Today’s low Kindle book prices will last only as long as it takes Amazon to re-establish its monopoly. It is hard to believe that the Justice Department has somehow persuaded itself that this solution fosters competition or is good for readers in the long run.
Advocacy
Scott Turow on Justice Department’s Proposed Settlement
April 12, 2012. The proposed settlement is a shocking trip through the looking-glass. By allowing Amazon to resume selling most titles at a loss, the Department of Justice will basically prevent traditional bookstores from trying to enter the e-book market, at the same time it drives trade out of those stores and into the proprietary world of the Kindle. The settlement provides a gigantic obstacle to Amazon’s competitors in the e-book business by allowing Amazon to function without making a profit, something that leaves that market forbidding to anyone else who might think of entering, and a bad business for those already there.
A Message From John Sargent of Macmillan Regarding Justice Dept. E-Book Investigation
April 11, 2012. This message was just released from John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, in response to the Department of Justice’s filing of a lawsuit claiming publishers colluded to fix e-book prices.
Dear authors, illustrators and agents:
Today the Department of Justice filed a lawsuit against Macmillan’s US trade publishing operation, charging us with collusion in the implementation of the agency model for e-book pricing. The charge is civil, not criminal. Let me start by saying that Macmillan did not act illegally. Macmillan did not collude.
More...Barnes & Noble to Restore Marshall Cavendish Children's Books
April 4, 2012. Here's some welcome news: Barnes & Noble has agreed to our request to bring Marshall Cavendish children's books back to their stores' shelves. By our count, more than 250 authors and 150 illustrators have been affected.
How these books got pulled in the first place is a lesson in how exclusive content agreements have begun balkanizing the book marketplace.
In December, Amazon Publishing purchased Marshall Cavendish's children's book list, more than 450 children's and young adult titles. The next month, Barnes & Noble announced that it would not be stocking any Amazon published titles in its stores. B&N released a statement from Jaime Carey, its chief merchandising officer, saying that it would not stock books published by Amazon, "based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent."
More...Letter from Scott Turow: Grim News
March 9, 2012.Dear member,
Yesterday's report that the Justice Department may be near filing an antitrust lawsuit against five large trade book publishers and Apple is grim news for everyone who cherishes a rich literary culture.
The Justice Department has been investigating whether those publishers colluded in adopting a new model, pioneered by Apple for its sale of iTunes and apps, for selling e-books. Under that model, Apple simply acts as the publisher's sales agent, with no authority to discount prices.
We have no way of knowing whether publishers colluded in adopting the agency model for e-book pricing. We do know that collusion wasn't necessary: given the chance, any rational publisher would have leapt at Apple's offer and clung to it like a life raft. Amazon was using e-book discounting to destroy bookselling, making it uneconomic for physical bookstores to keep their doors open. More...
Plaintiffs Seek Fair Use Ruling in Mass Book Digitization Case
February 29, 2012. Plaintiffs filed a motion last night asking Judge Baer to rule on the fair use defense in the HathiTrust lawsuit. At issue is a mass book digitization program through which Google converted millions of copyright-protected library books into machine-readable digital files that were duplicated and distributed to university libraries and HathiTrust, an online digital repository.
This is the first motion that squarely places before a court the question of whether the unauthorized mass digitization of library books is a fair use under U.S. law.
Background on the HathiTrust Lawsuit
Authors groups from Australia, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Quebec, the U.K., and the U.S., along with twelve individual authors, brought suit against the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University and HathiTrust last fall. The lawsuit seeks impoundment of the unauthorized scans, pending appropriate Congressional action.
Last June, the University of Michigan, which oversees HathiTrust, announced plans to permit unlimited downloads by its students and faculty members of “orphaned” books (some consider works whose rights-owners cannot be found after a diligent search to be “orphans”). Michigan devised a set of procedures — including a protocol for searching for an author and posting the names of “orphan work candidates” at the HathiTrust website for 90 days – to determine whether it would deem a work an “orphan.” Several other schools joined the project in August.
More...Amazon, Innovation, and the Rewards of the Free Market
February 16, 2012. Our article from two weeks ago, Publishing’s Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory, and similar articles spur frequent comments online that Amazon is simply reaping the rewards of its innovation, that its growing dominance of book publishing is merely a demonstration that the free market is functioning as it should. This isn’t really what’s been happening.
Useful innovation should of course be rewarded, but we've long had laws in place (limits on the duration and scope of patent protections, antitrust laws, stricter regulation of industries considered natural monopolies) that aim to prevent innovators and others from capturing a market or an industry. There's good reason for this: those who capture a market tend to be a bit rough on other participants in the market. They also tend to stop innovating.
Amazon's first Kindle, released in November 2007, was certainly innovative, but its key breakthrough wasn't any particular piece of technology. Sony had already commercialized e-ink display screens for handheld e-books in September 2006. (E Ink, a Cambridge company co-founded by MIT Media Lab professor Joseph Jacobson developed the displays used by both companies.) Amazon's leap was to marry e-ink displays to another existing technology, wireless connectivity, to bring e-book shopping and downloading right to the handheld device.
Amazon's innovation, in other words, was to untether the Sony device and put a virtual store inside it. This is no small achievement, and Jeff Bezos's particular genius seems to be his ability to grasp the transformative potential of this sort of thing long before others do, just as he saw the potential of databases and the Internet to facilitate shopping for books and the potential for one-click shopping to ramp up online sales before most others had caught on.
Amazon's reward for developing the wireless e-reader should have been that it would become a significant vendor of e-books and earn a profit commensurate with the value it added to the publishing ecosystem. Whether it would then continue to be a significant e-book vendor should have depended on whether it continued to innovate and provide good service to its customers. Amazon's reward should not have included being able to combine its wireless e-reader, deep pockets, and an existing dominant position in a related, but separate, market -- the online market for physical books -- to prevent other vendors from entering the e-book market. Amazon's reward as an innovator, in other words, shouldn't be getting to wall itself off from competition.
By all appearances, this is precisely what Amazon was trying to pull off two years ago, when it removed the buy buttons from nearly every Macmillan book. Amazon removed the buy buttons for both e-books and, stunningly, print books, even though its disagreement with Macmillan was confined to the sales terms for e-books. Amazon had about 90% of the market for e-books at the time, but that market was then quite small: Macmillan could handle Amazon's e-book blackout indefinitely. Amazon's 75% of the online print book market, on the other hand, provided real leverage on Macmillan, and Amazon chose to use that leverage. By using its print book dominance to dictate terms in the nascent e-book market, Amazon crossed a clear, anticompetitive line.
More...Give Away Someone Else's Book on World Book Night
January 19, 2012. World Book Night, a British experiment in giving away royalty-free new books to strangers, is coming to the US, and we’re on board. Here’s the background.
On every first Thursday in March since 1998, the UK has celebrated World Book Day by giving several million British schoolchildren £1 tokens they can use to purchase any book at a bookseller. UK publishers produce special £1 World Book Day editions of select books, and booksellers, schools, and libraries host hundreds of author visits, story times, and dress parties to celebrate the day. By all accounts, World Book Day has become quite successful in bringing books to children and families to bookstores.
More...Colbert Report: Ann Patchett Talks Amazon v. Brick & Mortar Booksellers
February 21, 2012. Novelist Ann Patchett discusses the closing of two large bookstores in Nashville, Tennessee, where she lives. She took action, opening Parnassus Books with a business partner in November. Patchett invites Steve Colbert to compare Parnassus and Amazon for himself when he publishes his next book. Here's the video clip:| The Colbert Report | Mon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c | |||
| Ann Patchett | ||||
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Publishing's Ecosystem on the Brink: The Backstory
January 31, 2012. Subtlety is out. Bloomberg Businessweek’s January 25th cover shows a book engulfed in flames. The book’s title? “Amazon Wants to Burn the Book Business.” A towering pile of books dominates the front page of Sunday’s NYT Business Section. The pile starts well below the fold (print edition), breaks through the section header at the top of the page, and leans precariously. Books are starting to tumble off. “The Bookstore’s Last Stand,” reads the headline.
