor at openDemocracy.
“In hundreds of conversations I’ve had with Iranian intellectuals, journalists, and human rights activists in recent years, I invariably encounter exasperation,” writes Danny Postel in Reading “Legitimation Crisis” in Tehran: Iran and the Future of Liberalism, a recent addition to the Prickly Paradigm pamphlet series distributed by the University of Chicago Press. “Why, they ask, is the American Left so indifferent to the struggle taking place in Iran? Why can’t the Iranian movement get the attention of so-called progressives and solidarity activists here? Why is it mainly neoconservatives who express interest in the Iranian struggle?”Postel, a senior editor of the online magazine openDemocracy, sees the Iranian situation as a crucial test of whether soi-disant American “progressives” can think outside the logic that treats solidarity as something one extends only to people being hurt by client-states of the U.S. government.
Danny Postel has been very helpful in promoting a book we published 15 months ago— We Are Iran: The Persian Blogs. We got zero traction with the progressive radio and websites, but we did get calls from Fox News, Voice of America, and the American Enterprise Institute. It was deeply depressing for an avowedly progressive publisher like ourselves to find us in this situation...
Let me add also, that we've had about 5000 downloads of the sample chapter, orders of magnitude greater than any other sample chapter we've ever posted. Based on various links I've seen, a good deal of that downloading is happening within Iran.
It could just be an artifact of not growing up in the U.S.—I was born and spent for the first 18 years of my life in Ireland—and it may sound heretical coming from Soft Skull but I can't help but feel that the most valuable area in which progressives could practice self-criticism is in the arena of reflexive anti-Americanism. Progressives seem to practice a peculiar kind of American Exceptionalism wherein America is the exception to the rule that not everything a given country does is intrinsically awful. Or, alternatively, a sociological expression of that quasi-narcissistic psychological formation that D.W. Winnicott talked about where an infant fails to be able to distinguish between itself an the world and takes on a form of omnipotence that presumes that it is a hurting machine, that everything it does is wrong, a situation as likely to produce fucked-up behavior (on an individual or imperial level) as the omnipotence that thinks that everything it does is right.
Alright, enough out of me...
...distributor going under. (via Bookslut.)
But, lest we forget, the IPA was actually losing money, unlike PGW, which was profitable.
Sorry for the light posting, occasioned by the fact that there is presently too much news, much too much news, and digesting it, and reacting to it, and adjusting to it has to be my primary responsibility. If you don't know what I mean, see this and this on our distributor's bankruptcy filing.
But, to keep perspective, see this and this (Helen and Paul are friends of mine from college, ditto of Jenny D.'s). It's an instance of pure evil at work in the world.
Roy Christopher, a David Frost of the counter-culture, has a new book out, and I'll quote a Soft Skull fellow traveler, the ingenious Disinformation Company, on why you should check it out:
“A special shout out to Disinfo ally Roy Christopher, whose much-anticipated interview collection Follow For Now is about to hit bookstores near you. The collection includes stellar discussions with the key cultural luminaries, blogerati, and intellectuals of our time, from Douglas Rushkoff and Bruce Sterling to Doug Stanhope and Howard Bloom. Read the Table of Contents and you’ll see why I believe, if you’re interested in these people and their personal visions, that Follow For Now will be amongst the most important books published in 2006.” — Alex Burns
...what might that be? Well, I know at this time of year there is much discussion of the effect of awards on literary culture, but what of the effect of applying for awards on a publisher's bank account?
To wit, Kristin Pulkkinen, our genius publicist, was just now discussing with me the books we're submitting for PEN Awards. Mostly, we love submitting for a PEN Award, they don't charge us. (Unlike the extortionate National Book Awards, who do, and handsomely...). We've also managed to be a finalist in a couple of PEN Awards, engendering even greater fondness for them here at Soft Skull.
But we saw that the PEN Hemingway Award, for Best First Novel, administering by PEN New England, had a $40 entry fee. "F&*k!" I exclaimed, my predeliction for profanity well-known in this office.
And then we see the note:
"* Exceptions will be made for small press submissions: if your press's annual net sales do not exceed 4 million dollars, you need not submit the entry fee."
Ladies and gentleman, the only literary award of which we are aware that recognizes that awards submission fees are a form of regressive taxation on independent publishers: the PEN Hemingway. Kudos to them, and to PEN in general for being free, and to the NBCC for also being free.
