Brenda Novak’s auction will take place from May 1st through the 31st. They are looking for donated prizes. I’m thinking of donating a 100 page critique but honestly I don’t know whether that would be something someone would want. I can’t offer an ad as I’m sold out for the year. What do you think?

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Melissa Foster and Amy Edelman for IndieReader.com itemize a number of reasons why self published authors aren’t getting respect. The reasons are commonsense and include the lack of editing and quantity over quality.

A scarier issue is that some independent authors simply believe that their work does not need to be edited. Writers are often too close to their work to make the critical structural and grammatical changes that might make the story more succinct. Let us simply say here that every writer benefits from a good editor.

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Music firms are going to be offering licensing for websites. This will allow ordinary folks to add well known music tracks to their videos or advertisements:

Examples of the customers they hope to attract include couples wishing to add music to their wedding video before uploading it to the internet, film festival entrants, small businesses making web adverts, school clubs and smartphone app developers.

Online licensing is a bonanza for music firms. Vevo made $150 million last year putting up web videos and paid out $100 million to artists.

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Stick a fork in Dorchester? That’s the question swirling around the internets now that it’s last known editor has been laid off. According to Brian Keene, Chris Keeslar has been let go.

Dear Publishing Colleague:

As of January 31st, 2012, I am no longer employed by Dorchester Publishing or collecting mail from this address. I have left a list of outstanding issues and will be available to management if questions arise, and I know that my colleagues are aware of each issue’s importance.

You can see a list of contacts Chris Keeslar provides to the publishing colleagues at Brian Keene’s site.

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Remember how Kiera Cass plotted “quietly” on twitter to down vote a negative review on Twitter? The bad review, the bad behavior, and the resulting brouhaha affected her not at all. CW has ordered a pilot of her book which is apparently Hunger Games meets the Bachelor (this book should be panned on the idea alone).

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Barnes & Noble is not stocking any print versions of Amazon published books. No way, no how, even those distributed by Houghton Mifflin. But, as Nate the Digital Reader points out, is BN going to pull all the Harry Potter books when Pottermore is launched and the only place you can buy the digital versions of Harry Potter is through Pottermore? After all, to not do so would be to violate B&N’s own policy that it created to punish Amazon. B&N’s policy is that books that are exclusive to Amazon shouldn’t be allowed into B&N’s stores. It’s the reason that B&N gave when it pulled the DC Comic books and it is the reason B&N is giving now to avoid stocking Amazon books.

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Amazon’s Q4 results are disappointing to Wall Street. It’s stock is tumbling because while the revenue stream is growing, the margin is not. Remember that Apple had a record quarter of revenue and a high margin (44%+). Wired writer, Tim Carmody, notes that Amazon’s game is the long ball.

Amazon has strategically placed a very long bet on growth in revenue and sales at the expense of profits. The Kindle Fire is a perfect example. Amazon makes relatively little in revenue and virtually no profit on the sales of individual devices. Millions of Kindle Fires, however, become millions of tiny retail outlets for everything Amazon sells, from digital books and movies to decidedly analog clothing and hardware. The company trades profit today for revenue tomorrow — with even more revenue and even higher profits arriving in the years to come. That’s the yardstick the company judges itself by.

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One of the reasons publishers are having a hard time competing with Amazon is Amazon’s direct to consumer relationship which eliminates some costs and provides Amazon with a hoard of data. The reason for this is because publishers don’t view readers as their customers and making that transition is difficult. Oh, John Scalzi might want to argue otherwise, but I don’t think that you can state it more clearly than the Authors Guild did yesterday:

For book publishers, the relevant market isn’t readers (direct sales are few), but booksellers, and Amazon has firm control of bookselling’s online future as it works to undermine bookselling’s remaining brick-and-mortar infrastructure.

The entire blog post is worth reading if only to understand the mind set of the most powerful author lobbying group in the business. There are about a half a dozen things wrong in the post but learning what others think about the business can help one understand the decisions that are made.

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A number of academics (1900 so far) have pledged to do no more work for Elsevier Publishing.  The boycott was suggested by a mathematician of the University of Cambridge.  The reason is threefold: 1) high priced access to scholarly works; 2) bundling of unwanted journals with high priced, coveted journal; and 3) support for the Research Works Act.

