Downside of E-Pubbing

E-pubbing is so fast and easy, anyone can do it. And millions do. More e-books than print books are being made. There’s no longer that middle gate authors had to get past (usually an agent or an editor) who blocked/opened the path from writer to reader. The process has been made relatively easy for those wanting to publish their own books.

But easy, fast, and money usually draw in people other than those wanting to get their books out to the public. It also draws in scam artists.

I read an article by John Naughton in The Observer called: Now anyone can ‘write’ a book. First, find some words… And by “find” he means it.

One of the most prolific self-publishers on the site is Manuel Ortiz Braschi. When I last checked he had edited, authored or co-authored no fewer than 3,255 ebooks. Mr Braschi is clearly a man of Herculean energy and wide learning, who ranges effortlessly from How to Become a Lethal Weapon in Two Weeks (£1.40) to Herbs 101: How to Plant, Grow & Cook with Natural Herbs (£0.70) while taking in Potty Training! The Ultimate Potty Training Guide! (£0.69).

How could he be an expert in all of those areas? He can’t. According to the article, Braschi is one of many spammers who

 "scrape" content from websites or, in some cases, actually lift entire texts, and republish them as ebooks. And, in a neat twist, each of these ersatz "books" can be marketed under several different titles as coming from different authors.

One “entrepreneur” is marketing a video course on how to post 10 to 20 new Kindle books every day by handing “the video course to your spouse, your assistant, your brother... heck – even hand it to your 10-year-old kid!”

The article claims Kindle self-publishing is “metamorphosing into a new kind of lucrative spam.” It even answers its own question as to why Kindle would allow this to happen:

 Could the fact that it takes a 30% slice of every transaction have anything to do with it? 

My question is: Can anything be done to stop this kind of blatant plagiarism? This is going to keep happening. It’s too easy for spammers to do and too lucrative for them to stop.

Are Your Words Yours?

For those of you who tweet, are your tweets covered by copyright? You’d probably say, yes. But if that’s true, then are you violating copyright when you retweet the words of others?

You may have heard of the book, Twitter Wit. The editor worked with Tweet authors, asking them to submit their best Tweets for the book. Those tweeters who were included went out of their way to help promote the book and it was a hit.

Now there’s a new book, Tweet Nothings. It’s not getting those favorable reviews. It, in fact, is being torn apart. Why? Because no one consulted the authors of the tweets included. Some of those who were included in the book are calling foul and lambasting the book on Amazon reviews. The editor has issued an apology letter (after the book was published, though). Instead of all the tweeters getting out there and promoting the book the way they did with Twitter Wit, the tweeters in this book are creating havoc.

The publisher, Peter Pauper Press, has ceased selling the book and promised not to resume sales until everyone quoted in the book is satisfied.

That may take a while since some are thoroughly outraged.

Are your words yours no matter where they appear? How about on Twitter, where you agree that Twitter can make such Content available to others? You can find more on this at TechDirt, Kung Fu Grippe, and Amazon.

What do you think?

It’s Not Over ‘til It’s Over

For quite a while now we’ve had the back and forth between Google and publishers and authors over Google’s decision to digitalize books. Finally, there was a settlement -- Google said it would pay $125 million into a book rights fund to pay authors and publishers.

Well, “settled” doesn’t mean “finished.”

According to the Dayton Business Journal,

The U.S. Department of Justice is looking into a proposed settlement by Google Inc. with authors of books it wants to put online, according to news reports.

A New York judge recently pushed back the May 5 deadline for authors to tell Google whether they want to opt out of the deal. Now that date has been moved out four more months.

Apparently the problem is in the details of the agreement. According to The Register:

The details of the agreement reached with publishers gives Google monoploy rights on publishing books included in the deal - so if Google decides to delete a title it will effectively disappear. If Google labels a book "inappropriate", no one else can publish it online without risking being sued. There's no indication what Google might dee an "inappropriate" book.

