Pardon me, but do you have any legal training? I’m thinking of suing someone. My lawyer thinks I’m a crackpot, so I need a second opinion.

Listen to this:

About twenty years ago when I was a volunteer 4th grade teacher I created an adventure aimed at teaching children about government. I instructed the kids to pretend to be on a cruise ship that is blown off course by a storm. They ended up shipwrecked on a tropic island, and in order to survive they had to develop a government.

Fifteen years later, Lost was launched on television and guess what? It’s about a passenger jet that crashes on a topical island. Obviously, to cover their trail they changed my cruise ship into an airplane. Other than that it’s my exact same idea. And look at the similarities! In my story the kids have to organize; On Lost they have to organize. In my story the kids have to eat disgusting things – same as on Lost. So, I’m thinking of suing the producers of Lost for copyright infringement. Do I have a slam-dunk case or what?

Actually, I hadn’t thought of suing until I read that an author named Jordan Scott has brought a lawsuit against bestselling Twilight author Stephenie Meyer alleging copyright infringement. According to Gil Kaufman of MTV. com, Meyer allegedly plagiarized something called The Nocturne written by Scott when was fifteen. She posted it one chapter a time on her website. Here’s what Kaufman writes about Scott’s claim: “Though Scott’s book is set in 15th-century France and details a love affair between a young sorcerer and a teenage girl and Meyer’s book chronicles a doomed teenage love triangle between a human, a vampire and a werewolf set in modern times, Williams said the plot lines and some developments — detailed in more than a dozen examples in the suit — match too closely to be a coincidence.”

After Business Secretary Lord Mandelson called for tougher sanctions on those illegally sharing files of copyrighted material, spokespeople for some British Internet Service Providers have howled in righteous pain. Milord’s suggestion that parents of file-swapping children might be subject to fines evoked particularly raucous – and predictable – yowls from the likes of Virgin and TalkTalk. Especially when talk of penalties reached 50,000 pounds and repeat offenders would have their plug yanked out of its socket.

Implying that the Secretary practiced an antique morality that requires thieves to be punished, one spokesman for an ISP suggested Lord Mandelson didn’t “get” the Internet and proposed such Draconian alternatives as “educating people” and “writing letters to alleged file-sharers.” Many a British parent must be trembling today at the prospect of receiving a letter from an Internet Service Provider or, worse, having their children educated about not taking things that belong to others.

Read BBC News’s Anger at UK file-sharing policy.

RC

We recently attempted to explain the new ePub standard and did a pretty good job of simplifying it for the lay audience if we do say so ourselves. However, a reader’s comment suggests we may have oversimplified it. He introduced the concept of “wrapping” ePub in proprietary shell.

What does that mean and why is it important to you?

The ePub (short for “electronic publication”) standard, we explained, was designed to create an open, one-size-fits-all format. We said that Sony was planning to scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of ePub, enabling users to read e-books on any reading device that supports the ePub standard.

Well, yes – and no. Here’s what a correspondent wrote:

“Unfortunately, Sony’s version of ePub, as currently described, will be wrapped in Sony’s DRM, so books downloaded to Sony’s e-reader will not be readable on other devices. ePub does not necessarily mean open, which should be the goal of IDPF and the reading community.“

“DRM” stands for Digital Rights Management, a long way of saying controlled or restricted access to digital content. Proprietary, in other words. Kindle is an example of a proprietary, closed standard.

We referred the question to Michael Gaudet, who frequently unpacks technical complexities for us, and here is what he had to say to our commenter:

What I think you’re asking for is a world with no DRM. While you may see it as unfortunate that Sony isn’t as forward thinking as you’d like, I’m sure Sony and the IDPF are trying to be as realistic as possible in accommodating the ebook market’s suppliers: publishers.

ePub has always been formulated with the anticipation that retailers could wrap it in DRM if they needed to, and many publishers ask for DRM and won’t retail ebooks without it. Each ePub retailer needs to consider how to solve the DRM requirements for publishers and customers, and it’s never going to please everyone.

The biggest publishers who are still actively specifying DRM controls are members of the IDPF and they made these demands in standards meetings for the ePub format, and retailers like Sony and Content Reserve saw what’s coming down the road well in advance of their customers. It would have been suicide for Sony’s ebook store to ignore all the content from publishers who require DRM at this time just because it’s fashionable to bash DRM.