And a big-time hint to the National Book Foundation that one of the ways in which they could contribute to literacy and respect for the book could be by ceasing to extort $100/title from independent publishers for each nomination. Or at least waiving it for say the first 2 or 3 titles submitted...
(As for the $2000 the publisher on the short list has to pay as a contribution to marketing support—well let's just say that Copper Canyon must have a separate line item in their annual budget for forking over money to the NBF in exchange for being one of the finest independent poetry presses in the United States)
So I wish there were the hours in the day that would allow me to blog at length about the German Book Office trip to meet with a great many German publishers and editors, mostly though not exclusively independent, a trip that also included Lauren Wein from Grove, Dennis Loy Johnson from Melville House, Katie Dublinski from Graywolf, Cal Barksdale from Arcade, and Rachel Deahl from Publishers Weekly. Suffice it to say that if any country's cultural apparatus invites you to do such a thing, you do it. You do it, and then you apologize for the fact that such visit will never be reciprocated by your own damn government...
Anyway, the one thing I have to offer is something called SignandSight.com A condensation, in English, of the various cultural reporting from both German newspapers and papers and magazines from around the world. It should be on every culture blogger's column of links, me thinks...
One thing that I've not noticed anyone mention (perhaps cause it's a bit insider baseball, perhaps because different media have credited different publishers according to whether they're in the US or UK or what-have-you) is that of the six short-listed titles, no less than four are liked to Grove Atlantic.
Desai, Kiran The Inheritance of Loss - Hamish Hamilton (published by Atlantic Monthly, an imprint of Grove, in the US)
Grenville, Kate The Secret River - Canongate (distributed by Grove in the US)
Hyland, M.J. Carry Me Down - Canongate (distributed by Grove in the US)
Matar, Hisham In the Country of Men - Viking
St Aubyn, Edward Mother’s Milk - Picador (Open City in the US, distributed by Grove)
Waters, Sarah The Night Watch - Virago
That, if I may say, is pretty damn impressive...
Book sites accounted for 15.93 per cent of all sites visited from the Google Book Search page last week.
To add to the encomia being heaped upon Ed Park in the aftermath of his injudicious firing...
In February of 2004, two days before Matt Sharpe appeared on the Today Show to discuss his book with Ms. Couric following its selection by Susan Isaacs for the TODAY SHOW book club, a review ran in the Village Voice. That review was by Ed Park and Matt and I agreed that if he never got a better review in the rest of his life, he could still die and consider himself well-reviewed ("genuine sui generis genius comic family novel writing")
I post the whole review below, because it really was amazing, but let me gloss one bit of it for you. Midway through the review, Ed refers to "the sibilant traffic jam of an opening ('Chris Schwartz's father's Prozac dosage must have been incorrect')"...Now I worked on that book for a while, and I heard Matt read from it several times, and there were other reviews, including a very nice one by Claire Dederer in the NYTBR, and all that, but it wasn't until I myself had to read the first five pages of that novel aloud, and nearly melted down just trying to get "Chris Schwartz's father's Prozac dosage must..." past my lips...
The point being: for a critic to notice that was just astonishing. How could he have noticed it, really, I still wonder...
Aphasic Instinct
Everything is illuminated—and often repeated—in Matthew Sharpe's heart-piercing novel
by Ed Park
March 3 - 9, 2004
Matthew Sharpe's The Sleeping Father is two novels in one—an imploding-family masterpiece every bit as heart-piercing as The Corrections, and a stylistically thrilling inquiry into the weight of words. It's a treasure-house of gleaming deadpan sentences (sample chapter-spanning juxtaposition: "They had a nice time on the couch until the sun went down," followed by "Three hours before summer arrived in California, it arrived in Connecticut"). It's sad, to the degree that this reader instinctively closed his eyes right at the moment it became clear something very ugly was about to happen. It's resplendent with aching absurdities, word salads, inspired semicolon deployment, golden-eared teenage monologues. It's the best thing I hope to read all year—and if it isn't, this will be a very good year indeed.
While it was not the central message of Ron Hogan's piece on ChickLit in today's GalleyCat, it is nice to see our Lynne Tillman used as the gold standard for "serious women's fiction" (in faux contradistinction to ChickLit). Oddly enough though, Lynne's newest book American Genius, A Comedy involves extended discussions on the topics of facials, furniture, and fabrics...
OK, so the latest scheme from Soft Skull is a new series of occasional political essays of five to ten thousand words, available as PDFs from our own website for free and, shortly, from Amazon.com and/or iTunes (working on those relationships right now...).
