Monthly Archives: January 2010

The Google Book Settlement and I

publishing, writing

I’ve spent most of this morn­ing read­ing through some doc­u­ment­a­tion sent to me by John Jarrold, my agent, con­cern­ing the Google Book Settlement. Google is in the pro­cess of digit­ising books. It began this, and has con­tin­ued to do so, largely without the per­mis­sion of rights holders.

The issues are com­plex. Even the sum­mary I read con­tained sev­eral state­ments to the effect that we simply won’t how aspects of the agree­ment will be inter­preted until they are tested in a court. Adding to the com­plex­ity is a mish-mash of UK and US jur­is­dic­tional problems.

Overall, I don’t think Google’s actions are legal; opt­ing in to the set­tle­ment will sug­gest I agree with the legit­im­isa­tion of an illegal act, which I don’t. It rep­res­ents a fun­da­mental change to copy­right law that puts the onus on rights hold­ers to defend them­selves against behemothic entities.

If you’d like to know more, here is the Google Book Settlement Page; and here is a sum­mary by Gillian Spraggs.

★ More Ebooks

publishing,

Further to my review of the COOL-ER eBook Reader, it’s worth not­ing that, else­where, the Internet is light­ing up with com­ments, spec­u­la­tion and reviews about the com­ing storm in pub­lish­ing that is the digit­isa­tion of lit­er­at­ure. Check out this MacWorld story. It out­lines the ten new ebook read­ers announced or released at CES this week.

I had a brief exchange with @Sifter on Twitter yes­ter­day. He reminded me that the key factor in the digit­isa­tion of books is the devel­op­ment of a device that will bring such books to the masses. Remember a few years back when only stu­dents, tech journ­al­ists and geeks were using email? Then, sud­denly, your mum and dad had email accounts. You could bank online. A tip­ping point had come. For ebooks, the tip­ping point will come with a device that can finally com­pete with the prin­ted book as the tech­no­logy best adap­ted for read­ing, short form and long.

Andy Ihnatko recently pub­lished a sens­ible round-up of what the fabled Apple Tablet (or iSlate, or iBook) might fea­ture. Elsewhere, Neven Mrgan hopes that Apple will take the reins of the dis­tri­bu­tion model for writers so that pub­lish­ing a book will be as easy as upload­ing pho­tos to Flickr. John Gruber over at Daring Fireball has pub­lished two posts of spec­u­lat­ing about the Tablet: the Tablet and Tablet Musings. How close will this device come to Apple’s 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video?

Friday Project author Caroline Smailes — in a post entitled I’m Cheap — announced that her books In Search of Adam and Black Boxes are now avail­able as ebooks for the rel­at­ively cheap price of £1.05. This, I think, is more sens­ible than the sky-high fig­ures I’ve seen else­where, and I expect the trend to con­tinue through­out the industry. (Note that some authors, such as Cory Doctorow, have been giv­ing away ebook ver­sions of their com­mer­cial fic­tion for sev­eral years.)

Interesting times.