It’s unknown yet whether Sony’s ebookstore ePub implementation will be readable on other devices, but chances are that it can be, depending on the other devices’ software to unlock DRM from multiple vendors. It’s highly likely Adobe’s Digital Editions could support Sony’s ePub in the future, and if that’s possible, then so will other reader platforms that acknowledge ePub.

When customers choose to buy non-DRM books from other retailers that offer them, like Fictionwise, the Sony device is a very welcoming platform for ePub, and I think that’s probably more important than Sony’s store right now. The opportunity exists to read ePubs with or without DRM, and that’s better than where we were a year ago.

Obviously, ePub is not so white, and DRM is not so black. We hope you can live with shades of gray until a true One Size Fits All Standard rules all digital content.

RC

Douglas Rushkoff is author of Life Inc: How the World Became a Corporation and How to Take It Back and he’s written a feel-good “Soapbox” guest editorial for Publishers Weekly telling us “why scaling down is good for publishing.” I’m not sure the fired, laid-off, and otherwise redundanted victims of last winter’s Wednesday of the Long Knives would characterize themselves as joyous forerunners of an upswing in the fortunes of our industry; nor do Rushkoff’s opening comments evoke buoyant optimism: “Borders is verging on bankruptcy; Barnes & Noble is closing stores; and major media conglomerates are closing imprints and ejecting talent faster than they gobbled it up in the 1990s.”

And how about this passage for making sure we know how dark it has become before the dawn:

Over the past year, we’ve watched venerable imprints fold into one another and great talent be almost randomly ejected. Knopf’s revered name is now subject to the corporate-speak of “Knopf-Doubleday.” HarperCollins created Collins, then crossed it off the spreadsheet, in the process booting Brenda Bowen’s children’s imprint; one of the most talented publicists in the industry, Larry Hughes; and the brilliant Gillian Blake, whom they had just snatched from Bloomsbury. Doubleday closed Morgan Road and lost an irreplaceable asset: one-woman publishing-powerhouse Amy Hertz.

But if we forcibly restrain cynicism we’ll come to his thesis: “While this makes for some bleak headlines in the short term, it bodes well for the future of a publishing industry that operates on a scale more appropriate to the medium we’re all creating and selling.”

We’ll grant him this one: “Publishing is a sustainable industry—and a great one at that. The book business, however, was never a good fit for today’s corporate behemoths. The corporations that went on spending sprees in the 1980s and ’90s were not truly interested in the art of publishing.”

Whether Rushkoff makes the case that the meltdown of the trade book publishing industry is a forerunner of the Age of Aquarius we’ll leave to readers of his editorial, We’ll Be Back. But some may take exception to his conclusion: “Now that publishing has revealed itself to be a bad growth industry, it is free to rebuild itself as the vibrant, scaled and sustainable business the reading public can support.” Even Dr. Pangloss might shrink from such soaring wishful thinking.

All sneering aside, we join the editorialist in hoping that tomorrow will truly be a better day for our poor battered industry.

Richard Curtis

About ten years ago as the digital book revolution got under way in earnest, the industry’s pioneers agreed that e-books would take off only when a generation of students had matured and begun demanding its content online.

That day appears to have come. With textbook prices tripling since 1986 and rising at twice the national inflation rate, students are looking at school books the way they looked at music CDs – if there’s a cheap or free way to get their hands on them, they will.

“Textbooks have not gone the way of the scroll yet,” writes Tamar Lewin of the New York Times, “but many educators say that it will not be long before they are replaced by digital versions — or supplanted altogether by lessons assembled from the wealth of free courseware, educational games, videos and projects on the Web.”

That will come as welcome news to many of the nation’s 17 million students. Both the cost and the weight of book-laden backpacks can be crippling.

But for publishers of textbooks and college bookstores it will feel as if the Death Star has just launched a doomsday weapon. Textbooks are a $5.5 billion industry, representing about 25% of the entire US book market. According to the National Association of College Stores, in 2007-08, students spent an average of $488 on new and used course materials in the college store or its online equivalent. The average price of a new textbook in 2008 was $57, and for a used one, $49. Some textbooks cost over $100 and the total book fees at some schools can exceed $1000 a year.

