How’s your speed-reading? Ready to go up against a robot? Here’s your chance.

A Japanese laboratory has developed a scanner that can turn pages and scan their contents – text and images – at 1000 frames-per-second with a minimum of distortion.
“The system could be used to speed up the digitization process of low-cost e-books and other library data,” reports plasticpals, a website devoted to all things robotic.

“The camera uses lights connected to a synchronized control circuit and a laser range projector to estimate the three-dimensional page geometry. This allows it to correct any distortion from the page being turned while at the same time flashing it with uniform, ideal lighting. The 3D data can even be reproduced on a computer.”

RC

A major literary agency is urging its authors to opt out of the Google settlement. A lawyer is planning to file his opposition to the settlement.

Where were they when, year after year and decade after decade, a treasure house of literary works was abandoned? Along comes Google with a plan to recover those treasures from the trash heap and now those who abandoned them have become passionate bibliophiles. Or have they just become jealous that someone figured out how to make a profit on properties in which they had no interest?

From where I sit it’s not about books, it’s about money. In the course of rescuing countless works from the public domain and adding value to works that publishers, agents and authors deemed commercially valueless, Google figured out how to monetize those works. And now those selfsame parties want a piece of something they so recently turned their backs on. It reminds me of the oil producers who abandoned tracts because they couldn’t get oil from shale. Then someone figured out how to get oil from shale and now the oil companies claim they’ve been duped.

Perhaps a better analogy is the story of the Little Red Hen. None of her friends – the cat, the duck, the rat – offered to help her to sow the seeds, water the plants, till the soil, pull the weeds, harvest the wheat, thresh the grain, grind the flour or bake the bread. But when the bread was baked, all her friends wanted a piece.

The Little Red Hen said to them, “You shall have no bread.” And the moral of this classic childrens tale is that she had every right to say it to them.

So – why do I smell a cat, a duck, and a rat?

Though Google has sown the seeds, watered the plants, tilled the soil, pulled the weeds, harvested the wheat, threshed the grain, ground the flour and baked the bread, it has, after a concerted effort by responsible author and publisher organizations, worked with our community to make sure that everybody gets a piece of bread. But that doesn’t seem to be enough for some who have conveniently forgotten who did all the work, invested all the money, developed the technology, and embarked on a stupendous effort to identify the priceless treasures of civilization’s literary heritage and see to it that they will never be lost.

Google also did it to make a profit. And for that they are under attack. Forgive me for wondering about the profit motives of these knights who belatedly ride into our midst with flags of righteous indignation unfurled.

Richard Curtis

Cover of The Little Red Hen, Usborne First Reading series,

I trust we have your attention.

September 4 is Deciding Day for authors trying to figure out whether or not to opt in to the Google Settlement. Though the previous deadline came before the author and publishing community had fully digested the settlement, we’ve now had time to contemplate the facts in tranquility. The Authors Guild in particular has striven to make authors’ options crystal clear. Below is the Guild’s own summary of recommendations. We’ve also appended links to its statement of last October. Finally, a link to the excellent analysis performed by an attorney and published on our site in April of this year.

RC
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All rights granted Google under the settlement are terminable at will by the rightsholder. Licenses that are terminable at will give the rightsholder far more power than a license of defined duration. In book publishing (as in life) all negotiating power comes from the power to say “no.” The settlement fully preserves that power for rightsholders, from day one.

By staying in the settlement:
• You aren’t limited to the (quite favorable) royalty rate we’ve negotiated.
• You have the right to veto your publisher’s decision to make your in-print book available in any way through the settlement.
• You have the right to block all displays of your out-of-print books, even if rights haven’t reverted to you, even if your publisher wants to display the books.
• You have the right to have your work in Google’s searchable database and display only snippets to users, blocking all other uses by Google.
• You have the right to change your mind (allow books you’d previously blocked to be displayed; block books you’d previously allowed to be displayed) at any time.
• This is just the start. For a more complete list of benefits, read this.