These stories capture pretty well the state of book publishing: this appears to be no ordinary, cyclical crisis that future authors and publishers will shrug off. To understand how the book industry got into this predicament, however, a broader perspective may be needed. The cover story of February’s Harper’s Magazine provides that, discussing a fundamental shift in the federal approach to antitrust law that’s affected bookselling and countless other industries. It’s a story that hasn’t previously been told in a major periodical, to our knowledge.
We’ll get to that in a moment. First, let’s set the stage with the other two stories.
More...Contracts on Fire: Amazon's Lending Library Mess
November 14, 2011. Are any of the books in Amazon’s new e-book subscription/lending program properly there?
Earlier this month, Amazon launched its Kindle Online Lending Library as a perk for its best group of customers, the millions who’ve paid $79 per year to join Amazon Prime and get free delivery of their Amazon purchases. Under the Lending Library program, Amazon Prime members are allowed to download for free onto their Kindles any of more than 5,000 books. Customers are limited to one book per month and one book at a time – when a new book is downloaded, the old one disappears from the Kindle.
The program has caused quite a stir in the publishing industry, for good reason (as you'll see).
First, let’s look at how books from some major U.S. trade publishers wound up on the Lending Library list.
More...Authors Groups From U.K., Canada, Norway and Sweden Join Authors Guild, Australian Society of Authors, and Quebec Writers Union in Suit Against HathiTrust
October 6, 2011. We filed an amended complaint this morning against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan and four other universities over the storage and use of millions of copyright-protected books. The press release follows.
NEW YORK – The U.K. Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, the Norwegian Nonfiction Writers and Translators Association, the Swedish Writers Union, The Writers’ Union of Canada, and four individual authors are among the new plaintiffs in an amended complaint filed today in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust. Individual authors joining the lawsuit include University of Oslo professor Helge Rønning, Swedish novelist Erik Grundström, and American novelist J. R. Salamanca. The Authors League Fund, a 94-year-old organization supported by Authors Guild members that provides charitable assistance to book authors and dramatists, is also now a plaintiff, as holder of rights of to an “orphaned” book by Gladys Malvern.
The defendant universities have pooled the unauthorized scans of an estimated 7 million copyright-protected books, the rights to which are held by authors worldwide, into an online repository called HathiTrust. In June, the University of Michigan, which oversees HathiTrust, announced plans to permit unlimited downloads by its students and faculty members of “orphaned” books (some consider works whose rights-owners cannot be found after a diligent search to be “orphans”). Michigan devised a set of procedures -- including a protocol for searching for an author and posting the names of “orphan work candidates” at the HathiTrust website for 90 days – to determine whether it would deem a work an “orphan.” Several other schools joined the project in August.
Within days of the suit’s filing on September 12th, the Authors Guild, its members, and others commenting on its blog had developed strong leads to dozens of authors and estates holding rights to the first 167 works listed as “orphan candidates” at HathiTrust’s website. Four living authors were on HathiTrust’s list. So were significant literary estates, such as those of Pulitzer Prize winners James Gould Cozzens and Walter Lippmann and the philosopher Sidney Hook. Foreign authors were also on the list, including André Missenard, who died in Paris in August. At least three of the works are still in print. Simple Google searches turned up most of the leads in minutes, including one that led to the author of “The Lost Country,” J. R. Salamanca. Under Michigan’s protocols, unlimited e-book downloads of Mr. Salamanca’s book were scheduled to be made available to an estimated 250,000 students and faculty members on November 8th.
More...University of Michigan suspends HathiTrust Orphan Works Project. Claims "proposed uses of orphan works are lawful," and promises a reboot.
September 16, 2011. The 163 books on Orphan Row have a reprieve. In a statement released this morning, the University of Michigan Library announced the suspension. “The close and welcome scrutiny of the list of potential orphan works has revealed a number of errors, some of them serious. This tells us that our pilot process is flawed.”
Michigan pledged to re-examine its procedures and create a “more robust, transparent, and fully documented process” and continue the project: “we remain as certain as ever that our proposed uses of orphan works are lawful and important to the future of scholarship and the libraries that support it.”
Michigan says that its main purpose has been to identify copyright owners:
"It was always our belief that we would be more likely to succeed with the cooperation and assistance of authors and publishers. This turns out to be correct. The widespread dissemination of the list has had the intended effect: rights holders have been identified, which is in fact the project's primary goal. And as a result of the design of our process, our mistakes have not resulted in the exposure of even one page of in-copyright material."
In the past few days, the Authors Guild, its members, and those commenting on this blog have identified or found leads, many quite strong, to the owners of the literary property rights to 50 of the books that Michigan planned to start releasing for downloading by hundreds of thousands of students in four weeks. (Additional list of literary property leads here.) Four of the authors of the so-called orphan books are alive, including one who signed an e-book deal earlier this month, and two of the books are in print, one in a revised edition. For 14 of the literary works, the spouses or children of the authors were identified, mostly through quick and simple online searches for obituaries. Five of those obituaries had quite current information about the location of the authors’ survivors, since the authors had died in the last ten years. One, André Missenard, died just last month in Paris.
More...Related Articles
Google Lawsuit Update: Judge Urges Swift Action, Sets September 15 for Conference
July 20, 2011. At a brief status conference yesterday morning before Judge Denny Chin, the parties to our copyright infringement lawsuit against Google requested additional time to explore a revised settlement. Judge Chin set the next status conference for September 15, but urged the parties to move quickly with their discussions, saying that he was inclined to put the litigation on a tight discovery deadline if a settlement isn't reached by then. More...Bridging "Broad Divides," Proposed Settlement May Show Path to Virtual Library of Out-of-Print Books
April 7, 2011. The following letter appears in today's New York Times.
To the Editor:
Your March 31 editorial “Google’s Book Deal” correctly points out that the landmark settlement between the company and authors and publishers would have “given new life to millions of half-forgotten titles collecting dust in out-of-the-way libraries.” But your discussion omitted several crucial aspects of the case.
We have a fundamental disagreement with Google: we believe that without first obtaining permission, Google is prohibited from copying books for commercial purposes. That’s why we sued. Judge Denny Chin, who faulted Google for “wholesale, blatant copying” without permission, seems to agree.
The settlement was crafted to bridge the broad divides among the stakeholders in the negotiations — authors, publishers, research libraries and Google. It would have provided financial benefits to authors of out-of-print books and made available a vast virtual library of those books.
Critically, when it came to “orphan works,” it would have collected and escrowed funds for authors (or their successors or estates). And it would have empowered any copyright holder to compel Google to remove or never scan his or her works without having to go to court.
We could have simply refused to recommend settlement and pressed our original demand that Google withdraw all its copyrighted material. Instead, we chose to propose an agreement that would benefit authors, publishers and readers.
The dream of a virtual library of out-of-print books is dead, for now. Perhaps a legislative route may be found instead; we hope that the settlement shows how it can be done.
SCOTT TUROW
President, Authors Guild
Chicago, April 4, 2011
The New York Times editorial is here.
More...Found one! We re-unite an author with an "orphaned work."
September 14, 2011. About two minutes of googling turned up a professor emeritus of one of the HathiTrust “orphan works” candidates. He lives in suburban Maryland. His second book sold a reported one million copies, and he’s listed in IMDb (two of his books were turned into movies: one starred Elvis Presley, the other Warren Beatty). He has a literary agent, and he signed an e-book contract earlier this month.No, we’re not making this up.
Just before we filed our lawsuit, we did some cursory research into some of the names on the list of "orphan works" candidates at the HathiTrust website to see if we could find contact information for a copyright holder. There are now 166 books (the original 27 listed by Michigan in July plus others added in August by various institutions) being readied for distribution. Works deemed “orphans” by HathiTrust are scheduled to be available for full-text display and unencrypted downloads to at least 250,000 students and faculty members at campuses in several states, starting in less than a month.