The loss of a good chunk of that revenue is going to put a big hurt on all who make a living from textbooks (and let’s not forget the authors!). Nevertheless, that seems to be the way the world is going. “In five years,” says the superintendent of one county serving half a million students, “I think the majority of students will be using digital textbooks”

Though publishers are repurposing their textbook content for online delivery, the pressure by colleges to hold costs down will make digitally delivered content far less profitable than books packaged in hard covers.

The state leading the charge to take textbooks digital is California under Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who balked at the cost and half-joked that the weight of printed textbooks was daunting even for him, an international bodybuilding champion. His initiative is to replace high school math and science textbooks with open source digital versions, which are free thanks to the efforts of CK-12 Foundation, a nonprofit group. CK-12 has adapted textbooks to meet state education standards.

“With California in dire straits, the governor hopes free textbooks could save hundreds of millions of dollars a year,” writes Lewin in In a Digital Future, Textbooks Are History. If the experiment is successful, what happens in California is not going to stay in California.

Cengage Learning, however, is trying another approach: renting textbooks. It will rent them for 40% to 70% off list price for as little as two months and as long as 130 days, according to another article by Lewin. When the rental ends, students have a choice of returning the books or buying them.

One of the benefits of Cengage’s business model is author compensation. “’Our authors will get royalties on second and third rentals, just as they would on a first sale,’” Lewin quotes Cengage’s CEO. In the traditional model, textbook authors never receive royalties on resales.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

September is traditionally the month when publishers release their biggest books. The strategy is to lock bestsellers into bookstores through winter and capture the Christmas sweepstakes. Christmas is by a wide margin bookselling’s biggest season.

But major book houses are pulling to the side of the road to let Dan Brown’s behemoth The Lost Symbol, with a purported 6.5 million first printing, rush past. Hopefully the vacuum created by its sweep to Number 1 on the bestseller list will suck some other books into its slipstream. Among those books are novels by authors who at any other time would seize and occupy that list – Larry McMurtry, Terry Brooks and Stephen King among them.

Instead, their publishers are scrambling to rearrange publication release dates or reconfigure sales and marketing strategies.

Read about it in this article in London’s Times Online. The headline says Brown’s book has created “panic” among its rivals. Sara Nelson, former editor in chief of Publishers Weekly, called The Lost Symbol a “book killer.”

RC

“For all the concern and uproar over online privacy,” writes Stephanie Clifford in the New York Times, “marketers and data companies have always known much more about consumers’ offline lives, like income, credit score, home ownership, even what car they drive and whether they have a hunting license. Recently, some of these companies have started connecting this mountain of information to consumers’ browsers.”

The most effective way this information is disseminated is via the cookies in your computer. Marshall Brain of How Stuff Works defines a cookie this way: “A piece of text that a Web server can store on a user’s hard disk. Cookies allow a Web site to store information on a user’s machine and later retrieve it. The pieces of information are stored as name-value pairs. For example, a Web site might generate a unique ID number for each visitor and store the ID number on each user’s machine using a cookie file.”

Like their black and white confectionary counterparts, digital cookies can be enormously beneficial or treacherously dangerous. In fact, they’re both at the same time, but unlike the bakery version you can’t eat the half you like and ignore the half you dislike. Each use of a cookie makes life easier for you or someone else; it also exposes your privacy and makes you vulnerable to exploitation by third parties. Some of those parties are trying to sell you something. Others may have more ominous motives including capture of your identity and theft of your savings.

“For decades,” writes Clifford, “data companies like Experian and Acxiom have compiled reams of information on every American: Acxiom estimates it has 1,500 pieces of data on every American, based on information from warranty cards, bridal and birth registries, magazine subscriptions, public records and even dog registrations with the American Kennel Club.” A lot of that data is harvested from the habits, tastes, preferences and relationships disclosed by the cookies you create through normal use of your email and Web browsing. Here is the link to Clifford’s article, Ads Follow Web Users, and Get More Personal

Though you can view, manage and delete your cookies, most people don’t bother. Like their Sesame Street role model, they are addicted to the convenience but unaware of the tendrils subtly enveloping their privacy and choking off options.

