After reporting on a remarkable dialogue between blogger C. Max Magee and a book pirate we received a comment from a person named jap [sic] claiming to be a pirate too.

His posting elicited a host of comments from readers ranging from vituperative (“Pirate is too sexy a term. What you are is a petty thief”) to respectful (“You have me intrigued, Jap. I would suggest you are not a typical pirate…”) to grudging agreement (“In a world without pirating, a majority of people would just not buy the book. So yeah, I definitely think the impact is overrated (or over-agonized about.”)

From his cover of anonymity jap responded to many of these comments and amplified on his original contention that “You have your morality and I have mine.” Though we deplore piracy and are reluctant to offer a forum for its practitioners, we happen to think that it’s sometimes better to listen to our adversaries than ignore them, however diabolical their reasoning may seem. This is especially true when they offer cogent suggestions about where we should be focusing our efforts to deal with piracy.

I invited “jap” to write an article for us but he declined. However, in the hopes that we can benefit from his observations, below are a few that we have gleaned from his communications. We will do our best to accept his airy reassurance: “Don’t worry: the book business is not in danger.”

Richard Curtis
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*You have your morality and I have mine. It is perfectly okay for me to download books (or movies btw). It was also okay to copy or print books for everybody before 1710 (when the first copyright law was passed), or buying that “unauthorized by author” book…

*Probably you are thinking just now “but it is unlawful!!” Is it necessary to explain that law and moral[ity] are not the same thing?

*Morality aside, it is probably of your interest to know that we the ebook pirates do buy books. I understand you are worried for your business but don’t worry: the book business is not in danger.

*I have never read most of the books I have downloaded. One of the downloads was a file containing several thousands of books. I have also bought several of the books I previously downloaded and read. Other books I did read I would never buy them. There are also books that I did read and I will buy as soon as I find them in a bookstore. I have also bought books that I know are easy to find and download. In fact buying books is a great pleasure for me.

*Why do many people pirate? I think the answer is different for each person. In my case, I think and I feel that that Internet is a great tool to get books, tons of books. It is the greatest library and the greatest bookstore at same time.

*DRM is a Bad Idea. It decreases sales, and believe me, it has never stopped pirates.

*There is a difference between stealing and downloading. If I steal a printed book at Best Buy, Best Buy becomes poorer. If I download a Dan Brown’s book, Dan Brown does not become poorer.

*Part of my money went to Dan Brown’s pockets. If you are interested in business, instead of your morality, the question is why many people go to library, and download books AND buy books. For centuries books have been bought by the very same people that go to libraries.

*I am a typical pirate. Most pirates never upload works, neither sell them, just download. Also most pirates buy content in a way or other. I for instance download movies but go to movie theatres. In fact many pirates are high spending people. And many music pirates are buying CDs, the real problem of CD market is that CD is becoming obsolete. Digital sales (iTunes and alikes) are speedily increasing. Hulu is not yet available in my country but I am willing to try it as soon as possible,

*Do you really think a guy who is scanning a book and uploading it is trying to avoid buying it at Fictionwise? That’s nonsense.

*How is not paying for a book in a library wrong? How is downloading for free a 1922 book (public domain) right but a 1923 book wrong?

*Until 1978 copyright term was a maximum of 56 years since the work was first published. Nowadays is 70 years since author’s death. If I download a 1950 book, is that wrong or right?

*The above terms are for United States. If I live in a country where a 1989 book is in public domain, is it wrong to download it?

*Morality? Copyright is (sometimes) useful, not moral.

*Btw I prefer to buy O’Reilly ebooks, they are not DRM’d.

*It is not possible to protect copyright. You can fight for-profit piracy because you can always follow the money and because any seller (lawful or not) needs to offer his product to public. You cannot successfully fight not-for-profit piracy because it is possible to do it so privately as desired. 10 years of RIAA prosecution did get nothing.

*However may be I can be useful for your business. I am not just a pirate, I am also a customer. Sometimes I pirate books, sometimes I buy them. Obviously, if you get to maximize the times I buy then you are increasing your sales.

*As I said DRM is a Bad Idea. When people buy ebooks, they want to do things like read that book on any present and future device. So many people break the DRM (it is easy) but breaking the DRM is unlawful, so your customers have paid to be outlaws. This is not the kind of thing that discourage piracy.