Authors Guild’s original statement last October

Attorney Joy Butler’s summary

RC

Stephanie Clifford of the New York Times reports that “the Reader’s Digest Association announced on Monday that it would file for prearranged Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection for its United States businesses within 30 days.” Though it sounds dire (most of us would be concerned if we were $2.2 billion in debt) the restructuring of the company, with its extensive holdings, will bring its debts down to $550 million. Most of us would be concerned to be in debt by that amount too, but the debtholders taking over the corporation seem to feel its manageable.

The jewel in the corporation’s crown is the revered magazine, Reader’s Digest itself. It will continue operating but at a reduced schedule (10 issues a year instead of 12), a reduced circulation (currently 5.5 million, down from 8 million) and a focus on”socially conservative values,” says Clifford. Here’s the article in full, and here’s a piece we posted a few months ago as this event began unfolding.

RC

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.

I’ve made a rule for myself to ignore an unfamiliar phrase the first couple of times I hear it, but if I hear it a third time I pay attention. If you haven’t heard the term “ePub” up to now, you’re going to do so with increasing frequency. So maybe you’d better listen up.

If you understand nothing else about e-book readers, at least understand this: they operate either on a closed standard or an open one. If closed, you can read an e-book only on that device. If open, you can read it interchangeably on many devices. Ideally, you should be able to read it on any device.

Music lovers know all about closed systems from Apple’s iTunes store, created a few years ago. You could not transfer music from your iPod to non-Apple players.

The most prominent example of an e-reader with a closed standard is Amazon’s Kindle. You simply can’t download a Kindle title into your cellphone or PDA. Amazon designed its product to keep retail e-book sales inside the Amazon family, and so far the strategy has been a big success. Arguably, however, the success can be attributed to Kindle being the first big commercial e-book reader, and by far the most actively promoted and publicized. Many Kindle owners swear by the device, but with competition mounting from a number of manufacturers and retailers, the next generation of consumers will have more choices. Some of the e-book readers will have a more open format.

Another example of a closed, or proprietary, device is the Sony e-Reader. However, an announcement by Sony of its intention to switch to an open standard will add momentum to the forces arrayed against Kindle. The name of that open standard is ePub. “By the end of the year,” writes Brad Stone of the New York Times, Sony “will sell digital books only in the ePub format, an open standard created by a group including publishers like Random House and HarperCollins.”

The ePub (short for “electronic publication”) standard was developed by the International Digital Publishing Forum. IDPF is a trade organization of e-book manufacturers, retailers, software developers and publishers that from the dawn of the industry – 1998 – has been working to create an open, one-size-fits-all format. Think of it as the e-book equivalent of the standard 33 1/3 rpm established for long-playing phonograph records and 45 rpm for singles. “Sony will also scrap its proprietary anticopying software in favor of technology from the software maker Adobe that restricts how often e-books can be shared or copied,” writes Stone.

Once Sony switches over to ePub, you’ll be able to read an e-book on any reading device that supports the ePub standard. As Stone points out, the battle that will take place around the ePub flag will involve a host of giants, not the least of which is Apple. So, as you shop for your next (or first) e-book reader it is definitely in your best interests to remember the word “ePub”.

Read Brad Stone’s Sony Plans to Adopt Common Format for E-Books.

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.

Given the hysterical headline of an article on the Guardian.co.uk’s Observer website, either Dan Brown has become a world superpower or the Guardian’s staff has contracted a fatal case of Hyperbolicism, or “Hype” for short. Or maybe they’ve forgotten that the same thing was said about Riding the Bullet, Stephen King’s novella, when it was published originally online in 2000. Anyway, here’s the headline:

Could Dan Brown’s new novel spell the end for the printed word?

And the subheadline:

“Hopes are high for Dan Brown’s sequel to The Da Vinci Code, with an ebook version of The Lost Symbol expected to transform a struggling publishing industry.”

It’s all about the release of Brown’s new thriller, The Lost Symbol, set for release on September 15. The Observer says the print run will be six and a half million. After the over-the-moon nuttiness of the headline I’d be inclined to check that figure. We’re certainly happy to confirm that Brown’s book will be a blockbuster bestseller and we will welcome the e-book edition’s appearance at the top of the format’s bestseller list. We just suspect that the printed book will still be standing when the book’s surge, and the hype, are over.

