I was going to run an April Fool story but somehow there are so many bizarre things going on in the world that almost anything is believable. A friend of mine advised me the other day that if you want to fabricate an absolutely unbelievable fact and have people suspend credulity all you have to do is open the sentence with 'Did you know that in America...'.
Here are some totally credible (and true) statistics. Visits to this website in March numbered 81424, 22% up on February (which was a lousy month) and way up on last year's February of 18724. This means the total number of vists is now 620957. An average day is 2500 visits, a rotten day 1500 and a great day is around 3800. I'm looking forward to breaking the 4000 barrier.
If you have any time today do read this interview with Emily Gravett and in particular follow the link to the audio slideshow.
In yesterday's comments on this blog, Tim Coates asks:
'Are we too interested in the technology and the future rather than the inventiveness and thought of the past to which the internet might give us access? We confine our study of the past to a small list of accepted historic work. Should we be looking for more?
Are we obsessed with the technology rather than the opportunity?'
Very fair questions. But before we can do more we need, as publishers, to secure the present and I have permission to reproduce this article by Nick Clee (published in the Times Literary Supplement but not available online) which summarises some of the issues facing the book industry:
At a pace evocative of Jarndyce and Jarndyce, two lawsuits with significant implications for the future of copyright are making their way through the US courts. The Association of American Publishers and the Authors Guild are suing Google, alleging that the internet search company is engaged in “massive copyright infringement” in its project to digitise the book collections of leading libraries. A victory for Google – or an extension of legal wranglings to a point beyond which its opponents run out of funds – would raise the threat, the book industry believes, of a severe compromise of authors’ and publishers’ rights.
Google runs two book scanning schemes as part of what it calls Google Book Search. The Google Books Partner Programme is an association with publishers, allowing browsers to search texts under conditions agreed in licences that Google and the publishers sign. No one is protesting about that – although some publishers, for reasons we shall see, are determined that they, rather than Google, should digitise the texts. The problems are with the Google Books Library Project.
Google is digitising the collections of libraries including Princeton, the University of California, Harvard, Stanford, the New York Public Library, and the Bodleian. At some of these institutions -- New York and the Bodleian among them -- Google is digitising only out-of-copyright works. (“I’ve asked the Bodleian how it knows that only public domain works will be involved,” Hugh Jones, copyright counsel of the Publishers Association, tells me. “I’ve never had a reply to that.”) At other libraries, Google is making digital files of the entire collections, copyrighted books and all.
Publishers can prevent the copying of the protected works; but only if they follow Google’s procedures for opting out of the scheme. Some say that this is like being told to complete an “I should prefer not to be robbed, thank you” form in order to protect you against burglary.
Google would be genuinely upset by this analogy. We respect copyright, the company protests. We show users only “snippets” of copyrighted works. “We believe a tool that can open up the millions of pages in the world's books,” Google says on its Book Search pages, “can help remove the barriers between people and information and benefit the publishing community at the same time.” In legal terms, Google cites the “fair use” provision of US copyright law, which allows copying of works without the copyright holder’s permission under certain conditions. Copying a work in order to promote scholarship, and indeed to promote book sales, is fair use, Google argues.
Perhaps it is. That is for the courts to decide, eventually. If they rule in Google’s favour, they will have judged the company’s digital files to be “transformative”, giving the copyrighted work “new expression, meaning or message”. But if a file is transformative, does not that term imply a new copyright? (I asked Google this question, but did not receive an answer.) And would the libraries, who receive copies of the files Google digitises, have copyrights in their digital files? What, then, would prevent the sale of these files at some point in the future? Perhaps not even another lengthy court case.
Again, this is a suggestion that would distress Google. Selling things, apart from advertising, is not our business, it says. We’re good guys. One of our mottos is “Do no evil”. But who knows what Google’s business will be, or what its ownership will be, in 10 years’ time?
These questions are just some of the many that are worrying rights holders in the digital era. “With every new technological development our copyright becomes more precious,” Maureen Duffy told an Authors’ Licensing & Collecting Society seminar on copyright earlier in March. (Unfortunately, the seminar drifted away from this point, and got bogged down for too long in a discussion of authors’ contracts – another concerning issue, to be sure, but one that may be rendered irrelevant if larger threats to copyright are realised.)
Another threat concerns territoriality. Look up the 2006 Man Booker Prize winner, The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai, at Amazon.co.uk. The top result is the Hamish Hamilton hardback edition, available for £10.18. Below it is a mass market paperback edition, at £4.08. This turns out to come from Grove Atlantic in the US. True, you will have to wait from one to three weeks to receive it. But the point is that, if you live in the UK, you should not be able to get hold of it at all: Hamish Hamilton holds the exclusive rights. Order books through the “Used and new” Amazon Marketplace, and you may receive pristine US editions in just a couple of days.
Researching this piece, I looked up a series of titles, of all kinds, on Amazon. In every case, I found US editions sitting alongside UK ones. Publishers have met Amazon, with lawyers present, to complain about the listings, and have received a sympathetic response. “"We have systematic measures in place to ensure we don't infringe, and where [those measures] fall down, we have a notice and takedown process,” a spokesman for the online retailer said. There is little evidence of a clean-up yet, however; it appears that considerations of territorial rights are not built into the data, and that manual correction of the records would be too laborious.
Some digital enthusiasts would say that territorial rights will become irrelevant as the internet becomes the primary medium of text distribution. The suggestion that electronic devices will supersede books among readers of such genres as fiction and biography may, despite advances in technology, arouse scepticism; but it is clear that digital distribution will become the norm elsewhere. In areas of academic and professional publishing, it already is. What will be the role of publishers then?
In scholarly publishing, there is an influential movement in favour of “open access” business models, by which research is made available for free. Susan Hezlet, publisher of the London Mathematical Society's journals, told the Guardian: "If all publicly funded published research was made available free on the internet, publishers would all go bust and no one would manage the peer review, editing and distribution processes.”
Publishers fear becoming redundant in general publishing, too. Some authors and agents – the agents believe that they will retain their mediating role, even if publishers become extinct – argue that most authors will simply post their works online. Companies that perform editorial, marketing and distribution functions will become unnecessary. Stephen Page, chief executive of Faber and president of the Publishers Association, took these predictions seriously enough to devote a lecture on World Book Day (1st March) to countering them. Publishers’ taste and marketing skills would become more important than ever in the digital-dominated future, he said. Moreover, publishers would have the increasingly urgent task of “ensuring that authors’ copyrighted works are sold and not given away”.
Piracy will certainly be widespread on the internet. Protecting texts against it is a huge problem, not only because of the skills of the hackers, but also because digital rights management (DRM) systems are unpopular with consumers. However, it remains likely that most people will continue to buy texts from official sources. Let us hope simply that the dominant official source for books is not Google. Or else we shall all have to find another way of earning a living.