You could call them ePamphlets. Or iPamphlets. We're calling it Soft Skull Samzidat, and, appropriately, the first essay in the series—Bush and Putin as Leaders: The Ties that Bind—deals with Russia or, more specifically, how Bush and Putin both look into each others' souls and see kindred spirits, and kindred operators...
A short version of the essay appears at The Globalist, the long version—the actual Soft Skull Samzidat Publication No. 1—appears right here, and below are a couple of choice excerpts.
The actions of the Bush Administration point to a great irony. Fifteen years after the end of the Cold War, America and Russia are undergoing a form of convergence of sorts. However, rather than Russia adopting liberal democracy and a market economy, as so many had predicted, the United States may be moving closer to a more traditionally Russian notion of managed democracy, in which executive authority reigns and the rights of citizens take a back seat to the needs of the state...
Each had his "Top Gun" moment before an adoring national press. Bush "helped" fly an S-3B Viking to the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003 to make a speech declaring the "end" to major military combat in Iraq. Three years earlier, and less than a month before his first presidential election, then acting President Putin co-piloted an Su-27 from Krasnodar to Grozny, the capital of Chechnya. The media images of the two presidents, resplendent in their flight suits, are remarkably similar. Both leaders are extremely secretive and rely on inner circles to guide them. Both demand total loyalty and can be brutal to those who cross them. Both are also inclined to attack the news media, which they see as irritants at best.
So in addition to the fact that we have just published a book called What Would Bill Hicks Say? (in which many folks, famous and not, channel the late stand-up comic Bill Hicks), we've heard tell of a new bootleg recording of Hicks, a "Post-Letterman" recording. The significance of it being "post-Letterman" will be obvious to Hicksniks, but read on, those of you are are piqued by have no idea what I'm talking about, and read Ben Mack (co-editor of what Would Bill Hicks Say?) explain what's the deal with Bill Hicks, and Post-Letterman.
Something to give a shit about... by Ben Mack
Bill Hicks (December 16, 1961–February 26, 1994) is considered one of the most influential comedians of the 20th century. However, he is far better known in Europe and Canada than in his homeland of America. His outspoken candor kept him from widespread fame and mass media attention. However, his legend is building.
Each year, on the anniversary of his death, fans around the world help his ideas evolve by asking, What would Bill Hicks say?
New material emerges that honors his memory. This year, some authentic new material surfaced. For many fans, this is a momentous find. While eBay offers hundreds of hours of his material...there were three hours that ardent Bill Hicks fans craved to hear.
On 1 October 1993, Bill Hicks did his twelfth gig on the David Letterman show. What the audience in the studio didn't know was that Bill Hicks had been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Later that night, Bill Hicks became the first comedian censored from CBS' Letterman show. Perhaps fitting for the Ed Sullivan Theatre, where Elvis Presley was censored in 1956. But, while Presley wasn't allowed to be shown below the waste, Hicks was made to disappear...
As reported in The New Yorker, Letterman greeted Hicks as he sat down on the couch with, "Good set, Bill! Always nice to have you drop by with an uplifting message!" But, there was trouble in the air and Letterman knew it. Letterman went to commercial with, "Bill, enjoy answering your mail for the next few weeks."
Back in his hotel, Bill stepped out of the shower to answer the phone. Robert Morton...the Letterman show was not running his set.
Bill was terminally sick and knew it. He imagined his Letterman show to be his swan song...what he would be remembered for. In many ways he might have been right. This debacle brought him more attention in the United States than his previous 11 Letterman appearances combined.
In the next few days after the censorship, Bill Hicks performed three shows ranting harder than ever before. These three "post-Letterman shows" as they've been called, have long been thought not captured. This last week, one of these three historic shows has just emerged, the middle show from 10/5/93, recorded by an audience member who happened to be an audio engineer. There is a brief gap in the recording at the one-hour mark when he switched tapes, but the quality is as high as can be expected from a covert recording.
This historic performance is available in its entirety as a completely free download from the art site Frequency23.org
There's an intersting post with invitation for comments on Sepulculture on the subject of whether consumer branding is possible/worthwhile/viable for a larger publisher (giving Soft Skull, correctly or not, as an example for the kind of branding he's talking about as more prevalent amongst independents.)