We weren't hopeful, because we knew that research librarians were behind the project, and they were likely to be especially careful to avoid any embarrassing slip-ups in this first go-round. We thought, at best, we might find the representative of some obscure literary estate. We were wrong.
Here’s what we did. It took two steps.
Step #1. We googled “book author [author name].”
This turned up, on the first page of results, a July 24, 2000, Publishers Weekly interview with the author. The interview mentions the name of his literary agent.
Step #2. We looked up the literary agent in a standard online phone directory.
We found the number and called. We spoke to the agent’s wife. She confirmed that her husband represented the author, who lives in Maryland. A couple hours later, the agent called us back. He had no idea his client’s first book, “The Lost Country” (the one made into the Elvis Presley movie), was headed to the orphanage in a few weeks. He wasn’t happy. He told us that his client had just signed an agreement to release his second book, “Lilith” (the one made into the Warren Beatty movie), as an e-book by Tantor Media.
The author is J.R. Salamanca. His agent is John White of the John White Literary Agency in Connecticut.
The next day, it was the day before yesterday, we spoke to Richard Salamanca, the son of the author. (Jack Salamanca has a hearing problem, so Richard handles phone duties.) He told us that he, too, hadn't heard of the HathiTrust Orphan Works Project and was stunned to learn that his father's first book was set to be released online to hundreds of thousands of students.
All told, it took us two-and-a-half minutes, give or take, to reach the agent’s wife.
Mr. Salamanca is a professor emeritus of the University of Maryland. He's listed in the current University of Maryland graduate school catalog. He lives in Maryland, just as he has for decades.
"The Lost Country" became a movie in 1961, "Wild in the Country," starring Elvis Presley, Hope Lange and Tuesday Weld. "Lilith" (1964) stars Warren Beatty, Jean Seberg (nominated for a Golden Globe for best actress), Peter Fonda, and Kim Hunter. Mr. Salamanca has a brief entry in IMDb, which links to the two movies.
There are other ways to find J.R. Salamanca, of course.
Alternative #1. The librarian we have on staff uses Contemporary Authors, a standard reference. It lists Mr. Salamanca’s office at the English Department of the University of Maryland in College Park.
Alternative #2. Google "j.r. salamanca," which brings up as the second result on the first page a 1969 Time Magazine review for his third book, "A Sea Change" ("J.R. Salamanca succeeds in finding an appropriate vehicle for his insights and his fluid poetic prose"). That article reports that the author teaches English at the University of Maryland. A phone call or e-mail to the department should have done the trick.
If HathiTrust's researchers can't locate a bestselling author with a literary agent, an author who’s also a retired professor from a major East Coast university, how are they going to locate authors in other countries? How will they find an author of a work in Finnish (more than 4,000 books in the collection), Hindi (more than 35,000 books), or Japanese (more than 150,000 books)?
Few of the authors of those books would have had the successes of Jack Salamanca. But countless of them, no doubt, would want to maintain control of their works. More...
Related Articles
Authors Guild, Australian Society of Authors, Quebec Writers Union Sue Five U.S. Universities
September 12, 2011. This afternoon, we filed suit against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan and four other universities over their storage and use of millions of copyright-protected books. The press release follows.
AUTHORS AND AUTHORS’ GROUPS FROM AUSTRALIA, QUEBEC, THE U.K., AND U.S. SUE HATHITRUST, THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN, AND FOUR OTHER U.S. UNIVERSITIES FOR COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT
Digital Files Provided by Google at Issue, As Plaintiffs Seek to Impound Unauthorized Scans of 7 Million Copyright-Protected Books, Pending Congressional Action
NEW YORK – The Authors Guild, the Australian Society of Authors, the Union Des Écrivaines et des Écrivains Québécois (UNEQ), and eight individual authors have filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in federal court against HathiTrust, the University of Michigan, the University of California, the University of Wisconsin, Indiana University, and Cornell University. Plaintiff authors include children’s book author and illustrator Pat Cummings, novelists Angelo Loukakis, Roxana Robinson, Danièle Simpson, and Fay Weldon, poet André Roy, Columbia University professor and Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, and Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning biographer T.J. Stiles.
The universities obtained from Google unauthorized scans of an estimated 7 million copyright-protected books, the rights to which are held by authors in dozens of countries. The universities have pooled the unauthorized files in a repository organized by the University of Michigan called HathiTrust. In June, Michigan announced plans to permit unlimited downloads by its students and faculty members of copyright-protected works it deems “orphans” according to rules the school has established. Other universities joined in Michigan’s project in August.
More...Court Rejects Google Settlement. Noting benefits, Judge Urges Revision
March 22, 2011. We’ve just learned that Judge Chin has rejected our proposed settlement in our lawsuit against Google. In a 48-page opinion that lauds the many benefits of the settlement, the court has left the door open for a revised agreement. In his conclusion, Judge Chin says that “many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA [the Amended Settlement Agreement] were converted from an ‘opt-out’ settlement to an ‘opt-in’ settlement. I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly.”We will have more on this for you soon. More...
Scott Turow on Random House: Local Booksellers May Be the Big Winners
March 7, 2011. Random House, the largest trade book publisher in the U.S., announced last week that it is adopting the agency model for selling e-books. For readers and authors concerned about a diverse literary marketplace, this is welcome news, a chance for online bookselling to avoid the winner-take-all trap. Random House's move gives brick-and-mortar bookstores, many of which are now selling e-books but cannot afford to lose money on those sales, a fighting chance in the new print + digital landscape.
"Book retailers have faced extraordinary challenges in recent years," said Authors Guild President Scott Turow, "a double whammy of recession and a shift to digital books that had cut many stores out. For anyone who loves bookstores, this is the best news out of the publishing industry in a long time. Random House's move may prove to be a lifeline for some bookstores."
More...Related Articles
Scott Turow on Google Ruling
March 22, 2011. “Although this Alexandria of out-of-print books appears lost at the moment,” said Authors Guild President Scott Turow, "we'll be studying Judge Chin's decision and plan on talking to the publishers and Google with the hope that we can arrive at a settlement within the court’s parameters that makes sense for all parties.”“Regardless of the outcome of our discussions with publishers and Google, opening up far greater access to out-of-print books through new technologies that create new markets is an idea whose time has come,” said Mr.Turow. “Readers want access to these unavailable works, and authors need every market they can get. There has to be a way to make this happen. It’s a top priority for the Authors Guild.”
Judge Chin's decision on the proposed settlement of the Google litigation, released earlier this afternoon, is here. More...
Google Litigation Update: Next Status Conference set for July 19
June 1, 2011. At a very brief status conference this afternoon regarding our copyright infringement lawsuit against Google, the parties asked Judge Denny Chin for additional time to explore settlement possibilities. Judge Chin noted that the issues are complex and set the next status conference for July 19th. More...Google Book Settlement Update: Court Extends Filing Deadline for Cash Payments
February 22, 2011. At the request of authors, publishers and Google, the court has extended the deadline to file for an upfront payment in the Google Book Settlement. Any author or publisher claiming an upfront payment -- a "Cash Payment" -- will now have until one year after the Court's final approval of the settlement to file. More...Related Articles
Scott Turow's New York Times Op-Ed on Shakespeare's Paywall
February 15, 2011. Read Scott Turow's New York Times op-ed here. More...Scott Turow to Testify Before the Senate Judiciary Committee
February 14, 2011. Authors Guild President Scott Turow will be testifying this Wednesday at the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing, "Targeting Websites Dedicated To Stealing American Intellectual Property." More details to follow. More...The E-Book Royalty Mess: An Interim Fix
February 11, 2011. To mark the one-year anniversary of the Great Blackout, Amazon's weeklong shut down of e-commerce for nearly all of Macmillan's titles, we're sending out a series of alerts on the state of e-books, authorship, and publishing. The first installment ("How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble. Probably.") discussed the outcome, of that battle, which introduced a modicum of competition into the distribution of e-books. The second, ("E-Book Royalty Math: The House Always Wins") took up the long-simmering e-royalty debate, and showed that publishers generally do significantly better on e-book sales than on hardcover sales, while authors always do worse.Today, we look at the implications of that disparity, and suggest an interim solution to minimize the harm to authors.