Hal Abelson, a professor of computer science at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and an open-publishing advocate, signed the pledge and wrote that “With the moves of these megapublishers, we [are] seeing the beginning of monopoly control of the scholarly record.” Benjamin R. Seyfarth, an associate professor in the School of Computing at the University of Southern Mississippi, wrote that “nearly all university research is funded by the public and should be available for free.”

Source: The Chronicle of Higher Education

Deals

• Something Secret This Way Comes by Sierra Dean * $0.00 * A | BN | K | S
• Cold Kiss by Amy Garvey * $1.99 * A | BN | K | S (YA)
• Giants: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham by John Stauffer * $1.99 * A | BN | K | S
• The Playboy by Carly Phillips * $1.99 * A | BN | K | S * The Bachelor, first in the series, is also on sale *
• Greatest Love on Earth by Mary Ellen Dennis * $1.99 * A | BN | K | S * A circus book*
• Jane by April Lindner * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S (YA)
• Knit Together by Debbie Macomber * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S
• This Is Not a Game: A Novel by Walter Jon Williams * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S
• Death, Taxes and a French Manicure by Diane Kelly * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S
• Hedgewitch Queen by Lillith Saintcrow * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S (reviewed here)
• Bandit King by Lillith Saintcrow * $4.99 * A | BN | K | S
• The Sherlockian by Graham Moore * $1.99 * A | BN | K | S
• Lord Lightning by Jenny Brown * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S
• Infinity: Chronicles of Nick by Sherrilyn Kenyon * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S
• Lady of Hay by Barbara Erskine * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S
• A Fountain Filled with Blood by Julia Spencer Fleming * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S * (this is the 2nd in the series. The first and second are now $2.99) *
• Anastasia’s Secret by Susanne Dunlap * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S
• Blood Song by Cat Adams * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S
• Child Bride by Suzanne Forster * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S * The book description is LOL you guys “As Annie lies unconscious, Chase can’t deny his swiftly mounting desire, watching her pillowy breasts undulate in rhythm with her shortened breaths. “
• Lily by Patricia Gaffney * $2.99 * A | BN | K | S (Reviewed favorably here)

Related posts:

1. Thursday News and Deals: Bestseller Roundup of 2011
2. Thursday News: BN Is Selling Off Assets, Trad Regency Book Deals
3. Thursday Midday News and Deals: Prices Up Says DWJ; Prices Down Says Data

Meljean Brook, author of the Guardian series, wonders why Google couldn’t have asked for permission first before scanning and why Authors’ Guild is pursuing this settlement which requires authors to opt out.

Epublishers Weekly has a video presentation of the various ereaders.

$100-$200 tablet laptops might be hitting the market soon. These tablet laptops are said to be based on the Android (Google OS) platform.

PW reports that Mark Gompertz will be Simon & Schuster’s new executive vp of digital publishing given that ebook sales are “growing faster than anticipated.”   Perhaps Gompertz will reduce the outrageously high pricing of the digital equivalents of the mass market books.   At the editor panel in RT, Grand Central stated that it was having quite a bit of success with its low priced ebooks.

Penguin has inked a deal to sell ebooks in China and has announced that ebook sales are 7 times the level that they were a year ago.   The sales are expected to be around 1% at the end of the year.

The Internet Archive moved to interve in the Google/Authors Guild settlement but the motion was rejected.   A motion to intervene is asking the court for permission to become part of the lawsuit or legal dispute between Google and Authors Guild.

Related posts:

1. Thursday eBook Tech News Round Up
2. Weekly Tech RoundUp
3. Round Up of Google Book Settlement Articles

As Gizmodo reports:

"Basically the story is this: the Author’s Guild raised issue with the Kindle 2′s new robotic text-to-speech feature, which can read any Kindle book aloud in a synthesized voice-’naturally, a feature that would be an absolute delight for the vision impaired. The Author’s Guild, however, saw things differently, stating that eBooks are not sold with “performance” rights and that the Kindle’s read-aloud feature would cut into the sales of audio books. And last month, Amazon caved to the Guild, giving individual publishers the ability to disable the text-to-speech reader for specific books."