I've two thoughts about this and will start with the one that's a caveat. A great independent publicist told me recently that while she and others definitely know Soft Skull as a publisher, and are curious about what we do, she hasn't a clue what my lead Fall 2006 title is. That can be a big probem, given that the mainstream media is going to frequently say: "OK I wanna do one Soft Skull book, which should I do?" I want to tell them, "You choose! I'd love to know which you choose, and why!" But it just doesn't work that way, sadly. And it's pretty impossible to build mainstream buzz around 35-40 titles a year...and it just goes against what we believe not just ethically (all authors are equal) but practically (I can do my best to discern another person's set of tastes
So, that's the caveat: the downside of a brand is that it's harder promote the individual components of it, and unlike a magazine where the brand the the thing that is bought, with us it's the book that is bought. (And sold books are what keep us in business...) So branding is definitely not the be-all and end-all as I'm slowly learning...
But Sepulculture was asking about the propects of the corporate publishers achieving branded-ness, since after all, despite my caveat, if we had no brand, we'd be really screwed, so it definitely has significant value. My instinct is that it can be done, but it would really require a complete reinvention of the structure of the corporate publisher. You'd need to create small imprints within the company, consisting of a group of maybe 4 to 8 people functioning as an entire editorial and marketing and publicity operation, availing of the corporation to provide infrastructure, sales, distribution. They would have considerable autonomy, so long as they met their financial targets. Everyone in that unit would be encouraged to think like a publisher, considering the entirety of how a book gets from the writer to the reader. And the sales, rights and contracts, production and manufacturing groups would be structuring themselves as service providers.
In effect the Random Houses and Penguins would be holding companies of a stable of imprints and the primary difference between them, and a company like Soft Skull wrorking with a distributor like PGW, is that they would have stable cash flow and great economies of scale on everything from FedEx to printing. (Operations like Perseus and Avalon are existing examples, albeit on a smaller scale, of this hypothetical structure)
But, absent that level of autonomy it would be very difficult to build a brand, since all a brand is, really, is a small group of people creating something they think is lovely, and a larger group of people (readers) agreeing it is lovely, and a bond developing between them. That connection can't be faked, not in books...
As some of you may have read in an earlier post, we're publishing a biography of Bishop V. Gene Robinson, the first openly gay bishop in the history of Christendom. Consequently, I have his name in my Google News Alerts (the Poor Publisher's Clipping Service). I get about six or seven a day and this morning I got one with two entries: one, from Alternet adapted from a speech of his earlier this year, the other a letter to the editor of the Birmingham News. They speak for themselves.
Giving So It Matters AlterNet - San Francisco,CA,USA...There's a lot in scripture about leprosy. It was a much-feared disease in Biblical times, and one of the very interesting things about leprosy is it does something to the nerve endings in your hands and feet. Much of the disfigurement that you see in lepers comes from the fact that they can't feel pain in their hands and their feet. So you can put your hand on a red hot stove and it doesn't communicate to your brain that your skin is literally on fire.
I think the reason it's used in scripture so much is that we all want to insulate ourselves from the pain of the world. The trick is to stay connected to the world so that we feel the pain and then to make some kind of response to it.
There are two kinds of giving, but I like to think of it as downstream giving and upstream giving. It's not enough to pull the drowning victims out of the river, you need to walk back upstream and find out who's throwing them in. So there's both downstream-giving that actually takes care of victims of oppression. And then there's upstream-giving -- walking back upstream to do justice and to promote systemic change to find the underlying causes that are causing all this.
The religious right is upstream, throwing people in the river and it's time we named it for what it is. It's time we took the Bible back. It's time we took our faith back and stopped having to apologize for being Christian or Jewish or Muslim without having to explain, "No, we're not that kind of a Jew, we're not that kind of a Christian."
I think right now for gay and lesbian people it's easier to come out to someone as gay than it is to come out as Christian. We have allowed ourselves to be hijacked. Part of what I'm trying to do in my ministry is use my skills and my office to say that there are Christians in this world who feel differently about these issues. It takes religious people to fight back against religious people...
Birmingham News - Birmingham,AL,USA
...I was outraged when Gene Robinson, an admitted homosexual, was ordained as a bishop in New Hampshire a couple years ago. I have never seen my beloved church in the same light since this travesty occurred. It is like there is a dark cloud hanging over the church every time I attend. I have spoken with my priest and continue to pray about this issue on a daily basis. I have received no satisfaction because any way you look at it, according to the Bible, homosexuality is an abomination in the eyes of God...