Negotiating a publishing contract is frequently contentious, but authors have long been able to take comfort in this: once the contract is signed, the interests of the author and the publisher are largely aligned. If the publisher works to maximize its revenues, it will necessarily work to maximize the author's royalties. This is the heart of the traditional bargain, whereby the author licenses the publisher long-term, exclusive book rights in the world's largest book market in exchange for an advance and the promise of diligently working to the joint benefit of author and publisher.
Now, for the first time, publishers have strong incentives to work against the author's interests. More...
Parties to Google Book Settlement Ask for Filing Extension
February 11, 2011. Authors, publishers and Google have filed a stipulation asking the Court to extend the deadline for filing claims to receive an upfront payment, -- a "Cash Payment" -- in the Google Book Search settlement. The current deadline under the settlement, which is being reviewed by the court, is March 31, 2011. If the extension is granted, authors and publishers will have until one year after the Court approves the settlement to make a claim for a Cash Payment. More...E-Book Royalty Math: The House Always Wins
February 3, 2011. To mark the one-year anniversary of the Great Blackout, Amazon's weeklong shut down of e-commerce for nearly all of Macmillan's titles, we’re sending out a series of alerts this week and next on the state of e-books, authorship, and publishing. The first installment (“How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble. Probably.”) discussed the outcome, one year later, of that battle. Today, we look at the e-royalty debate, which has been simmering for a while, but is likely to soon heat up as the e-book market grows.E-book royalty rates for major trade publishers have coalesced, for the moment, at 25% of the publisher’s receipts. As we’ve pointed out previously, this is contrary to longstanding tradition in trade book publishing, in which authors and publishers effectively split the net proceeds of book sales (that's how the industry arrived at the standard hardcover royalty rate of 15% of list price). Among the ills of this radical pay cut is the distorting effect it has on publishers’ incentives: publishers generally do significantly better on e-book sales than they do on hardcover sales. Authors, on the other hand, always do worse.
How much better for the publisher and how much worse for the author? Here are examples of author’s royalties compared to publisher’s gross profit (income per copy minus expenses per copy), calculated using industry-standard contract terms:
“The Help,” by Kathryn Stockett
Author’s Standard Royalty: $3.75 hardcover; $2.28 e-book.
Author’s E-Loss = -39%
Publisher’s Margin: $4.75 hardcover; $6.32 e-book.
Publisher’s E-Gain = +33% More...
How Apple Saved Barnes & Noble. Probably.
February 2, 2011. Happy blackout anniversary! Where were you when the lights went out? We're sending out a series of alerts this week and next that look at the state of e-books, authorship and publishing to mark the one-year anniversary of the Great Blackout, when Amazon attempted to protect its near complete dominance of the rapidly growing e-book market through a stunning, punitive act against a publisher that dared to challenge its terms. (To see our account of this showdown as it happened -- posted last Groundhog Day -- go to "The Right Battle at the Right Time.")
It was one year ago last Saturday that Amazon turned out the lights on nearly all of Macmillan's books, removing the "buy buttons" from the print and electronic editions of thousands of titles. Macmillan authors, many of whom had linked their websites to Amazon pages that were suddenly disabled and useless, found themselves cut off from readers who frequented the dominant online bookstore.
Amazon's stunning move was a preemptive strike, an attempt to keep Macmillan from going through with its plan to shift to an "agency model" for selling e-books. Macmillan, which immediately saw its online sales plummet, stood firm and prevailed: Amazon ended the blackout after a week.
The story of the blackout and its aftermath reveals much about the high-stakes device and format war that's reshaping the publishing industry. Last year's Amazon-Macmillan showdown was a critical battle in that war.
One Year Ago: Amazon's 90% E-Book Market Share
By last January, Amazon seemed destined to retain an overwhelming share of the e-book market. It then, by most accounts, commanded about 90% of the U.S. trade e-book market. Barnes & Noble had entered the game just two months before, launching the Nook in time, barely, for the critical holiday season. Few in the industry were optimistic about Barnes & Noble's e-book efforts, however.
Amazon's strategy, it seemed clear, was to leverage its formidable advantages -- including its dominance of the online print book market -- to all but lock up the e-book market. If it was successful, Amazon would control the equivalent of a vast online book club. Any publisher wanting to sell to the club would have to agree to Amazon's terms. This was an ugly prospect: book clubs tend to be resilient, but ultra low-margin enterprises for all involved, except the proprietor.
More...Scott Turow's Letter to Members
September 9, 2010. Upon learning that I’ve just become president of the Authors Guild, friends and acquaintances have tended to ask two questions more than any other (besides, “What were you thinking?”):
#1. Do you own an e-reader and what do you think of the experience of reading that way?
#2. Are e-books and e-readers good or bad for authors?
The first question is a lot easier to answer than the second.
More...Addendum: Author Economics of the Odyssey-Amazon Agreement
July 26, 2010. We don't know the details of the Odyssey-Amazon agreement, but we can make some informed guesses. The agreement is most likely under the agency model, with Amazon paying Odyssey 70% of the retail price of the books. Wylie and Odyssey are together taking a typical agent's commission as compensation: 10 or 15% of the 70% received from Amazon. In round figures, this means that the author receives 60 to 63% of the retail price of the book.For comparison, a typical contract with a traditional publisher pays e-book royalties of 25% of net proceeds. If the e-book is sold under the agency model, the author's share is 25% of 70%, or 17.5% of the retail price of the book. After the agent's commission, the author receives roughly 15 to 16% of the retail price of the book. More...
Online Piracy Bill Aimed at U.S. and Foreign Sites
November 19, 2010. On November 18, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 19-0 to approve a bill intended to curb online piracy. The Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act, S.3804, would give the Justice Department and federal courts a new tool to crack down on websites that are dedicated to copyright piracy or that sell counterfeit goods. More...Wylie-Amazon: Publishers Have Largely Brought This on Themselves. Amazon Exclusivity Is Major Concern.
July 26, 2010. Thursday's announcement that the Wylie Agency, through its new publishing arm, Odyssey Editions, has a deal with Amazon to exclusively distribute at least 20 books in electronic form has shaken the industry. The 20 books include many important 20th century American works, including Invisible Man, Lolita, Portnoy's Complaint, Updike's Rabbit novels, The Adventures of Augie March, The Stories of John Cheever, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. These works are all in print and all, apparently, governed by old publishing contracts in which the authors didn't expressly grant electronic rights to the print publishers.
Random House, which holds the print rights to many of these titles, reacted Thursday afternoon by disputing that authors retained electronic rights to these books and saying that it would not do business with Wylie for English-language works "until this situation is resolved."
This is the most important development in electronic publishing since Apple entered the market offering publishers an "agency model" for selling e-books. Several aspects of the Wylie/Amazon/Random House entanglement merit comment:
1. Authors retain e-rights in standard publishing contracts unless they expressly grant those rights to the publisher, as we've consistently said and as a federal court held in Random House v. Rosetta Books. It's fine and proper for these authors and their heirs to exercise those rights, and we applaud the Wylie Agency for finding a way to make it happen.
2. That said, when an agency acts as publisher, serious potential conflicts of interest immediately come to mind. ...
3. That the Wylie/Odyssey agreement is reportedly exclusive raises many questions and concerns. Authors should have access to all responsible vendors of e-books. Moreover, Amazon's power in the book publishing industry grows daily. ...
Regardless of the exclusivity issues, any direct agreement between a literary agency and Amazon is troubling. Amazon has, time and again, wielded its clout in the industry ruthlessly, with little apparent regard for its relationships with authors or publishers or, for that matter, antitrust rules. ...