I have an issue with the Guild for classifying the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech feature as "performance". There’s a world’s difference between an audio book and a text-to-speech feature of an ebook. The key difference is there’s no voice actor in the text-to-speech feature. It’s deprived of emotions, accents and other nuances. It’s a flat, unemotional robotic voice. It doesn’t give a performance of any kind. It’s a very basic function. Just like having a vacuum cleaner that does what it can do, instead of a floor cleaner who pays close attention to details and the quality of work.

It’s some responses to the article that I have a serious issue with, such as these:

Ebone: "Sometimes there just no pleasing people. You can get unabridged audiobook versions of just about every book on the market. Does EVERY product have to tailor itself to the needs of every special interest group? Maybe some of the protesters would like to be 747 pilots. Is Boeing supposed to develop a special 747 that the blind can fly too?"

Hello Mister Wishbone: "I’m all for blind people rights, but isn’t it a bit ridiculous to protest the lack of features on a commercial product? Shouldn’t it be up to Amazon or the authors to decide if they care about the blind people market? It’s like yelling at Apple because iPods do not have braille buttons. At some point, it just doesn’t make sense."

Morgan Breden: "I honestly don’t see how they have the right to complain. The books are available in audio format already, so why don’t they just buy those instead of an ebook? It’s not like the ebook has any other functionality to a blind person.

Call me a jackass, but it just sounds like another case of “I’m disabled so I should get free shit that everyone else has to pay for”. Last time I checked, in America, everyone was supposed to be equal."

This kind of attitude completely pisses me off.

Equal? You want to talk about equal? It’s an unequal world for people with disabilities. Always has been and still is now. The rights of people with disabilities are part of the civil rights and yet, people with disabilities are still second-class citizens. The quality of their lives is absolutely crap. What makes it more insulting, they sometimes have to pay for access to whatever is easily available – and free – to everyone else.

I don’t know where this person gets the idea that all things are "free" for blind people. I suspect this person and I have different ideas of what defines "free".

We all were born into a world that doesn’t cater to our special needs. If he could see or hear, it’s always free. If he couldn’t, it’s certainly not free, and rarely available. It’s up to the society to adapt to all needs, but due to various people’s ideas and beliefs, the society refuses to adapt. It’s either "shut up and put up with whatever we feel like offering" or "pay up and shut up" with this strong view that making the society fully accessible to all citizen is too expensive and time-wasting.

In my ideal world, every YouTube video would have a function that could enable subtitles for deaf users and audio descriptions for blind users. Every ebook device would have a text-to-voice function for blind readers without further charges. Every cinema in every town would have a daily accessible offering of all current releases for deaf and blind viewers. Every web site would be well designed and fully accessible. Every video would have removable subtitles. Every image with a description tag for an audio reader to latch on. Every online shop would be fully accessible for its disabled customers. No web site would dare to inflict its autoplay music on its visitors (because screen readers for blind users tend to malfunction, trying to read the autoplay device, which forces blind users avoiding certain web sites because of this kind of thing).

Until then, people with disabilities have to rely on whatever is available. If they truly want it, they have to go out of their way to get it and they oft have to pay for it.

In blind readers’ case, a typical price for an audio book is approximately  £10 while a paperback is around  £3.99. If there is an out-of-print book they would like to read, they oft can’t buy it because the audio book version simply isn’t available.

Get a professional reader? Tell me, when you stumble across a positive review of a foreign novel or film that hasn’t yet been translated to English, do you dig in your pocket to hire a translator to translate the foreign novel or film? If not, why should blind people hire professional readers to read books that aren’t accessible to them? Especially if it’s accessible to everyone but them?

There are libraries, of course, but some branches are struggling with budget cut-backs, resulting with limited offerings for its disabled patrons. It’s an insult that books for people with disabilities should be seen as a luxury. It’s certainly a luxury for people who don’t have sight problems, but it’s a necessity for blind people.

Equal? Bull.