I was up in Toronto Wednesday and Thursday to tell our Canadian distributor's reps about forthcoming books (an event known as Sales Conference) and to visit some stores and editors. One of my stops was at This Ain't The Rosedale Library, a wonderful Toronto bookseller that is ridiculously supportive of Soft Skull (we have some of our poetry books face out there, for God's sake!)
And there I got the wonderful news that the Guardian has selected the store as one of the Top Ten bookstores in the world. Thrilled for them, I resolve to check the rest when back in New York.
Lo and behold, who do I see on the list but City Lights (natch!) and Clovis in Williamsburg, equally ridiculously supportive of Soft Skull. (The owner, Amanda, saves money by driving to Soft Skull's office to pick up her order...)
As excited as I am to tell you about these stores, part of me also wants to tell you about the other stores in those cities: Modern Times in SF, Pages in Toronto, St. Marks and Bookcourt and Three Lives in NYC...So here's what I say: visit them all, please, if/when buying books this year. The owners and managers of thse stores are all scared shitless right now, relying on holiday sales to get them through another year.
Also, a quick additional observation sparked by this accolade and by the trip to Toronto. This Ain't The Rosedale Library and Pages are both among the top ten independents for Soft Skull in terms of sales, also. Toronto helps keep Soft Skull in business. Thanks, Toronto...
From the Australian newspaper the Herald Sun on the subject of This Day in History (it's already November 2nd in Australia...)
2003 – The Rev Canon V Gene Robinson is consecrated as the first openly gay bishop of the US Episcopal Church, a move that threatened to tear apart the worldwide Anglican community.2004 – A filmmaker who was the great-grandnephew of Vincent van Gogh is slain in a daylight attack, and police arrest a Dutch-Moroccan man after wounding him in a shootout. Theo van Gogh made a movie criticizing the treatment of Muslim women.
I came to this information via the poor man's clipping service Google News Alerts, because of the reference to Gene Robinson, and I'm keeping up-to-date with him because we're publishing a book about him next June, entitled Going to Heaven written by Elizabeth Adams, herself possessed of a lovely blog.
I then notice, as did you, immediately beneath, that November 2nd is also the day (the following year) on which Theo van Gogh was assassinated in the Netherlands. And we're in discussions about doing a book about that also (a translation of a Dutch book, publishing today...). Shoudl we end up doing it, I'll devote a post to it, as it touches on several things of concern to Soft Skull and publishing (and the Frankfurt Book Fair).
So this coincidence—Gene Robinson and Theo van Gogh—compells me to note, earlier than I might otherwise have planned to, that Soft Skull is embarking on a plan to start publishing a good deal about religion and how it plays into politics and society. And it's not all anti-clerical, either, though I can assure you that it is also not going to involve books about how the Dems can win in 2008 by being more religious. What it is about is recognizing that the U.S. is by far the most religious country in the West, and if we're to tussle with understanding this country, we have to engage with religion, and we're going to have to get our hands dirty with it. And, notwithstanding the relative secularity of the rest of the West, and notwithstanding my massive antipathy towards utterly ahistorical Huntingtonesque theories about clashes of civilizations, to also seek to understand the role religion (theological religion, let's say) plays when cultures (Algeria and the Netherland, Somalia and Italy, Morocco and Spain, etc etc...) interpenetrate.
Interestingly enough, almost everyone writing for us on this subject is in blog land. Michael Standaert is writing on Tim LaHaye and the Left Behind series in Skipping Toward Armageddon: The Politics and Propaganda of the Left Behind Novels and the LaHaye Empire; Laurel Snyder is editing Half/Life a collection of original essays on growing up half Jewish; and David Griffith has written what is probably the finest title for a book we'll publish this year: A Good War Is Hard to Find which we're describing as a Catholic Regarding the Pain of Others or as Joan Didion meets Flannery O'Connor...the first chapter of the book is online here.
So we're hitching a couple more horses to the Soft Skull non-fiction chariot: intellectual property as readers of my Google post will have noted, and religion, as I'm saying here. Making ever stranger bedfellows with queer studies, music, foreign policy, electoral politics, and so on...
Do we know what we're doing, putting all this together? No. But we're doing it so we can find out why we're doing it.
This is an occasionally updated post of links I've found that themselves link to a variety of discussions on the subject of this Google business in particular, but also to the larger questions of Fair Use, Public Domain, Piracy and so forth.