4. To a large extent, publishers have brought this on themselves. This storm has long been gathering. Literary agencies have refused to sign e-rights deals for countless backlist books with traditional publishers, even though they and their clients, no doubt, see real benefits in having a single publisher handle the print and electronic rights to a book. Knowledgeable authors and agents, however, are well aware that e-book royalty rates of 25% of net proceeds are exceedingly low and contrary to the long-standing practice of authors and publishers to, effectively, split evenly the net proceeds of book sales.
Bargain-basement e-book royalty rates will not last. Low e-book royalty rates will, as e-book sales become increasingly important, emerge as a dealbreaker for authors with negotiating leverage. Publishers will, inevitably, agree to reasonable royalties rather than lose their bestselling authors to more generous rivals and startups. We suspect publishers are well aware of this and are postponing the unavoidable because it seems to make sense in the short run. We believe this is short-sighted.
A major agency starting a publishing company is weird, no matter how you look at it. This sort of weirdness will only multiply, however, as long as authors don't share fairly in the rewards of electronic publishing. Publishers seeking to manage this transition well should cut authors in appropriately. The sooner they do so, the better. For everyone.
Wiley Rejects Guild's Audit Proposal
June 16, 2010. From the start, informed consent has been our primary concern regarding Wiley's proposed amendments to the Bloomberg authors' contracts. In our view, Wiley's initial letter was a spectacular failure, destined perhaps for law school textbooks, in obtaining informed consent to a contract modification. After reviewing several Bloomberg Press contracts, we couldn't imagine why any well-informed author would agree to the proposed amendments. Wiley has now said, repeatedly, that we have it all wrong, that the proposed amendment is actually good for Bloomberg authors. (Here are our three earlier alerts on this matter: one, two, and three.)This week, we discussed a proposal with Wiley to help sort things out. In a press release yesterday afternoon (you can find it below), Wiley rejected our proposal, but agreed to disregard any signed contract amendments at the author's request. While this is progress, and we're relieved that Bloomberg authors will have this opportunity, we still don't know whether those authors will be given the clear information they need regarding how the changes will affect their royalties and other material terms of their book contracts.
Our proposal to Wiley, which we agreed not to share with the press without first informing Wiley (Wiley took it upon itself to share part of it with the press), had three parts:
1. After the conclusion of a standard Wiley royalty period, Wiley would allow an independent royalty auditor to review a reasonable sample of actual Wiley/Bloomberg royalty statements under the Wiley system and prepare a report on how the Wiley amendment affected authors' royalties. The auditor would compute royalties under the Wiley amendment and under the original Bloomberg terms, to arrive at a clear, side-by-side comparison of the two. Wiley would disseminate that auditor's report to its Bloomberg authors. This report would end the argument between Wiley and the Authors Guild: real data would replace rhetoric. More...
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Our BEA Salute to Roy Blount, in 4 Colors
May 26, 2010. If you're coming to the show, stop by Booth #4769 anytime after noon (perhaps when you drop in for a hot dog and a beer with Scott Turow at 12:15) and pick up a button quoting Roy's last Bulletin column:
If you're not coming to BEA and would like a button, drop a self-addressed stamped envelope in the mail and we'll get one to you.
More...Songwriters and Authors Unite to Protect Termination Rights
May 3, 2010. The Authors Guild and The Songwriters Guild of America (SGA) told the U.S. Copyright Office on Friday that there is an urgent need to eliminate a potential “gap” in termination rights granted under the Copyright Act. The joint filing, announced today by Authors Guild executive director Paul Aiken and SGA president Rick Carnes, was in response to a request for comments by the Office on the issue. The “gap,” if not addressed, might prevent as many as 100,000 creators from being able to exercise termination rights they – and Members of Congress – thought had effectively been granted to them under the law. More...Scott Turow Elected President of Authors Guild; Judy Blume Is Vice President
April 28, 2010. At the annual meeting of the Authors Guild in New York yesterday, members elected Scott Turow as their president and Judy Blume as their vice president. Meg Cabot, Michelle Richmond and T.J. Stiles joined the Guild's executive Council. Roy Blount Jr. concluded his presidency of the Authors Guild, the largest organization of published book authors in the U.S., after serving four years. More...Random House, HarperCollins Look to Lock In Low E-Book Royalty Rates: 5 Ways to Protect Yourself
March 18, 2010. Random House and HarperCollins are sending letters to authors and agents seeking amendments to contracts regarding e-book rights. These letters, although some suggest that the author's work was "selected" for digitization, appear to be going to virtually all authors who have no stated e-book royalty rate in their contracts. In some cases, the letters have gone to authors who have never granted e-book rights to the publisher.
These amendments should be treated with extreme care.
E-book royalty rates are low at the moment. Both publishers are trying to lock in e-book royalty rates at 25% of net receipts. As we've previously said, we believe this will prove to be a low-water mark for e-book royalties:
Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of proceeds, and the standard trade book royalty of 15% of the hardcover retail price, back in the days that industry standard was established, represented about 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the book. We're confident that the current practice of paying 25% of net on e-books will not, in the long run, prevail. Savvy agents are well aware of this. The only reason e-book royalty rates are so low right now is that so little attention has been paid to them: sales were simply too low to scrap over. That's beginning to change.
Here's how to protect yourself:
More...White House Applauds Joint Effort for Print Disabled
March 9, 2010. The Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers and the Reading Rights Coalition agreed to work together to ensure access to books for people with print disabilities. On the White House blog, Kareem Dale, Special Assistant to the President for Disability Policy, endorsed the effort. More...Supreme Court Reverses Appellate Decision on Freelance Settlement
March 3, 2010. There's big news in our freelance electronic database class action. Yesterday, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned an appellate court ruling that the settlement, entered into in 2005, was impermissible because it encompassed unregistered as well as registered freelance works. More...Related Articles
Guild Launches Who Moved My Buy Button? Website
February 5, 2010. The Authors Guild is pleased to announce the launch of WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com, which is now live in fully-functional beta form. Who Moved My Buy Button? allows authors to keep track of whether Amazon has removed the "buy buttons" from any of their books.Simply register the ISBNs of any books you'd like monitored, and our web tool will check daily to make sure your buy buttons are safe and sound. If there's a problem, we'll e-mail you an alert.
Although we've launched WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com in response to Amazon's wholesale removal of buy buttons from Macmillan titles, we believe Amazon should be monitored for years to come. Amazon's developed quite a fondness for employing this draconian tactic (there's a chronology at the website); it's only grown bolder with its growing market clout.
Vigilance is called for: sounding off is our best collective defense. Register your ISBNs today -- it's free and open to all authors, Guild members and not. (Though we'd prefer you join.) More...
To RIAA or Not to RIAA, That was the Question
February 5, 2010. As you may be reading in today's paper, the Justice Department in its filing regarding our settlement with Google continues to see legal problems with the settlement, focusing on class action law but also continuing to raise some antitrust concerns. We disagree with the Justice Department's reading of the law. At the same time, it's good to see the Department recognizes the settlement's many benefits. In our view, it's best for everyone that out-of-print library books be made available through reasonable, market-based means to readers, students and scholars. Without a settlement, that won't happen. It's also best that authors have direct control of the scans the Google has made, with the power to compel Google to hide, display or remove those scans. Without a settlement, authors have no such control. Google's scanning and use of authors' books would continue until the lawsuit was finally resolved. More...Related Articles
Macmillan E-Royalties at 25%
February 4, 2010. In a letter just released by John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, Sargent makes reference to discussions with the Authors Guild over Macmillan's e-book royalty structure. As you know, we criticized Macmillan in October over its proposed new e-book royalty rate of 20% of receipts.In our discussions, Sargent agreed to "be flexible" on e-royalty rates, since current industry standards provide a royalty of 25% of receipts. The signal was quite clear that 25% was there for the asking. In further discussions on Monday, Sargent confirmed that Macmillan's standard e-book royalty would be 25% of receipts under their new boilerplate contract.