The Register also notes other concerns over the agreement:

Under the agreement Google pledged to establish a Books Right Registry - US copyright holders can get onto the register and get a cut of 63 per cent of Google's earnings from their work, or can ask for their work to be removed. If they don't receive an opt-out request, Google has the right to scan and offer for sale digital copies of books. … The deal also controversially gives Google rights over "orphan works" - books written by people who cannot be traced.

Ars Technica went more specifically into concerns by some authors and publishers about the deal:

So, for example, the agreement as structured could essentially turn Google into the sole rightsholder for orphaned works, which would mean that anyone would have to negotiate with the company over the use of these works. Other objections focus on the fact that Google could control the sale and distribution of out-of-print works, even if the original author decided to release it under a more liberal license. Other recent objections suggest that the settlement, by giving the search giant control of how the out-of-print works are displayed, could allow the company to censor and selectively display these works, based on community standards or political concerns.

If you want more info, including links to the motion filed to intervene in this case, check out The New York Times.

So apparently, it’s not over ‘til it’s over. You’ve got about four more months to weigh in and be heard. The best place to voice your opinion is with The Authors Guild or talk to your publisher.

Chester Campbell, Author

Chester Campbell’s latest book is called The Surest Poison and features PI Sid Chance, a former National Parks ranger whose career as a small town police chief was cut short by malicious accusations of bribery. This is Chester’s first book in this series. He writes a second series featuring Greg McKenzie, a retired Air Force investigator, and his wife. There are already four books in the McKenzie series.

Chester lives in Tennessee and is active in the local chapters of both Sisters in Crime and Mystery Writers of America. He first started writing when he was in the Army Air Force and a fellow cadet mentioned that he wanted to study journalism. Chester knew a good idea when he heard one. That idea took him from work as a newspaper reporter, freelance writer, magazine editor, political speechwriter, advertising copywriter, public relations professional and association executive, all the way to novelist.

Now he’s here to advise us on electronic book rights.

Welcome Chester!

Electronic Rights to Books
By Chester Campbell

Electronic rights to books are becoming more valuable as the availability of ebook readers and methods of downloading titles rapidly increases. The big guys are still Amazon’s Kindle and what Sony calls its Reader Digital Book, but there are many others around, some with Wi-Fi capability. Mobipocket supports many mobile phone operating systems, allowing you to read while standing it line at the grocery.

What’s the outlook for the future? Some in the publishing industry still see ebooks as a fad, but Steve Haber, who developed the Sony Reader, disagrees. He told the Fast Company on-line magazine:

"E-book readers will largely dominate the industry, and it could happen in less than 10 years. Every time I give a Reader to someone to test, I never get it back. It's just like when TiVo or digital cameras came out. At first, people didn't know they needed it. But once they have it, they can't live without it.”

He said the technology shift was the same as when camcorders went from film to digital. “When we introduced our Reader, the biggest resistance I heard was, 'I like the smell of books, and I like the smell of paper. I can't go digital.' That was the confirmation for me that this change will happen. If the smell of paper is the biggest push back, then we're good to go."

So what to do about the electronic rights to your books? Adler & Robins Books, a book packager, has an excellent discussion of the subject. They recommend you retain control of e-rights as much as possible. I’m with a small press and kept all of my electronic rights, which allows me to make my books available for the Kindle and any other ebook reading device.

If you’re with a larger publisher, you may not have that option. But here’s what The Authors Guild has to say about it:

“If your publisher insists on an upfront, outright grant of electronic rights, insert contractual language requiring the publisher to negotiate royalty and Subsidiary Rights licensing splits with you immediately prior to the planned exploitation or licensing of electronic rights.

“The royalty rate your publisher proposes to pay if it publishes its own electronic edition of your book should be enumerated in the Royalties clause of your contract. If your publisher licenses electronic rights to another publisher, your share of the fee should be enumerated in the Subsidiary Rights clause of your contract. Although electronic publishing is still an evolving industry without clear standards, not long ago, Random House announced an intention to evenly split ebook sales revenue with authors. Before this announcement, Random House had been offering authors royalties of no more than 15% of the retail price of an ebook. Many other publishers, including Harper Collins, have started to offer a 50-50 split of net proceeds also. Therefore, you should negotiate to receive no less.”