*Everytime I have bought a DRMed book I broke the DRM for the above reason and I did feel fooled because I paid but I was out of law. Just imagine which is the effect on your law abiding customers. They get a product that is worse than what I get when I pirate. Do you want to reduce piracy? Sell your books sans DRM.

*My best hint for you: don’t obsess with piracy, focus on selling.

*How did I read this article? It is not because it is an article about piracy, but because it is an article of this blog, and I usually read this blog because it is a good blog about the book world.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough’s Song of Sorcery is another light-hearted contemporary fantasy adventure that will please the author’s many fans. Colin Songsmith sings a song to an old witch who takes an unlikely revenge. The witch’s granddaughter rescues him from the dire threat of being eaten alive by the cat. She hears the song, which happens to concern her recently married sister and a gypsy. Convinced that she has to save her sister, she takes the minstrel, the cat and her magical resources to Rowan Castle. The story is rich with descriptive details of setting and encounters with magical and fantastic creatures such as a talking cat, a lovesick dragon, and a bear prince. The characters speak in contemporary slang which plays nicely against the traditional fantastic settings.

Elizabeth Ann Scarborough was born March 23, 1947, and lives in the Puget Sound area of Washington. She won a Nebula Award in 1989 for her novel The Healer’s War, and has written more than a dozen other novels. She has collaborated with Anne McCaffrey, best-known for creating the Dragonriders of Pern, to produce the Petaybee Series and the Acorna Series.

The Master Fiddler

Naïve Jacquie Grey thought that her life would just work itself out. But now that she’s stuck in Tombstone, Arizona without a dime, she’s beginning to rethink that strategy. Her vulnerability and gullible nature make Jacquie the perfect mark for handsome Choya Barnett, who can’t help but use her innocence to his advantage. Now that Jacquie’s body and soul are laid bare, will Choya regret his cruelty?

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The Ivory Cane

From the moment they met in the streets of San Francisco, Sabrina had mixed feelings about him. Bay Cameron was strong and noble, but insufferably rude. Moments after he saved her life, he had insulted her pride–an unforgivable crime as far as she was concerned. Sabrina Lane was blind, but she could easily see that this man brought out her most passionate impulses. She might even fall in love with him–if she could stand his company.

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In Sweet Promise, Erica Wakefield’s torrid past is behind her–she has finally escaped her self-destructive ways. She knows that she has found the perfect man: handsome, rich and completely in love with her. Forest is exactly what Erica’s millionaire father wants for his beautiful daughter. So why is this Texas spitfire still thinking about her estranged husband, Rafael de la Torres? Wasn’t the Mexican lover just a ploy to get Daddy’s attention? When Erica has to find Rafael and make him sign the divorce papers, she runs the risk that he will reignite the passion that smolders in her memory?

In late 2006, students at a school in Turin, Italy filmed and then uploaded a video to Google Video that showed them bullying an autistic schoolmate. The video was totally reprehensible and we took it down within hours of being notified by the Italian police. We also worked with the local police to help identify the person responsible for uploading it and she was subsequently sentenced to 10 months community service by a court in Turin, as were several other classmates who were also involved. In these rare but unpleasant cases, that’s where our involvement would normally end.

But in this instance, a public prosecutor in Milan decided to indict four Google employees —David Drummond, Arvind Desikan, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes (who left the company in 2008). The charges brought against them were criminal defamation and a failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. To be clear, none of the four Googlers charged had anything to do with this video. They did not appear in it, film it, upload it or review it. None of them know the people involved or were even aware of the video’s existence until after it was removed.

Nevertheless, a judge in Milan today convicted 3 of the 4 defendants — David Drummond, Peter Fleischer and George Reyes — for failure to comply with the Italian privacy code. All 4 were found not guilty of criminal defamation. In essence this ruling means that employees of hosting platforms like Google Video are criminally responsible for content that users upload. We will appeal this astonishing decision because the Google employees on trial had nothing to do with the video in question. Throughout this long process, they have displayed admirable grace and fortitude. It is outrageous that they have been subjected to a trial at all.

But we are deeply troubled by this conviction for another equally important reason. It attacks the very principles of freedom on which the Internet is built. Common sense dictates that only the person who films and uploads a video to a hosting platform could take the steps necessary to protect the privacy and obtain the consent of the people they are filming. European Union law was drafted specifically to give hosting providers a safe harbor from liability so long as they remove illegal content once they are notified of its existence. The belief, rightly in our opinion, was that a notice and take down regime of this kind would help creativity flourish and support free speech while protecting personal privacy. If that principle is swept aside and sites like Blogger, YouTube and indeed every social network and any community bulletin board, are held responsible for vetting every single piece of content that is uploaded to them — every piece of text, every photo, every file, every video — then the Web as we know it will cease to exist, and many of the economic, social, political and technological benefits it brings could disappear.