As we've said before, we believe that 25% of receipts is a transitional royalty rate for e-books. From our December 15 e-mail alert on Random House's retroactive rights grab:
"Authors and publishers have traditionally split the proceeds from book sales. Most sublicenses, for example, provide for a 50/50 split of proceeds, and the standard trade book royalty of 15% of the hardcover retail price, back in the days that industry standard was established, represented about 50% of the net proceeds of the sale of the book. We're confident that the current practice of paying 25% of net on e-books will not, in the long run, prevail. Savvy agents are well aware of this. The only reason e-book royalty rates are so low right now is that so little attention has been paid to them: sales were simply too low to scrap over. That's beginning to change... [W]e strongly suspect that e-royalty rates are at a low-water mark."
That said, Macmillan's e-book royalty rate is now similar to that of other major publishers. We look forward to continuing to discuss with Macmillan other provisions of its proposed new contract.
John Sargent's open letter follows. More...
Weather Advisory
February 10, 2010. Authors, it's snowing! Do you know where your buy buttons are? Are you sure? Buy buttons go missing without notice more often than you know (read Buy-Button Removal Chronology). Make sure your buy button is snug and warm at your book's page at Amazon. Sign up for your free account at whomovedmybuybutton.com. We'll alert you if your buy button takes a powder, whatever the weather.Not certain whether your buy button's gone missing? We can help. See Buy-Buttonology: A Field Guide to Amazon's Book Pages.
Keeping an eye on our friends at Amazon since last Friday.
More...
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The Right Battle at the Right Time
February 2, 2010. Macmillan's current fight with Amazon over e-book business models is a necessary one for the industry. The stakes are high, particularly for Macmillan authors. In a squabble over e-books, Amazon quickly and pre-emptively escalated matters by removing the buy buttons from all Macmillan titles (with some exceptions for scholarly and educational books), in all editions, including all physical book editions. Thousands of authors and titles are affected; hardest and most unfairly hit are authors with new books published by Macmillan that are in their prime sales period.More...
1/11/10 - Google Claims Process Simplified
January 11, 2010. Claiming a lengthy list of your books, short stories, essays, poems and articles for Google settlement benefits just got much easier. You can now start the process by simply submitting your bibliography to the claims administrator. You need only e-mail -- or send by regular mail -- a list of your books and shorter literary works (poems, short stories, articles) that may appear in books covered by the settlement. When in doubt, we suggest you submit everything. More...Random House's Retroactive Rights Grab
December 15, 2009. On Friday, Random House CEO Markus Dohle sent a two-page letter to many literary agents regarding e-books. Much of the letter is devoted to Random House's efforts and investments to market traditional and electronic books.On the second page, Mr. Dohle gets to the point. After noting that most of Random House's backlist titles grant the publisher electronic book rights (we agree, since most backlist titles are from the past ten years, a period in which authors have generally licensed electronic rights in tandem with their print rights), he writes that "there have been some misunderstandings concerning ebook rights in older backlist titles." He then proceeds to argue that older contracts granting rights to publish "in book form" or "in all editions" grant electronic rights to Random House.
The misunderstandings reside entirely with Random House.
More...
Last Call: Google Settlement Seminars by Phone
January 22, 2010. For those still seeking more information about the Google Book Settlement, we'll be hosting five phone-in seminars next week. These are open to all authors and agents. The seminars are free, except for your usual long-distance phone charges. We've expanded the capacity to accommodate many more people. We encourage you to forward this on to other authors and groups of authors.Each seminar will provide a short, clear explanation of the settlement and will answer all questions from participants. Each seminar will last about an hour. The seminars will be conducted by Paul Aiken, Jan Constantine, and Anita Fore, the Guild's Executive Director, General Counsel, and Director of Legal Services.
Here are the dates and times, click on a link to sign up:
Monday, January 25, 2010 at 10:00 AM Eastern Std Time
Monday, January 25, 2010 at 3:00 PM Eastern Std Time
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 10:00 AM Eastern Std Time
Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 3:00 PM Eastern Std Time
Wednesday, January 27, 2010 at 10:00 AM Eastern Std Time
When a seminar is full, it will be removed from the list of options on the online registration form.
More...
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11/13/09 - Amended Settlement Filed in Authors Guild v. Google
November 13, 2009. We've filed the amended settlement in Authors Guild v. Google. The official documents will be available at googlebooksettlement.com at some point over the weekend. In the meantime, here are the big changes:1. Smaller Class; Representation of Foreign Countries on Registry Board. We've narrowed down the class to authors and publishers of works registered in the U.S. and authors and publishers of works published in the three other countries that have contributed the largest number of English-language works to American libraries: Australia, Canada, and the U.K. Each of these countries will have an author and a publisher seat on the Book Rights Registry board.
2. Independent Fiduciary for Unclaimed Works. An independent fiduciary approved by the court will be solely responsible for decisions regarding unclaimed works. More...
Ursula K. Le Guin, Google, and the Economics of Authorship
December 23, 2009. We appreciate Ursula K. Le Guin's many years of membership and regret that she has chosen to resign from the Guild. We are open and eager to discuss this matter with her at any time.In many respects, we agree with Ms. Le Guin. We hold the principles of copyright to be fundamental -- they are bedrock principles for the Authors Guild and the economics of authorship. That's why we sued Google in the first place.
It would therefore have been deeply satisfying, on many levels, to litigate our case to the end and win, enjoining Google from scanning books and forcing it to destroy the scans it had made. It also would have been irresponsible, once a path to a satisfactory settlement became available.
More...
Google Settlement Fairness Hearing Adjourned
September 24, 2009. Judge Denny Chin has granted the motion of authors and publishers to adjourn the fairness hearing scheduled for October 7th. While noting that the current settlement raises "significant issues," Judge Chin says that "the proposed settlement would offer many benefits to society, as recognized by supporters of the settlement as well as DOJ. ... It would appear that if a fair and reasonable settlement can be struck, the public would benefit."Court Order Adjourning Hearing More...
Justice Department "Does Not Want Opportunity Lost," Urges Revisions
Text of e-mail sent to members, September 21, 2009. Beating their midnight deadline by about 90 minutes, the Justice Department on Friday filed a brief calling for modifications to the Guild's class-action settlement with Google over Google's scanning of millions of library books without permission. While it opposes the settlement agreement as it now stands, the Justice Department "strongly supports" the settlement's goals of creating new markets for out-of-print works and committed itself to working constructively with the parties on a revised settlement. More...Time to File Amended Settlement Extended to November 13
November 9, 2009. Judge Denny Chin approved the request of the parties in Authors Guild v. Google to extend the time to present an amended settlement agreement from today until Friday, November 13th. In a letter filed with the court this morning, Michael Boni, attorney for the authors in the litigation, said that the parties have been hard at work on completing the amended settlement and that discussions with the Justice Department had continued, with the most recent meeting on Friday, November 6th. November 9, 2009 Letter and Order of Judge Chin More...Authors Guild Testimony Before House Judiciary Committee
The Guild in its September 10th testimony argues that although authors and publishers have been so far spared the fate of their colleagues in the newspaper and magazine industries, "The portents are not encouraging. Finding a sustainable business model for creative work in digital form seems nearly impossible on the Internet: if piracy doesn’t get you, the aggregators will."The Guild finds reasons for optimism, however, including the Google Book Settlement, which "promises to address one of the oldest and most vexing of market failures: the loss to the commercial market of out-of-print books." More...
Books in Limbo
This piece by James Shapiro originally appeared on Huffington Post August 19, 2009 and is reprinted here with permission of the author.Much has been written of late about the Google Book Settlement, mostly about issues of copyright, monopoly and privacy. The tone has become increasingly nasty and the turn to scare tactics familiar to anyone following the health care debate. Lost in these broadsides and in the motions filed to the U. S. District Court that will soon rule on the case is the view from the trenches: What effect will the proposed settlement (or its derailment) have on students and scholarship? More...
Should I Opt Out? Should I Fear Google? What about the Money?
Answers about the Google Book Settlement
There’s not much time left for authors to opt out. What should I do? Short answer: nothing. Longer answer: Opting out of the settlement is for authors who want to preserve their right to sue Google themselves. We don’t think there are any such authors. More...