If there’s a nugget of news in this conflated story it’s that the e-book will be released simultaneously with the print edition. The business wisdom of simultaneous e-book and p-book publication has been fiercely debated with sharply divided opinions expressed by both pro and con supporters.

RC

Is the book business beginning to feel like the movie business? An article by the New York Times‘s Michael Cieply might reinforce the similarities.

Cieply reports that, unlike filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino who landed huge studio deals at the Sundance Film Festival, today’s aspiring young movie makers have got to finance everything, investing in themselves on the speculation that lightning will strike in the form of financing and distribution by a major studio. As more and more authors throw in the towel in despair of landing a book deal with a big publisher, they are publishing their own books and underwriting every step from editorial to publicity.

Are there other ways to compare Cieply’s description of the film industry with the current state of publishing? Let us count them, and to help you, I’ve taken the liberty of extracting some of Cieply’s descriptions and substituting language that might reinforce the idea that New York is a lot closer to L. A. than a five hour flight on the red-eye.

The glory days of independent film [first novels], when hot young directors [authors] like Steven Soderbergh and Mr. Tarantino had studio [publishing] executives tangled in fierce bidding wars at Sundance [Book Expo, Frankfurt] and other celebrity-studded festivals, are now barely a speck in the rearview mirror. And something new, something much odder, has taken their place.

Here is how it used to work: aspiring filmmakers [authors] playing the cool auteur [literary lion] in hopes of attracting the eye of a Hollywood power broker [major New York literary agent].

Here is the new way: filmmakers [authors] doing it themselves — paying for their own distribution [self-publication], marketing films [books] through social networking sites and Twitter blasts [social networking sites and Twitter blasts], putting their work up free on the Web to build a reputation, cozying up to concierges [maitre d's] at luxury hotels [chic publishing watering spots] in film festival cities [New York] to get them to whisper into the right ears.

The economic slowdown and tight credit have squeezed the entertainment [book] industry along with everybody else, resulting in significantly fewer big-studio [Big Publishing] films [bestsellers] in the pipeline and an even tougher road for smaller-budget independent [midlist books]. Independent distribution [Independent publishing] companies are much less likely to pull out the checkbook while many of the big studios [publishing houses] have all but gotten out of the indie film [midlist book] business.

Had enough? Oh, come on, how about one more for the road! This time, you fill in the right words:

“Everyone still dreams there’s going to be a conventional sale to a major studio,” said Kevin Iwashina, once an independent-film specialist with the Creative Artists Agency and now a partner at IP Advisors, a film sales and finance consulting company. But, he said, smart producers and directors are figuring out how to tap the value in projects on their own.

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.

At long last some thirty of Harlan Ellison’s finest books are becoming available in paperback. After releasing them as e-books we worked closely with the author to make sure the print editions reflected his stringent editorial standards.

Recently released are Strange Wine , The Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, Harlan Ellison’s Hornbook, Troublemakers, Partners in Wonder, Stalking the Nightmare and Again, Dangerous Visions. You can see them all on display on Ellison’s E-Reads author page.

Many connoisseurs of Harlan Ellison consider Strange Wine to be his finest collection. Though its contents, individually speaking, are not as high profile as some of his other collections, taken as a whole it is an electrifying book. Here’s an excerpt from an Amazon reviewer with the handle “Penguin Egg”:

It is good news that this book is soon to be republished. It’s about time. I’ve been a fan of Ellison for a quarter of a century and this, by far, is my favourite book of his. If you have never come across Ellison before, you’re in for a treat. A master story-teller, he breaks new ground with practically every story, whether it is in the style of the telling – such as “From A to Z, The Chocolate Alphabet”-, or in the subject matter – “Croatoan.” Whatever the style or the subject matter, the voice of Ellison is unmistakable, -uncompromising, vivid, funny, and perceptive- so that even if an Ellison story did not have his name above it, you would quickly guess who it was. The stories range from the humorous “Mom” to the serious “In Fear of K.” Whatever he writes, he is thoroughly entertaining. What makes this collection of stories different from his others is that this collection has an introduction for every story. With any other writer, this would be an intrusion; but with Ellison, it works, because the man is funny, wise, and entertaining. They are basically a miscellany of anything that Ellison wants to talk about: How he came to write this or that story; where he wrote it; the ideas behind it- and sometimes the connection to the story is tenuous…

And for a delicious appetizer, you won’t want to miss Ellison’s introduction.