If you own your electronic rights, you can also sell them to a publisher that specializes in ebooks. Some authors who’ve had a problem getting interest in their manuscripts from traditional publishers or agents go that route first. It can be a springboard to a print publication. E-publishers pay royalties of 30 to 50 percent of list price.

Another caution most advisors give is if your publisher insists on getting electronic rights, you insist on defining out-of-print precisely. Otherwise, they can sell an ebook occasionally and say your book is still in print. Your rights should revert back to you if a specific number of books is not sold in a year’s time.

According to industry buzz, Barnes & Noble is considering its own ebook reader. So are some traditional publishers, including those that currently print newspaper and magazines. Best take a close look at your own situation and be sure you’re ready for a bigger boom in digital publishing.

Which reminds me, I need to upload my new book, The Surest Poison, to the Kindle site.

Thank you Chester.

Chester will be checking in today to answer questions and say hi back to those who comment. Speaking of commenting -- have any of you retained your E-rights? If not, do you wish you had?

I’ll start off the questions for Chester by asking…. I saw in your website FAQ that you were an aviation cadet in the Army Air Forces. Where in the heck were you last month when I was interviewing people for my book on Avionics?!

Digital Rights

Publishers Weekly recently had an article about agent Robert Gottlieb who has been one of the leaders advocating for authors to retain digital and multimedia rights. He’s been fighting for that since the mid 1990s.

Gottlieb, as head of one of the most powerful New York agencies, used his leverage to make it clear that authors (and, by extension, their agents) weren't going to miss the boat.

Now, many years later and many changes in publishing later, Gottlieb seems to be still waging the fight.

When asked about the recent scuffle authors waged against Amazon regarding the text-to-speech option on the new Kindle 2, Gottlieb takes a familiar stance: “Companies can't eviscerate copyright.... They can't incorporate rights they don't have; if those things are allowed to happen, it only serves to deteriorate the industry as a whole.”
Gottlieb also believes, as many agents do, that renegotiation on e-book royalties is inevitable. Because it's cheaper for publishers to produce e-books—with the physical production and distribution removed from transactions—the “cost of doing business,” as Gottlieb puts it, is lower for publishers. This means “authors should share in that additional profit.”

Gottlieb dismisses the idea that publishing is dying.

The challenges ahead excite him—“I don't see [any of] this as the end; I see it as an ever-evolving adventure.”

Copyrights Elsewhere

If, as an American, you’ve assumed that the publishing rules are the same all over the world as they are here, you’ll want to read an article in The Sydney Morning Herald called “Revoke the Rules and Help Book Pirates.”

It starts off by talking about the book industry in India:

It is a free-marketer's nirvana. India for books is what Thailand is for CDs - a land of piracy. For what you would pay for one Rushdie book in Australia, in India you could get his entire oeuvre.

Then goes into what it’s like in Australia.

We have a separate copyright territory. If a book is written, designed, edited and published by Australians - as is about $900 million worth of books sold in Australia annually - an overseas publisher cannot sell an edition of it here. If it is produced overseas, Australian publishers must publish it here within 30 days of its foreign release, or it can be "parallel-imported" to Australia. If it is out of stock, the publisher has 90 days to replenish it. This "use it or lose it" principle is commonly called the 30/90 rule.

Definitely an interesting article for those, like me, who know little about how it works in other countries. Malcolm Knox, the author of the piece, ends with:

Lifting the restriction on parallel importation would not send us immediately into a copyright free-fire zone like India. But there are plenty cautionary tales about unregulated markets right now and, unlike finance and banking, our cultural industries do not sprout again in a few years. Once second-hand, a culture remains second-hand for a long time. Ask the Indians.

I think most American authors would agree with me when I say, copyrights are important. And in this age of the Internet, copyrights are being challenged even here in the states.

Copyright Law & Authors

I’m no lawyer and don’t play one on TV, so I’m not going to speak about the law. But I am going to direct you to an article in the US News. Patrick Ross, executive director of the Copyright Alliance, which advocates for copyright as an agent of jobs and creativity, wrote “Copyright Laws Work Well Against Illegal File Sharing, Also Called Online Theft.”