At leas with the Kindle 2 and other ebook readers that have text-to-speech function, blind readers can now be equal to other people as well as feeling independent. You know, feeling as if they are finally ordinary customers.

They buy ebooks they probably won’t read, but at least through the text-to-speech function, they can experience instant gratification that many others enjoy. Sure, it doesn’t offer what audio books can offer, but at least the option is there. It should be every reader’s right to choose. A typical reader can choose to buy a hardback, a paperback, an ebook, or an audiobook. A blind reader doesn’t have these choices, but they could at least choose between an audio book and a basic text-to-speech function.

Do you know how many academic text books have the audio version? Very few. Do you have any idea how much blind college students have to pay just to gain access to many text books required for their courses? Of course there are discounts, but it still takes away their independence. They can’t sit in their room and study books whenever they like. Their lives revolve around their professional readers’ schedules that are restricted to week days and between nine to five.

How about blind readers who simply want to have a right to the privacy of what they read? Such as a guide book to sex, a book on divorce, or just plainly dirty books? The audio version isn’t always available for these. If there was, do you really think blind patrons enjoy going to a library or bookshop where they have to ask for assistance to locate and purchase the audio version of this kind of books? Some authorised audio book sellers online don’t sell these because you know, blind people are supposed to be asexual. If ordinary people can buy them off the internet in private, why can’t blind people?

And some blind readers just want to sit back and enjoy a story any time they want. They don’t want to go out there and track down an audio book that may or may not be available. Some audio books become available months after a hardback or paperback is released. They don’t want the hassle.

They simply want to be in a situation where late at night, they think, "Yeah, I’m in mood for a romantic suspense novel," and purchase an ebook through their ebook device on spot, and then kick back with the text-to-speech reader reading the story out through the night.

To the person who said "I’m all for blind people rights, but isn’t it a bit ridiculous to protest the lack of features on a commercial product?"

Did you hear that repetitive sound? That was my head hitting a wall.

What, are you saying that blind people can’t be recognised as customers? You know, people who have the money to spend? Companies that don’t recognize people with disabilities as potential customers are a real bunch of short-sighted idiots.

It’s just so wrong of the Author’s Guild to control what blind people can buy. A text-to-speech reader is not even a performer, for goodness sake.

Related posts:

1. Federation of the Blind Pushes Back Against Authors Guild
2. Why Amazon Was Wrong to Back Down from Authors’ Guild
3. Authors Guild Vies for Worst Publicity of 2009 (and other news)

Anyway, Authors’ Guild engaged in another brilliant piece of legal scholarship by arguing that Amazon’s Text to Speech violated the “audio rights” of an author.   (note, there are no audio rights, just a derivative right to public performances)   This is now leading to some wonderful PR for Authors’ Guild as over 200 sight impaired individuals protested in front of Authors’ Guild headquarters yesterday.   CNN iReporters picked it up.   (Thank you Tourmaline).   AG’s response?   Basically that media is losing so much money going e, that they can’t afford to help out the blind.   We’ll have more on this tomorrow from Maili, but suffice it to say that if business is about the battle over hearts and minds, Authors’ Guild (and anyone associated with AG) is losing that battle.

Joining AG’s in the battle for who can appear the worst in public is the Associated Press who wants people to stop linking to their content unless we start paying for it.   I hope that the AP actually gets what it wants which is no referral traffic at all.

The New York Times did a fairly positive piece on romance. The most startling fact of this article was that in the fourth quarter, Harlequin had an increase of 32% in earnings over the same quarter last year.   I was sad to see Ravenous Romance quoted as a romance epublisher given a) the dreck that Ravenous produces, b) that it doesn’t produce romance books but porn and c) their owner thinks that what they are publishing is porn with a better vocabulary (which she apparently doesn’t read).   (I was quoted in the piece as well. Is that a disclaimer or bragging. Couldn’t tell and was tempted to leave that part out).

A publishing related group is trying to get the Patriot Act revised  to “restore    reader privacy that it believes was stripped away by the Patriot Act and in particular Section 215 which authorizes the issuance of secret search orders which permits the government to search the records of any person its believes could be relevant to a terrorist investigation. According to the memo, the Patriot Act eliminated safeguards protecting the confidentiality of the records of bookstore customers and library patrons, and has had a chilling effect on First Amendment right.”