If you read the nutrition information on cookie packages because you’re worried about obesity, you absolutely owe it to yourself to read Brain’s article to understand what goes into your computer – and, more importantly, what secretly comes out of it, who views it and what they do with it.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Cookie Monster Image Copyright © The Jim Henson Company

In Strings by Dave Duncan, Alya’s hunches are so consistently right they’re surreal. Naturally, someone wants to use her gifts so they can exploit an offworld colony. But Alya meets the grandson of the brilliant and tyrannical director of the world called 4-I and she begins to doubt her own intuition. Cedric has dreamed of becoming a scout and exploring new worlds and when he meets Alya he is more determined than ever to leave 4-I, with her. His grandmother, the director, needs him on 4-I, though, because she has schemes afoot to protect her planet and to cover up a murder and she does not intend to let him go. However, she has underestimated her grandson–and the young woman whose intuition is so strong and whose destiny is linked to Cedric’s.

Strings is another gem in E-Reads treasure chest of 21 Dave Duncans. We urge you to read them all.

RC

In Starrigger by John DeChancie, an independent space trucker picks up a beautiful hitchhiker and a trailer-load of trouble. E-Reads has just reissued it with a beautiful cover by our ace designer and production manager Nathan Fernald.

One of the best of the indie starriggers, Jake knows a few tricks about following the Skyway, which connects dozens, or maybe hundreds, of planets. Nobody knows how many and nobody really knows the full extent of the Skyway and much of it remains unexplored. But, somehow, a rumor gets started that Jake has a map for the whole thing and suddenly everybody wants a piece of him: an alien race called the Reticulans, the human government known as the Colonial Assembly, and a nasty piece-of-work called Corey Wilkes, head of the wildcat trucker union TATOO. No matter what Jake does, no matter how many twists and turns he makes, he can’t shake any of the menaces on his tail. The Starrigger series continues with Red Limit Freeway and concludes with Paradox Alley, which we hope to bring to you soon.

By the way, we have two authors writing about starriggers, John DeChancie and Jeffrey Carver, who calls his Star Riggers - two words. And two worlds. Check both series out and see how each approaches the theme.

At any rate, if you love John DeChancie’s science fiction, get hooked on his “Castle” fantasy series – eight of ‘em.

RC

Do guys read? Fifty top editors in the publishing business say they don’t. Listen to Tom Matlack, co-founder of The Good Men Project, telling a tale of woe on Huffington Post:

A year ago my VC partner and I (collectively we have been involved in starting Television Food Network, a 15 million subscriber weekly magazine, and 30 other media-related companies) decided we wanted to publish an anthology of first person stories by men about manhood. We collected a Pulitzer Prize winning author (Charlie LeDuff), an NFL Hall of Famer (Andre Tippett), a New York Times war photographer (Michael Kamber), a Sing Sing inmate gone straight (Julio Medina), a fantasy baseball legend (Mark St. Amant), a poet Laureate (Robert Pinsky) along with normal guys (black, white, straight, gay, rich, poor, married and divorced) with stories to tell about being fathers, sons, husbands and providers at this turning point in man-history.

We hired the best agent in the business, wrote a detailed book proposal, and went shopping for a publisher. Fifty (that’s 5-0, including a who’s who list of the literary world) turned us down. They told us guys don’t read, would never read any kind of anthology, and most certainly wouldn’t read an anthology about men. Apparently we are all mindless fools. The publishers also said they were focused exclusively on the “sure-thing” celebrity books in the wake of deteriorating economics. Just about that time we noticed a well-received anthology in the New York Times Review of Books written by women during menstruation.

Matlack decided to go in another direction and his book and documentary film are scheduled for launch in mid-November with a cadre of heavy-hitters and high-profile events. ” We are planning events in boy’s clubs, fire stations, prisons, and army bases — where ever guys want to talk.”

“Who knows if The Good Men Project will work?” Matlack says. “But at the very least our approach demonstrates the wave of the future. The dinosaurs are dead. It’s time for everyone involved in the old book food chain to admit it and develop a holistic approach to something new and exciting.”

RC