Definitely worth reading.

Here are a few quotes:

Technology makes it easy for anyone to duplicate and distribute creative works. That does not justify indiscriminate use of technology.

Decriminalization advocates say amateurs need to be free of copyright laws so they can combine songs and images into new works.

The market is providing legal alternatives, driven by our property rights system that gives creators power over the production and distribution of their works. They have a motivation to create artistic works, and thus the creative industries and their 11 million U.S. workers produce a positive balance of trade with every U.S. trading partner. We enjoy a treasure-trove of creative works that is the envy of the world. We can't flip the rights system to empower file sharers at the expense of artists and their motivation to continue to create.

Searching for Copyrights

Are you writing a book and want to quote from some other author’s book? Need to find out whether that other work is copyrighted? Seems like it ought to be easy to determine. Look in the book and check the copyright date, right?

Ahh, if only it were that easy. The copyright date in a book tells you when it was published and can tell you who held the rights at that time. But things change. And time is fluid. Ownership of the rights can go back to the author. Or to the author’s family if the author is deceased. And how long a book is under copyright varies according to when the book was published. Then you have to find out if the rights were renewed.

So, you have to check with the U.S. Copyright Office records. Part of the records are online. The others are not.

Now, thanks to the Universal Library Project, Project Gutenberg, the Distributed Proofreaders and Google, the records are available free to the public. You can download the entire file. Yeah, it’s huge. And not easily searchable. But…it’s a start.

Is Napster Coming to a Book Near You?

Remember the uproar a few years back about teens downloading music online for free? Remember the lawsuits because they were sharing copyrighted songs by the thousands? Artists and producers who owned the rights to those songs forced Napster to change their way of doing business.

Newsweek predicts that the same scenario may happen to the book world. It all came to the forefront last month with a website for ArtizBookSnap. Sort of a scanner, except designed to handle books. According to the author, the book snapper is sort of a big, heavy, awkward contraption costing $1,600 that won’t, as it is, change the world. You have to turn the pages by hand, two cameras (not included) take pictures and send them to your computer then software transforms them so they’re readable on a screen or e-reader.

The significance of the ArtizBookSnap is that it could be the forerunner for a much more consumer-friendly device that would lead to a Napsterish for Books or an I-Pod-like e-book reader. People could create ebooks from their physical books then share them online with others. No paying the authors. To hell with copyrights.

That's when the idea of ripping books might really catch on, presumably with cheaper, cooler scanners. "It will be inevitable," says Booppanon. "And then the book industry will follow what happened with the music industry." Remember—Napster happened in a snap.

Sometimes it’s not the car coming down the road at you that you have to worry about. It’s the truck you can’t see yet.

Authors: Stand Up For Your Rights

There was an article called “Just An Online Minute … Book Piracy: Overrated Problem?” in yesterday’s MediaPost Publications that seemed a bit illogical. The author, Wendy Davis, compared the music and movie industries’ concerns over Web piracy of their products with the concerns of book publishers over piracy of their products (books).

Davis doesn’t see a problem for the book publishing industry.

She starts by saying that file-sharing isn’t a significant problem for book publishers. “After all, the general public hasn't yet taken to e-book readers the way it has to iPods or digital music,” she wrote.

Let’s look at this. Movie piracy didn’t used to be the problem it is today either. The movie industry has been doing everything possible for years to keep ahead of the problem and they’re still not on top of it totally. Does Davis think the book publishing industry should wait until the situation is out of control and can’t be held in check?

In addition, she points out that readers have long been able to check out audio books at the public library. To her, this means that, “While anxiety about Web piracy isn't totally irrational, it seems misplaced here.” She fails to include the fact that libraries have long offered music tapes and records for check-out. Most offer videos for check out, as well. Yet she seems to feel that the music and movie industries' concerns are legitimate while the publishing world’s concerns are not.

Should authors, because they have generously allowed libraries to lend their books free of charge, give up their rights, their royalties, their claims to their works? Every time a song is played on a commercial, used in a play, sung on a TV show, the artist is paid a fee. But authors are expected to sit back and not try to protect their rights, their livelihood?