These are important points of principle, which is why we and our employees will vigorously appeal this decision.

A few years ago a pair of reporters for a now-defunct publication called Inside ran an interview with three men from the old world of publishing who were in the process of reinventing themselves.

The article was titled “Publishing’s Grumpy Old Visionaries” and the three were depicted as “wundermenschen of the brave new book world”. One of the three was former Random House editorial director Jason Epstein. Another was literary agent John Brockman. To understand my reluctance to reveal the third, you’ll have to click on the article. (And incidentally, one of the two reporters was none other than Sara Nelson, who went on to become editor in chief of Publishers Weekly.)

Though their projections differ in a number of particulars, the Grumpy Old Visionaries accurately foretold the place where we are now and the rock-strewn path that led us here.

The three ageless hotshots are still working their visions and walking both sides of the publishing street – the dusty, decaying old one and the gleaming but bewildering new one. One of these three caballeros, Epstein, has tried to fix his coordinates in both past and future in a reflective article in the New York Review of Books. Like the rest of us he has mixed emotions about the two worlds but he lets his predilection show in this poignant summing-up:

“I must declare my bias. My rooms are piled from floor to ceiling with books so that I have to think twice about where to put another one. If by some unimaginable accident all these books were to melt into air leaving my shelves bare with only a memorial list of digital files left behind I would want to melt as well for books are my life. I mention this so that you will know the prejudice with which I celebrate the inevitability of digitization as an unimaginably powerful, but infinitely fragile, enhancement of the worldwide literacy on which we all—readers and nonreaders—depend.”

Read his elegant and elegiac essay here.

RC

Even if the iPad is all it’s hyped to be, it will be only as good as the wireless that provides content to it. And that has a lot of people worried. “Carrier networks aren’t set to handle five million tablets sucking down 5 gigabytes of data each month,” says Philip Cusick, an analyst at Macquarie Securities. “It’s only going to get worse as streaming video gets more prevalent.”

Cusick’s dour assessment is quoted in a New York Times article by Jenna Wortham describing the strain that the iPad and other tablets will add to a cellphone network that is already laboring. “America’s advanced cellphone network is already beginning to be bogged down by smartphones that double as computers, navigation devices and e-book readers. Cellphones are increasingly being used as TVs, which hog even more bandwidth. They can also transmit video, allowing for videoconferencing on cellphones.”

Just how heavy is the anticipated traffic? Wortham cites an AT&T executive who reports “an unprecedented increase in wireless data use of nearly 7,000 percent since late 2006.”

No wonder. Wortham reminds us that “An hour of browsing the Web on a mobile phone consumes roughly 40 megabytes of data. Streaming tunes on an Internet radio station like Pandora draws down 60 megabytes each hour. Watching a grainy YouTube video for the same period of time causes the data consumption to nearly triple. And watching a live concert or a sports event will consume close to 300 megabytes an hour.”

What does that mean in practical terms? Well, let’s put it this way: make sure you have lots of things to occupy yourself with while gazing at your progress bar.

Here’s Wortham’s article in its entirety.

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.

Today marks the publication date of a new Dan Simmons novel so astonishing it’s almost impossible for me to articulate it – and I have spent several decades articulating the achievements of my client Dan Simmons.

The books is Black Hills, published by Reagan Arthur Books, an imprint of Little, Brown. Here is an excerpt of a starred review from Publishers Weekly:

Hugo-winner Simmons, the author of such acclaimed space operas as Hyperion and Olympos as well as Drood, an intriguing riff on Dickens’s unfinished last novel, displays the impressive breath of his imagination in this historical novel with a supernatural slant. In the author’s retelling of Custer’s last stand at the Little Big Horn in 1876, the dying general’s ghost enters the body of Paha Sapa, a 10-year-old Sioux warrior who’s able to see both the past and the future by touching people. The action leaps around in time to illustrate the arc of Sapa’s life, but focuses on 1936, when, as a septuagenarian, he plots to blow up the monuments on Mount Rushmore in time for a visit to the site by FDR to atone for his role in constructing the stone likenesses. In his ability to create complex characters and pair them with suspenseful situations, Simmons stands almost unmatched among his contemporaries.