A particularly good one comes from the new academic librarian blog ACRLog that, in addition to discussing the matters dear to their hearts, mention the excellent, albeit too short, New York Times Magazine piece on clearing rights for documentaries.
Then, here's Ed's take on my first posting on the subject, as well as another great item that Ed found that really ticked my amateur copyright lawyer funny bone.
This latter one I found particularly bright. He’s a pox-on-both-your-houses fellow, but I did think that his characterization of Google was quite illuminating. They come from a culture not necessarily of information wants to be free (since obviously they’ll hog patents, and databases) but of information IS almost free. Or, at least, that the marginal cost of reproducing it is zero. Whereas, as we all know, printers do not in fact reprint for free.
It does reinforce a thought I've been having about the distinction between my position, and that of other publishers—those who are frontlist dependent (where publicity is particularly important) and publisher who are backlist dependent (where preserving value, and repurposing content is seen to be crucial.) I do still hold that hoarding backlist will weaken it over 50 years.
Some very interesting stuff on the other side of the Atlantic also, from Grumpy Old Book Man who in particular identifies a somewhat technical site called INDICARE. I know eyes will glaze over when you see it, but it really is so crucial for us all to get schooled on this. Because, frankly, those with the money are schooling themselves right now. I really cannot understate the significance of the developments in intellectual property law and practice over the last decades and the coming one. The debates over the minimum wage and Social Security and pension funds, while significant, are nevertheless so much less salient to how the world's economy will be organized 100 years from now than IP law.
The Dean of Expaning the Public Domain, Larry Lessig, weighed in on his blog, and there are many illuminating comments.
So I've been having a (very civilized) exchange with the Association of American Publishers over their Google lawsuit. I'm basically furious about what's going on, though I can't blame them directly: it's the membership that decides what they do. I post my exchange to date below (eliding some bits not relevant).
In effect this post constitutes really an Open Letter to the Publishing Community, though from some blogs I'm reading—notably, because of their position as an agent, Booksquare, who comments here and here—this blog will be preaching to the converted.
First e-mail sent when I heard of the lawsuit:
Dear [...]:
I have a bit of a dilemma here actually as I vehemently disagree with the AAP’s position. This happens to be an issue I’ve studied very closely (we have a number of books under contract on the subject of intellectual property)...and it’s not even, unfortunately, something I can just keep quiet about disagreeing with either. But I don’t want to put you or the SIP Committee in a difficult situation—in part because I believe the AAP’s position on this is particularly harmful for small and independent publishers, even more so than the AAP’s lobbying on behalf of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act.
Is it sufficient, when publicly declaiming and doing the things I do, to simply not refer to my membership of the committee? How does the AAP handle this kind of situation (I’m sure I’m hardly the only AAP member who has disagreed with the AAP’s position on a given topic).
Thanks and sorry! (And no rush, I’m in Frankfurt right now...)
Richard
Here was the AAP's response:
Of course, we at AAP are sorry to hear that one of our members vehemently disagrees with AAP's position on the Google Library Project. However, as you might imagine, such disagreements are not unprecedented and can be expected to arise from time to time. AAP's support for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, for example, has been the subject of disagreement with some of our members who publish in the field of computer research and security. However, such disagreement has not stopped AAP from continuing to support the DMCA nor has it stopped those members from publicly disagreeing with AAP's position on the matter.
When these disagreements arise, we do our best to try to make sure that members who disagree with a position or action taken by AAP fully understand the reasons why AAP has taken the position or action, as well as the process by which the decision was reached to take the position or action. AAP always tries to act based on broad consensus among its members, but this does not mean that AAP acts only where there is unanimity among its members.
As you know, AAP has a Board of Directors that is elected by our members and empowered by AAP's bylaws to make decisions and take actions on behalf of the entire AAP membership. Quite often, issues that eventually come before the Board for decisions and actions are initially explored and considered by one or more of AAP's committees and divisions. AAP staff routinely work to facilitate participation in these committees and divisions by all interested members, and members are always encouraged to contact AAP staff to make known their interests, concerns and views on relevant matters.
AAP cannot, should not, and does not try to censor or silence members who disagree with specific AAP actions or policies. Although we sometimes hear of members who consider withdrawing from AAP membership based on such disagreements, it appears that they usually decide that the overall value of AAP membership and their ability to express their dissenting views both within and outside of the AAP clearly warrant their continued membership.