RC

The exclamation point in Showstopper! The Breakneck Race to Create Windows NT and the Next Generation at Microsoft is no error. You’ll undoubtedly add a few of your own when you finish the dramatic inside story of the creation of Windows NT by Wall Street Journal reporter G. Pascal Zachary.

Driven by the legendary Bruce Cutler, a picked band of software engineers sacrifices almost everything in their lives to build a new, stable, operating system aimed at giving Microsoft a platform for growth through the next decade of development in the computing business. Comparable in many ways to the Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Soul of a New Machine by Tracy Kidder, Showstopper! gets deep inside the process of software development, the lives and motivations of coders and the pressure to succeed coupled with the drive for originality and perfection that can pull a diverse team together to create a program consisting of many hundreds of thousands of lines of code.

RC
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Some reviews…

Released in mid-1993, Microsoft Corp.’s Windows NT software is arguably the best attempt yet at a universal operating system for personal computers, allowing PC users to open a file, move text or graphics, calculate a row of numbers and run several word processors, spreadsheets and other applications at once. With Windows NT (which stands for New Technology), Microsoft chief executive Bill Gates hopes to extend his dominion, with NT serving as the foundation for everything from desktop systems to corporate information networks. Critics, however, observe that the hardware required for NT is expensive and note that a forthcoming Microsoft operating system, Chicago, may eclipse NT. Wall Street Journal reporter Zachary tells how Microsoft wizard David Cutler and his team of programmers, working intensely for five years, overcame technical snafus, thousands of bugs, workplace skirmishes and collapsing personal lives to create Windows NT. This is both an enlightening primer on the management of complexity and a rare behind-the-scenes look at the cutthroat software wars.
Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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I found this an absolutely riveting read. The book provides a view into a type of company and an approach to software development that is different from anyplace I’ve ever worked. Many things about it have stuck with me–the perspective on testing an operating system that will have to work with every popular software product; the staffing philosophy at Microsoft; the “eating your own dog food” concept (developers and testers had to actually use NT as they were developing it, thus constantly exposing themselves to its flaws). The author does a good job of telling the stories both of the big players and the worker drones. It’s a very personal book about what strikes me as a very impersonal company. It’s one of those rare non-technical books that I recommend to people who are new to software engineering. I read it for the first time when I’d just gotten my first software development job, and again several years later, and I didn’t enjoy it any less the second time around.
Kevin B. Cohen for Amazon

Last month, we completely lost our patience waiting for Plastic Logic to reveal the name of the e-book reader it will be launching next year. “I don’t think the company’s directors realize how frustrating it is for us to refer to the surname but not the given name.” we wrote. “Our frustration has reached the tipping point. We don’t want to wait any more.” So, we invited readers to make up their own name and offered an award for the one we liked the most.

Today we have a winner. Chris Christoffersen (no relation that we’re aware of to the singer-actor, who spells his name Kris Kristofferson) coined the word “Teasle,” a truly creative blend of “Kindle” and “Tease.” Perhaps Plastic Logic hasn’t meant to tease us. Perhaps it truly hasn’t come up with a name. That’s fine. Until they do, we’re calling it The Teasle.

The naming of the gadget is no small matter. Barnes & Noble will be partnering with Plastic Logic to carry its e-books on the newly launched BN.com retail site. So it would be nice, to say the least, if the manufacturers could give BN.com a name to refer to. Meanwhile, for whatever it’s worth, a teasel (note the spelling) is an herbaceous plant. Some teasels have medicinal properties. Others, we are reliably informed, are pests.

If Plastic Logic adopts “Teasle” we expect a fat tip.

Richard Curtis