William Morris's Google Memo Off Target
Text of e-mail sent to members, August 10, 2009. William Morris's recent memo to clients about the Google book settlement contains several errors that are likely to sow some confusion. More...Roy Blount: Let's Not Lose Our Heads Over a "Monopoly" of Orphans
Text of e-mail sent to members, June 24, 2009. Dear Fellow Authors, I'd like to talk to you about orphans. Recently, regarding our settlement with Google, some dissent has been voiced that centers on so-called "orphan books." I can't see any reason to dissent from the settlement over the matter of orphan books. More...Court Extends Time to Opt Out of Google Settlement by Four Months
April 28, 2009. The court overseeing Authors Guild v. Google extended the time for authors and publishers to opt out of the settlement by four months, to September 4th (Judge Chin's order). We don't recommend opting out -- this settlement is a good deal for authors, bringing their out-of-print books back to commercial life (while leaving the marketplace for in-print books alone More...Making the Kindle Accessible to the Print Disabled
April 7, 2009. There's an easy technological fix: those with certified disabilities could have a Kindle operating system that is subtly modified to permit voice output for all books, overriding any limitations put in place by publishers. Read the Guild's statement on accessibility after the jump. More...Freelance Class-Action Settlement Going to Supreme Court
March 2, 2009. This morning, we learned that the Supreme Court has agreed to hear the appeal regarding our freelance class-action settlement with electronic datase companies and decide whether federal courts have jurisdiction over lawsuits involving unregistered works. This is good news. More...Amazon Reverses Stance on Computer-Generated Audio for the Kindle 2
March 2, 2009. At the end of the business day on Friday, Amazon announced that it would allow publishers (and thereby many authors) to block text-to-speech audio functionality on a title-by-title basis for its Kindle 2 reading device. More...Related Articles
A Brief Guide to the Benefits of the Authors Guild v. Google Settlement
February 25, 2009. The settlement strengthens authors' rights and will, if approved by the court, result in millions of dollars of payments to authors. At least $45 million will be paid to authors and publishers to release claims for books that are scanned by Google by May 5th of this year. But that's not the most significant part of the settlement, in our view. We expect the licensing that this settlement would enable, particularly of out-of-print books, will result in far more revenues for authors over the coming years. More...Related Articles
Kindle 2 Audio: How Does It Sound?
February 25, 2009. Text-to-speech (TTS) programs have been in use for a number of years, and they're improving. As Roy Blount says in an op-ed in today's New York Times, Kindle 2's TTS isn't Jim Dale reading "Harry Potter," but it's listenable. There's no need to take our word for it; have a listen to the sample below. More...E-Book Rights Alert: Amazon's Kindle 2 Adds "Text to Speech" Function
February 12, 2009. On Monday, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos unveiled Amazon's Kindle 2 e-book reading device at the Morgan Library in New York. Most of the changes from the first version of the Kindle are incremental improvements: the new Kindle is lighter and thinner, for example, and Amazon eliminated the scroll wheel. One update, however, is wholly new: Amazon has added a "Text to Speech" function that reads the e-book aloud through the use of special software. More...Holiday Message from Roy Blount Jr.:
Buy Books From Your Local Bookstore, Now
December 11, 2008. I've been talking to booksellers lately who report that times are hard. And local booksellers aren't known for vast reserves of capital, so a serious dip in sales can be devastating. Booksellers don't lose enough money, however, to receive congressional attention. More...
How the Authors Guild v. Google Settlement Will Work
December 4, 2008. The landmark settlement between the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers (AAP) and Google promises to create new markets for out-of print books, while vastly improving reader access to those books. More...$125 Million Settlement in Authors Guild v. Google
A message from Roy Blount Jr.:October 28, 2008. A couple months after I became Authors Guild president in 2006, we met with Google to propose a settlement to our class-action lawsuit. The Guild had sued Google in September 2005, after Google struck deals with major university libraries to scan and copy millions of books in their collections. Many of these were older books in the public domain, but millions of others were still under copyright More...
Authors Guild v. Google Settlement Resources Page
October 28, 2008. On this page, we've gathered documents and links that will be of interest to authors and others regarding this settlement. More...Press Conference Remarks of Guild Executive Director
[October 28, 2008] It's a pleasure to be here to jointly announce what may be the biggest book deal in U.S. publishing history. More...Macadam/Cage Royalties on Track, According to Publisher
September 19, 2008. After today's Publishers Weekly report about layoffs and a "cash crunch" at San Francisco publisher Macadam/Cage, we gave editor-in-chief Pat Walsh a call to check on the company's fiscal health. More...Authors Guild to Work With F&W/Adams Media to Review Accounting Practices
August 15, 2008. F&W/Adams Media has contacted the Authors Guild in response to our August 13 member alert about an arbitrator's award to Guild member Sherry Argov. F&W expressed its confidence in its royalty accounting practices and has offered to work with the Guild to demonstrate that its accounting systems are appropriate. We'll take F&W up on its offer and will be reporting the results of our review to our members. More...Related Articles
Simon & Schuster Proposes E-Book Amendment
July 17, 2008. Simon & Schuster has recently sent a one-page letter to many, perhaps thousands, of authors with unspecified e-book royalty rates in an attempt to set those rates at 15% of the "catalog retail price" of the e-book. More...Authors Guild to Study F&W/Adams Media Royalty Accounting
August 13, 2008. Internal e-mails, including an admission that Adams Media has "no system in place for tracking inbound Royalty Statements from translation rights deals," and a recent arbitrator's ruling in Massachusetts awarding $209,000 to an author raise serious questions about the accounting practices of F&W Publishing and Adams Media. More...Authors Registry Hits $2.5 Million Mark for 2008
June 30, 2008. The Authors Registry, the not-for-profit organization founded by the Authors Guild and others in 1995, has paid more than $2.5 million to authors since the start of the year, a record for the organization. More...Amazon Squeezes Long Tail
April 4, 2008. Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all print-on-demand books that it sells be printed by BookSurge, Amazon's on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon. More...Reversal in Freelance Class-Action Settlement
November 29, 2007. The 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals reversed, in a 2-1 decision, the district court's approval of the settlement.The news is stunning. The appellate court ruled that the district court lacked jurisdiction over claims relating to unregistered freelance articles. It was an issue that no one brought up on appeal.
The appellate court's opinion. More...