Please feel free to contact AAP staff, including myself or our President and CEO Pat Schroeder, if you are interested in discussing the actions taken by AAP concerning the Google Print Library Project and your reasons for disagreement with those actions. We would certainly welcome the opportunity to answer any questions you may have regarding the basis for AAP's actions, and perhaps to even persuade you to reconsider your disagreement with those actions.
One additional point -- you are incorrect when you refer to "AAP's lobbying on behalf of the Sonny Bono Copyright Extension Act." Because our members were deeply split on the question of whether Congress should, as a matter of public policy, extend the term of copyright protection by an additional 20 years, AAP did not take a position for or against that legislation when it was pending before Congress. AAP was involved, at the request of the Register of Copyrights and the chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, in negotiations with the education and library communities regarding a special section of that legislation that provided certain privileges to those communities with respect to certain uses of copyrighted works during the additional 20 years of protection provided by the legislation, but AAP did not lobby for or against enactment of the legislation. Subsequently, when the legislation was challenged in court on the grounds that Congress lacked the constitutional authority to enact it, AAP did join a "friend of the court" brief that rejected this argument and opposed the challenge to the legislation on those constitutional grounds; however, we made certain that the brief clearly noted that, on the public policy issue, AAP had not lobbied for or against the legislation.
I hope this response is helpful to you.
Best, [...]
Association of American Publishers
50 F Street, NW 4th Floor
Washington, D.C. 20001-1530
Very reasonable, and I was busted on the non-trivial distinction as regards how they in fact handled the business of the Copyright Extension Act. Here's my response which basically outlines a chunk of my take on the matter, though the business logic, about which I do feel strongly, was neglected here since I do think it's been fairly widely covered elsewhere.
Dear [...]:
First let me register my gratitude for your comprehensive response, and second my apologies as regards the Extension Act—I based that assumption on the fact of the amicus brief filed at the time of the Lessig case—I was writing late at night from Frankfurt without access to much but my slightly faulty memory. The difference between lobbying for the bill, and filing an amicus brief that it not be overturned is not that great, but I do accept there is a difference. I would nevertheless have wished the AAP to support Lessig, not the government, in that case, though glad that the AAP did not take a position on the extension of the term of copyright legislatively.
I understand the process whereby this decision was reached, and I am aware that it reflects not only a large majority of the board, as your press release indicated, but of the membership as a whole (and, probably, not just a revenue-weighted majority but a majority of members, and probably a rather substantial majority to boot.) So it’s an entirely legitimate decision in a procedural sense, I do very much recognize that.
Over the last year, I have made a substantial commitment of my company’s time and energy to fighting what I consider to be an intellectual property land grab more significant than the actual 19th century land grab (recognizing that the expansion of trademark protections are probably more egregious than those in copyright). Fair Use is withering and its defenders are relatively few and dramatically under-resourced—I am adding Soft Skull to their number, for what that’s worth. I have several books under contract dealing with different aspects of intellectual property rights, and they would largely be aimed at, inter alia, defending fair use, expanding the use of licenses such as the Creative Commons, and returning the copyright term to the original 28 years, a la the Founder’s Copyright movement. Given this, it would be impossible for me to remain silent when my peers are adopting an approach completely contrary to what our books will be advocating. It is incumbent on me to find whatever soapboxes I can find, and try to make as strong as possible a case as I can to persuade that majority to change their position. I’ve inveighed against both the music and film industry for their shortsightedness in interviews and panel discussions in the past—I would be justifiably branded a hypocrite for failing to do so in my very own industry.
Prior to the AAP suit, my situation wasn’t really complicated in that I could simply dispute with individuals. But now, in effect, the situation is fixed, and whatever pontificating I might do would therefore be seen to be against the AAP as a whole, rather than the individual positions taken by different companies. [...]
You did however ask me to outline the basis for my opposition so as to give you a chance to respond.
I would characterize my overall position thusly: the long-term future of American publishing depends fundamentally on the quality of the content that we produce and sell. An excessive focus on the ownership of that content, and on restricting how others might make alternative uses of that content will seriously impinge on the value of that content over decades. A hyperbolic but nevertheless accurate example: Shakespeare’s plays would be impossible to publish under the present conditions. More contemporary examples: Brecht’s plays. Ulysses. All great art (also known as: backlist) is a compound of that which has gone before (most of the great classical music liberally quotes antecedents, likewise in painting).