I don’t believe authors and book publishers object to having books available online. They’ve been available in that format for years. What they object to is people or companies stealing their work without compensation. Just as the movie industry has worked to make it so someone could buy a video and watch it as many times as they want, but not be able to make copies and give or sell them, so should book publishers be able to do the same thing.

Davis concludes the article with: “Book publishers, who don't appear to face the same threat from file-sharing, also need to realize that consumers will be more likely to purchase their product, not less, when it comes in a format they want.”

She’s missed the whole point. If consumers buy the book, that’s great. No problem. Yippee!

Authors are artists just like musicians, actors, painters, and sculptors. They are not slugs in the mud who should shut up and let their work be copied and stolen. They work hard, sometimes years, to produce a piece of work. To not get paid what is rightfully – and I stress that word right-fully – theirs is not fair and those rights should not be ignored or trampled on.

Authors and book publishers don’t have a problem with someone buying a book. They have a problem with a book being made available so that a third party makes money instead of the publisher and author, the rightful owner of those words.

Library of Congress

Still in D.C. Yesterday, I headed to the Library of Congress. I’ve been to D.C. several times, but have never gotten around to the Library of Congress, so I was excited to have the day to myself to wander.

The Metro was a short walk, four or five blocks, from the Mandarin Oriental, then it was only three stops to the station closest to the Library, then another short walk to the doors. First, I took a guided tour of the Jefferson building. A great way to get oriented and to learn things you couldn’t find on your own, such as a lot of information about the architecture and history.

I’ll insert here that it’s still cold in D.C. – I wore a shirt, a jacket, and a coat with gloves and needed every layer. But because of the cold or that it is after Spring break, there weren’t huge crowds. I had no trouble getting close to the Guttenberg Bible or any of the other interesting items on display. There’s lots to see, from the first map to label the U.S. “America,” to some of the earliest photographs and recordings. My favorites, of course, were early books, manuscripts hand-written by authors, and works by authors we all know of and have read.

The research room was gorgeous -- a huge quiet room for those over 18 who need to do research. And all the glorious floor-to-ceiling wood book shelves filled with enticing books. Not to mention all the statues and murals and … everything. It was enough to make you want to throw out a sleeping blanket and stay all night.

Every time you write a manuscript or publish a book and send in two copies to be copyrighted – this is where it goes. Oh, the books!

After I left the Library, I walked through the neighborhood for a while. Found a market where I bought a couple of bananas, some grapes, soy crisps and a diet Dr. Pepper – my breakfast, lunch and dinner. On the way back to the Metro, I stopped at a Starbucks to get dessert – a non-fat soy Chai.

Great day.

Rewriting the Words of Others

I’m out cruising the Internet this morning, checking out the news, when I come across an article called “A Bible Written in Simple Terms” in the Orlando Sentinel. The article talks about the many different versions of the bible written over the years, most of them in an effort to dumb it down for people who don’t understand the “thees,” “thous,” and words like “manger.”

There’s an audio version that came out last fall, a 464-page book that came out in 2005 that tells the story in narrative form rather than chapter and verse, a 1978 version that tells the bible at eighth grade level, a 1996 version written at sixth grade level, and many more.

My question is not, “How many versions of the bible do we need?” Nor is it, “What’s next? A toddler level?” I’m not asking that last question because I know there are bible story books already out there for parents to read to their pre-schoolers.

My question is, “At what point do you say that this one that brings it down to the first grade level or this one that is admittedly a paraphrasing of the bible is NOT the bible?”

There have been many re-tellings of Shakespeare’s plays. Romeo and Juliet appear in many books, the entire plot including the tragic ending, set in modern day. Yet the author doesn’t claim his book is THE Romeo and Juliet.

Can we go back to the original Bible, the one written on scrolls or papyrus or whatever they were written on and say that is THE bible. Everything else is a knock-off. A copyright infringement, if the original were still under copyright.

If I had written the bible, I’d be ticked that so many hacks were ripping me off.