Weirdly, Disney allowed the print rights to the book “Witch Mountain” to go unpurchased.   Witch Mountain is the basis for the plot in the upcoming Dwayne Johnson movie “Race to Witch Mountain”.   Sourcebooks was able to purchase those rights and plans the release of the book to coincide with Disney’s release of the DVD.

Related posts:

1. Author’s Guild Tells Authors to Stay Out of the Ebook Game
2. Authors Guild Continues Overreaching. Claims Olfactory Rights Belong to Author
3. Federation of the Blind Pushes Back Against Authors Guild

Both ideas are somewhat suspect but the mere saleability of an idea shouldn’t prevent reader concern over this issue. The Authors Guild is attempting to broaden the copyright to include rights that were never conceived to be considered part of the bundle of rights granted by the Copyright Act of 1976 or any of its subsequent modifications. Indeed, the Authors Guild torturous interpretation of the rule to include olfactory rights would be an impossible stretching of Copyright that not even JK Rowling’s lawyers would have the chutzpah to claim.

From the Authors Guild statement:

It is important to note that in the digital era, books, and the smell of books, have been decoupled. In the future we expect authors to participate in the development of custom aromas for their books. These olfactory rights constitute a derivative right to be licensed separately. The preservation of these rights is essential as authors explore new markets and distribution channels.

As Cory Doctorow recently
href=”http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/mar/31/cory-doctorow-kindle”>wrote in the Guardian on a piece related to the the Kindle’s TTS function, the Authors Guild is trying to appropriate rights that don’t rest with the authors in the first place.

Now, I happen to disagree with that position because I don’t think that text-to-speech is a substitute for audiobooks for the majority of listeners, and because the value of text-to-speech is such that people will buy enough ebooks to offset any losses from substitution, and, most importantly, authors who oppose this feature look like grasping, greedy jerks and will alienate their readers.

There is nothing in the Copyright Act that gives rise to the Authors Guild position. Copyright applies only to the expression of an idea. I question whether the smell of a book could ever be copyrighted. The formula that creates the smell could be patented and probably copyrighted but the expression, the scent itself, does not seem to be copyrightable. Can you copyright the air that we breathe? Further, old book smell isn’t created by authors at all (and it is creativity that the copyright act is designed to protect). Old book smell is created through the aging and molding process that results when paper is exposed to the elements over a period of time. If anything could be rightly deemed intellectual property, it is the process by which the smell is achieved. NOT THE SMELL ITSELF.

Further, each individual human has a different ability to smell. According to research conducted through the Human Genome Project, humans have "superfamily of approximately 1000 odorant receptor (OR) genes and that each OR gene is expressed in approximately 1 per 1000 olfactory epithelial neurons (hereinafter OE) and that polymorphisms in many of these genes have been reported. In lay terms, different people have different abilities to sense smells. This implies "interindividual variation in olfactory responses and perhaps to diseases triggered by olfactory stimuli."

Indeed, if you look that the "abstraction-filtration-comparison" test which is used by courts to determine if an accused work is substantially similar to the protectable elements of a copyrighted work, you can see that there are simply some concepts that are not subject to protection. The first step in the abstraction test is to “separate the ideas (and basic utilitarian functions), which are not protectable, from the particular expression of the work.” Copyrights do not protect concepts such as the subject matter present in artistic renderings. As Justice Holmes stated: "Others are free to copy the original. They are not free to copy the copy." Bleistein v. Donaldson Lithographing Co., 188 U.S. 239, 249, 23 S.Ct. 298, 47 L.Ed. 460 (1903).

Therefore, the scents that are being reproduced are copying the original, not something that the authors are entitled to as a derivative right. Simply put, this is another overreaching rights grab by Authors Guild and for the sake of readers rights, we can only hope DuroSport will not cave to these demands.

Related posts:

1. Author’s Guild Tells Authors to Stay Out of the Ebook Game
2. Federation of the Blind Pushes Back Against Authors Guild
3. Why Amazon Was Wrong to Back Down from Authors’ Guild