E-Reads carries two vintage Dan Simmons novels, Song of Kali and Phases of Gravity.

Richard Curtis

Here is Simmons himself to introduce his book to you.

Are you as weary as we are of doomsayers sounding the death knell of print books? The latest comes via a blog on Huffington Post by Dan Agin, editor in chief of the online journal ScienceWeek. You would think that with a Ph.D. in biological psychology and three decades of lab research experience in neurobiology, Agin would be smarter than to make categorical statements like “Requiescant in pace, big print publishing.The run is finished.” Aside from his solecism (it’s Requiescat), he has buried print books and declared Game Over.

Agin has made the mistake that so many other Print-is-Deaders have done, condemning the medium when what we really hate is the system that supports it. We’ve said it many times but it bears reiteration: there is nothing wrong with printed books – just that the way they are distributed, which is appallingly stupid and wasteful. But does that mean print is finished? Not even close. However, Agin is entitled to his opinion and goodness knows there are a lot of people who share it.

What surprises us, though, is how willing this credentialed neurobiologist is to exalt Kindle and other e-readers when there is an impressive body of scientific evidence suggesting that reading on a screen may not be all that it’s cracked up to be. Some researchers have suggested that readers – especially young ones – are easily distracted by e-books, fail to immerse themselves the way they do in print, and do not retain information as well as they do with words on paper. In a posting last fall called The Medium is the Screen. The Message is Distraction, we quoted Sandra Aamodt, former editor in chief of Nature Neuroscience: “People read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent… Distractions abound online — costing time and interfering with the concentration needed to think about what you read.”

And Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development at Tufts and author of Proust and the Squid: The Story and Science of the Reading Brain, points out that “No one really knows the ultimate effects of an immersion in a digital medium on the young developing brain.” But “my greatest concern is that the young brain will never have the time (in milliseconds or in hours or in years) to learn to go deeper into the text after the first decoding, but rather will be pulled by the medium to ever more distracting information, sidebars, and now, perhaps, videos (in the new vooks).”

Read Agin’s article, Kindle Armageddon: How the Publishing Industry Is Slitting Its Own Throat, and form your own opinion.

Richard Curtis

SAMPLE TAKEDOWN NOTICE (from Scribd)

Pursuant to 17 USC 512(c)(3)(A), this communication serves as a statement that:

1. I am [the exclusive rights holder [the duly authorized representative of the exclusive rights holder] for [title of copyrighted material being infringed upon, along with any identifying material such as ISBNs, publication dates, etc -- or, if the material is a web page, the URL];
2. These exclusive rights are being violated by material available upon your site at the following URL(s): [URLs of infringing material];
3. I have a good faith belief that the use of this material in such a fashion is not authorized by the copyright holder, the copyright holder’s agent, or the law;
4. Under penalty of perjury in a United States court of law, I state that the information contained in this notification is accurate, and that I am authorized to act on the behalf of the exclusive rights holder for the material in question;
5. I may be contacted by the following methods (include all): [physical address, telephone number, and email address];

I hereby request that you remove or disable access to this material as it appears on your service in as expedient a fashion as possible. Thank you.

Regards,
[your full legal name]

Today marks the laydown* of Black Magic Sanction, the eighth novel in Kim Harrison’s bestselling Hollows series and its heroine Rachel Morgan, whom Publishers Weekly describes as a “delectable magical jack of all trades.”

BlogCritics has this to say:

“For those fans who have followed the first seven books of the series, beginning with Dead Witch Walking, this one is a must-have. Black Magic Sanction begins a new story arc for main character Rachel Morgan. We see her grow a bit and come into her own, accepting that even though she has smut on her aura and can kindle demon magic, she is the one who is control of her own decisions. She has known love and loss and has escaped death more times than one would have ever thought possible, and yet she is still standing on her own two feet, a little wiser and perhaps stronger because of all that she has been through.”

Here’s a link to Kim’s Amazon author page. She’s pictured on the left in one of her favorite, um, haunts.

We wish Kim luck and hope Rachel Morgan doesn’t get trampled by her fans when the bookstore doors open.
RC

*For those who are unfamiliar with the term, a laydown is publishingese for a highly focused distribution of a much anticipated book. Most books have a “pub date” – the date on which it may be sold in stores. But few have release dates that are rigidly restricted to maximize the impact and minimize spoilers. Think Harry Potter on sale at midnight.