The Publishing World Post #8: "Rights, Wrongs, and our E-Future"

I began the week with an article that offered me a great deal of comfort. In the heat of the arguments against Google’s e-book program and in anxiety over my proclaimed attempt to tackle Digital Rights Management in my final essay, I’ve been drained of my fodder to stoke the fires of support for e-books; it’s hard to agree with Google’s attempts, and in the face of the great DRM megalith, my faith in the arguments for e-books faltered. The torch, however, was not dropped in this past month. Buried in the blog section of PW is David Rothman’s E-Book Report regularly addresses rather large issues in the e-book world (recently including “How to Read an E-book in a Bathtub,” “Locking up Dickens: DRM is a lit and biz toxin,” and “‘Novel’ e-book site to woo young laptop-toters—and grandmas too”). The article that most recently caught my eye is a reaction to an evaluation of e-libraries published in The New Yorker. Since the article claims that the magazine “is as wrong about e-libraries as Martin Luther apparently was about paper books,” Rothman mainly addresses the same closemindedness in his adversary’s article that I’d experienced recently. He rightly complains that Anthony Grafton “barely mentions the Internet Archive's Open Content Alliance and refers not once by name to Brewster Kahle, the brilliant MIT-educated founder of the archive who for years has been addressing the ‘Can we do it?’ details of a universal library” and in doing so “chooses to don blinders and downplay visions like Brewster's or mine [Rothman’s]--not fully attainable today but certainly worth striving toward.” The beauty of this blog is it’s rich content pointing to examples—good and bad—of the advances in/detractors of electronic media, including a link to books.google where an interested reader can peruse a copy of Scholarly Publishing: The Electronic Frontier by Robin P. Peek and Gregory B. Newby that includes a chapter by Rothman on his actual proposal for “A Virtual Central Database.” Also good fodder for a discussion of Digital Rights Management was a PW article about the Rowling/Warner Bros. lawsuit against the publisher RDR Books for their involvement in a web-print project that hinges on content that could be ruled Rowlings’ individual intellectual property (in which Warner Bros. has a large stake, of course). The information is already published online on the Harry Potter Lexicon (also the title of the intended book), but Rowling says that since her own Harry Potter encyclopedia will be definitive and will profit charity (at least in part), “I cannot, therefore, approve of ‘companion books’ or ‘encyclopedias’ that seek to preempt my definitive Potter reference book for their authors’ personal gain.” Would an addition of “Unofficial” or “Fan-Written” to the title allow RDR to publish the book fair and square? In other lawsuit news, the New York Times just released an article about authors suing their publisher for steeply discounting books sold to clubs and subsidiaries, thus cutting author royalties “a fraudulent, deceptively concealed and self-dealing scheme”—or at least, that’s the authors’ argument. One plaintiff is quoted with a touch of humor—an not entirely at Regenery’s expense: “it suddenly occurred to us [plaintiffs] that Regnery is making collectively jillions of dollars off of us and paying us a pittance. Why is Regnery acting like a Marxist cartoon of a capitalist company?” The Times, being a publisher itself and having a deep connection to book publishers the world over, seems to side a bit more with Regenery’s lawyer who states “No publisher in America has a more acute marketing sense or successful track record at building promotional platforms for books than Regnery Publishing. These disgruntled authors object to marketing strategies used by all major book publishers that have proved successful time and again as witnessed by dozens of Regnery bestsellers.” After all, these writers were responsible for signing their contracts. I agree that the difference between $4.25 per book and $.10 per book is a huge and honestly ridiculous disparity between royalties, but I’m a full proponent of authors and publishers being equally responsible for what is included in a contract; both parties have a grace period in which to negotiate and clarify terms. If the terms in the contracts are actually misleading, I can see this case being much stronger. I still find it sad that our society is so litigious that even legal issues seem to begin and resolve thanks to the headstrong maxim “It’s better/easier/wiser to ask forgiveness than permission.”