Dead Celebrities Bill Dormant; May Revive
June 22, 2007. The New York State Assembly and Senate adjourned their regular sessions yesterday without taking action on the "Dead Celebrities" bill. This is good news. More...Immediate Help Needed on New York "Dead Celebrities" Bill
June 20, 2007. There's been a sudden and alarming push in the New York State Legislature to pass a bill that would create a posthumous "right of publicity" for anyone who died since Jan. 1, 1938. The Guild has sent out an e-mail to members encouraging them to take action against Assembly bill (A.8836) and Senate bill (S. 6005). More...Apology, Movement from Simon & Schuster
June 1, 2007. Simon & Schuster executives yesterday apologized for "any early miscommunication" regarding reversion of rights, according to the Association of Authors' Representatives (the literary agents' organization). S&S is willing to negotiate a "revenue-based threshold" to determine whether a book is in-print, says the AAR. The AAR's alert follows. More...Literary Papers Tax Bill Needs Your Support
May 3, 2007. In an e-mail to members, the Authors Guild asked for support of the Artist-Museum Partnership Act, which has been reintroduced in the House and Senate. The bill would allow authors to deduct from their income for federal tax purposes the fair market value of donated manuscripts and other literary papers. More...Global Chilling Update: Major Libel Ruling in London
October 11, 2006. The House of Lords, the United Kingdom's highest court, ruled today that British journalists may now publish allegations about public figures without fear of libel claims, provided that they acted responsibly and in the public interest in carrying out their reporting. A recent Authors Guild Foundation panel discussed how British libel law was affecting American authors. We don't yet know whether or how the ruling will apply to book publishing, but we're trying to find out more information. More...Trademark Bill Threatens Free Expression
February 14, 2006. A bill that would drop express protection for "noncommercial use" of a trademark and would weaken the protections for those who use trademarks in news commentary will be considered by the Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday, February 16. The legislation has already passed the House. The Guild is encouraging writers in states represented on the Judiciary Committee to contact their senators about the bill. More...Is Google a charity? Some handy talking points for the Google Class-Action Lawsuit
September 23, 2005. In an e-mail to members, the Authors Guild lays out some basics about the class action suit against Google. More...Related Articles
Authors Guild Sues Google, Citing “Massive Copyright Infringement”
September 20, 2005. The Authors Guild and a Lincoln biographer, a children's book author, and a former Poet Laureate of the U.S. filed a class action suit today in Manhattan against Google over its "Library" program. The suit charges the $90 billion company with massive copyright infringement. More...Jung Biographer Stands Firm, Wins
October 19, 2005. This past summer, heirs of Carl Jung pressed a German imprint of Random House to insert "corrections" to the text of the German language edition of a Jung biography by Authors Guild member Deirdre Bair. With the help of Guild attorney Anita Fore, Bair succeeded in having her lauded biography published without alteration. More...Not at the Writers' Expense
On October 22, 2005, The Washington Post published an op-ed by Authors Guild President Nick Taylor on Google Library. In it, Mr. Taylor asks why increased exposure is the only compensation a wealthy company can offer authors for this commercial venture. More...Five Publishers Sue Google over Google Library
October 19, 2005. The Association of American Publishers announced today that The McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group (USA), Simon & Schuster and John Wiley & Sons had sued Google over its Library project. The suit seeks a declaration from the court that Google's scanning of entire works is copyright infringement and an injunction preventing such scanning. More...Google's "Renegade Notion of Eminent Domain"
October 2, 2005. In a letter published in today's New York Times, Authors Guild president Nick Taylor responds to the recent op-ed written by Google advisory board member Tim O'Reilly. Mr. Taylor urges "a better way: let's build a real digital library, not just 'snippets.' Writers are willing, but not at the cost of our rights." More...Google Launches Book-Browse Competitor to Amazon
October 7, 2004. Unlike Amazon's "Search Inside the Book," Google Print offers to place ads beneath book excerpts and share revenues with publishers. Authors are entitled to 50% of publishers' ad revenue in most cases. More...Class Action Settlement Amended to Cover Amazon.com and Highbeam
On July 28, 2005, Judge Daniels gave preliminary approval to an amended settlement in the freelancers' class action suit. The amendment is intended to resolve a dispute over the licensing by one or more of the defendants of freelancers' articles to Amazon.com and Highbeam Research during settlement negotiations. The Authors Guild and other plaintiffs believed these licenses to violate the settlement. More...Official Summary Notice of Settlement (1 page)
Click here to download the Official Summary Notice: Summary Notice More...Official Notice of Settlement (more detailed)
Click here to download the Official Notice: Notice More...6/14/10 - One in Five Bloomberg Authors Received Royalties Based on Retail List Price, Says Wiley
June 14, 2010. John Wiley issued a new press release Friday afternoon regarding the contractual modifications it's seeking from its Bloomberg Press authors. In that release, Wiley says that one in five Bloomberg contracts provided royalties based on retail list price. As we've previously noted, Wiley's proposed amendment would slash royalties for those authors by up to 50%. (Our earlier alerts on this matter are here and here.)Wiley commits to reach out to Bloomberg authors. Reaching out will only help, however, if the authors are provided with accurate information. Based on Wiley's latest release (below, following our alert), we're not optimistic.
1. Wiley says that in Bloomberg "list price" agreements, royalty rates were lowered when discounts exceed 50%, that the average discount rate for the books was greater than 50%, and that therefore "we believe the authors will benefit with the proposed, simplified Wiley terms."
This belief doesn't stand up to an examination of the Bloomberg contracts. While it's true that Bloomberg contracts often provide that royalty rates are reduced when sales discounts reach certain thresholds, Wiley's suggestion that these reductions uniformly apply once discounts exceed 50% is wrong. The royalty reductions kick in at various levels, depending on the contract. Sometimes royalty rates are reduced when books are sold at 51% discounts to retailers and sometimes at 53% or 55% discounts. But here's the thing: even taking that into account, authors do far better under the original Bloomberg contracts than under the Wiley amendment. More...
6/11/10 - Turow to Wiley: "Knock it off and do the right thing."
June 11, 2010. Late yesterday afternoon, John Wiley issued a press release disputing some of the assertions in our alert of yesterday morning. In our alert, we called Wiley's April letter to its Bloomberg Press authors "deceptive" and "misleading" and that it would "materially and adversely affect the royalty rates of many Bloomberg Press authors."We stand by every word of our alert, and we again call on Wiley to start over. No sensible Bloomberg author with a contract providing royalties based on the retail list price of their book would have signed Wiley's amendment if they were fully aware of its effects. Wiley should send Bloomberg authors a new letter, informing the authors that they are disregarding any previous consents to Wiley's proposed contract changes and clearly explaining how the new terms they're suggesting differ from the authors' existing contracts.
Or, as Scott Turow put it on reviewing their response, "Wiley should knock it off and do the right thing."
In any event, here are our replies to John Wiley's various assertions:
1. Wiley's response says that its April letter to Bloomberg authors "explain[ed] the changes in plain English" and invited authors "to discuss these changes or raise questions."
Wiley's April letter is plain enough, but it avoids any hint that its changes will greatly reduce many Bloomberg authors' royalties. This is fundamental. Wiley's a sophisticated publisher, well aware of what it's doing and well aware that most authors aren't publishing attorneys. It could have spelled out the effects of its proposed contractual changes in equally plain English. If it had done so, then the offer to discuss the changes would have been meaningful. More...
6/10/10 - Wiley's Deceptive Letter to Bloomberg Press Authors: "We are pleased to inform you" that we will be slicing your royalties up to 50%
June 10, 2010. John Wiley & Sons acquired Bloomberg Press, the books division of Bloomberg, in March. At the end of April, it began sending a letter to hundreds of Bloomberg Press authors purporting to inform them "about a few differences in the accounting systems of Bloomberg and Wiley that it will be helpful for you to know about."While this sounds innocent enough, it isn't. More...
11/13/09 - Happy Amended Settlement Day!
November 13, 2009. We file the amended Google settlement with the court today, but it's not quite out of the oven yet. While you're waiting, we thought we'd share some of the thoughts of others on the original settlement.Normally, we wouldn't recommend a piece that in any way compares out-of-print books to sewage, but this piece in Slate is by Tim Wu, a Columbia Law professor and former clerk for Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. Mr. Wu specializes in copyright law and telecommunications policy and is best known online as the popularizer of the net neutrality movement. He's also chairman of the board of Free Press, a nonprofit dedicated, among other things, to combating media monopolies. For those wary of Google, his concluding paragraph is worth reading:
"But if you want to put Google in its place, the book project is the wrong way to do so. It is Google's monopoly on Internet search that is valuable and potentially dangerous, not a quixotic project to provide access to unpopular books. So hold on to that sense of wariness, but understand that in this case, it's misplaced. To punish Google by killing Book Search would be like punishing Andrew Carnegie by blowing up Carnegie Hall." More...
9/09/09 - Authors Line Up to Support Google Book Settlement
September 9, 2009. Authors who support the Google Book Settlement as a way to provide greater access to their books and make additional money from those works need to do nothing to be a party to it and enjoy its benefits. Still, many have decided to make their support known. Here's a list of Authors Guild members who have taken a public position in support of the settlement. More...9/02/09 - Amazon Accuses Someone Else of Monopolizing Bookselling
September 2, 2009. Amazon made it official today, filing a brief in the Google case claiming that someone else might gain a monopoly in bookselling. It seems we're compelled to state the obvious:Amazon's hypocrisy is breathtaking. It dominates online bookselling and the fledgling e-book industry. At this moment it's trying to cement its control of the e-book industry by routinely selling e-books at a loss. More...