The fundamental goal of copyright in the Constitution is not to confer an absolute property right but rather to stimulate cultural production: a limited property right being a means to that end, rather than an end in itself. Thus we are always intrinsically talking about relative values, trade-offs, balancing acts, etc. Having the world’s books available in searchable and granular format online is a tremendous boon to the culture, and will result in more and better books. Again and again, in comments issued by publishers and authors, by the AAP and the Authors Guild, there is a profound failure to perceive that such rights are not absolute property rights, but relative property rights, issued provisionally to achieve a larger social purpose. That is how it is, and how it should be.
I’m not going to address the business issues here except to note that I would love to see empirical data that suggests that the value of our intellectual property would be diminished by its availability in the proposed Google Print for Libraries format...the Amazon Search Inside and Google Print for Publishers both seem to suggest the opposite. I also cannot see how one could make the case that the works’ availability in this format will deprive publishers of licensing revenue except in a very few circumstances (Google scanning highly granular reference works being the only exception I can think of). The business issues are legion, but the positions (with which I happen to agree) are presently quite widely disseminated, in fact they’re on blogs by authors, readers, techies, agents (anonymous) everywhere. I’m merely here going to add some points that do not appear to be widely expressed already:
1. I ran the Permissions Dept at Oxford Univ Press for 2 years in the late 1990’s and watched how scholars (and sometimes editors, and editorial assistants, and researchers) devoted hundreds of hours of work clearing permissions for “snippets.” This is a vast waste of resources and one not taken into account, I can be almost positive, when publisher weigh the important of less restrictive fair use conventions.
2. Obviously you have your legal advice, and Google has theirs, but from what I’m reading, a very substantial majority of IP lawyers and scholars take Google’s plans to be Fair Use.
3. The e-mail letter to the Small & Independent Publishers Committee [which apprised us of the suit, and of which I am a member, though I've flagged in my attendance in the last year] hints at how grateful SIP publishers should be that the AAP is spending its money on this case. I would like to register one important caveat. Soft Skull Press has been subject to three copyright and trademark cease-and-desist letters (one from an AAP member) in the past two years, letters that I could only defend against because my fiancee is an intellectual property lawyer. The biggest threat Soft Skull’s intellectual property faced in the past 2 years was from a claim from HarperCollins that was so overreaching it bordered on sanctionable. In sum, the largest members of the AAP are well able to defend themselves, and have used their resources in the past to attempt to legally strong-arm smaller members of the AAP. Thus while I accept that the AAP has to represent the expressed interest of a majority of its members, I do hope that it will not be represented to the public that the AAP is riding to the rescue of its smallest members—it would be just a little too over-the-top. (Your press release does not do this, I recognize, only the letter to us.)
4. Unlike in trademark law, where a failure to defend one’s trademark can result in a weakening of the mark, failure to sue for copyright infringement does not in any way diminish one’s right to sue in other cases. Again and again, one hears a domino-effect claim from parties opposed to Google Print. I have no idea what that claim means since it is not a legal observation. However, should other companies seek to do what Google is doing and remain within what many, include myself, consider to be the bounds of fair use, then a domino effect would be wonderful. If, on the other hand, they do not operate within the bound of fair use, let’s say they propose to sell entire chapters, or the book, then failing to stop Google would have no effect whatsoever on anyone’s ability to sue this other hypothetical company. In fact, should the courts rule against the AAP, that precedent could create an even more expansive approach to Fair Use than the one presently in effect.
My thanks for this opportunity to air my concerns. I suspect my position, because largely historical/philosophical, will be difficult to reconcile with that of the majority of the Board: the tension lies even within the components of the AAP mission quoted in the press release—“[th]e protection of intellectual property rights in all media, the defense of intellectual freedom, and the promotion of reading and literacy.” The first item can be at odds with the second and third, and I fear the AAP’s members fail to realize that if you cling too tightly to the property, you’ll impinge on the freedom and the cultural literacy, and the future intellectual property will be that much poorer as a result.
I do feel that a debate, not only about Google but also about the larger fair use issues that the Google matter raises, can and should ensue, alongside whatever legal process the AAP Board chooses to follow.
Best regards,
Richard Nash
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Publisher, Soft Skull Press
55 Washington St, Suite 804
Brooklyn NY 11201
PLEASE NOTE NEW ADDRESS
phone: 718.643.1599
fax: 866.881.4997
mobile: 917.804.0716
richard@softskull.com
www.softskull.com
