If for no other reason, e-books are the perfect vehicle for immediately correcting errors in published books. And if the errors are serious enough to damage a person’s reputation or otherwise incur potential legal liability, a prompt correction and withdrawal of the offending text demonstrate the sincere determination of the those who messed up to set the record straight without delay.

Such might be the recourse of Charles Pellegrino and his publisher Henry Holt in expunging material in his otherwise highly acclaimed account of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima, The Last Train From Hiroshima.

According to William J. Broad in the New York Times, a section of the book cites recollections of someone who says he flew in an observation plane accompanying the bomber that released the a-bomb, the Enola Gay. But the man, Joseph Fuoco, “never flew on the bombing run, and he never substituted for James R. Corliss, the plane’s regular flight engineer,” says Corliss’s family. “They, along with angry ranks of scientists, historians and veterans, are denouncing the book and calling Mr. Fuoco an impostor,” writes Broad.

The author of the book “now concedes that he was probably duped” and plans to “rewrite sections of the book for paperback and foreign editions.”

If normal production timelines apply, that means that the paperback might not come out for a year after hardcover publication, or six or nine months if Holt accelerates release of the reprint. Foreign editions? Foreign publishers need to translate the book first, so don’t expect a correct edition to appear overseas for many months as well.

If there was ever a case for e-books, this is it. Pellegrino and his publisher could remove the controversial passages for an e-print and write an apology that might remove not just the insult of the offending passages but also the injury of making the Corliss’s family wait, brood – and, perhaps, call a lawyer. As of this writing, however, there is no e-book edition. It undoubtedly has been “windowed”, the term used by publishers to describe the holding back of an e-book edition until the hardcover has had its run. Though controversial (see Agent Nat Sobel Challenges Publishers to Hold Back E-Prints), windowing is sound strategy for many books and might have been fine for Last Train too had it not been for this alleged error, which if true is embarrassing at the very least but potentially damaging as well.

Holt should consider crash-releasing Last Train in e-book.

Here’s the Times article.

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.

Last fall our piece about Britain’s outrageous libel laws (Can’t Sue for Libel in US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World) got a lot of attention, and perhaps some of the howls of horror it provoked were heard across the pond. “Embarrassed by London’s reputation as ‘a town called sue’ and by unusually stinging criticisms in American courts and legislatures,” writes New York Times‘s sarah Lyall, “British lawmakers are seriously considering rewriting England’s 19th-century libel laws.”

What the beef? “English libel law is the opposite of America’s in many ways,” says Lyall. “In the United States, the plaintiff, or accuser, must prove that the statement in question was false; public officials must also prove that it was made maliciously, with ‘reckless disregard’ for the truth.” Whereas in England, “the burden of proof rests on the defendant, whose statements are presumed false and who has to establish that they are true.”

As a result, authors and publishers have been intimidated from writing anything that might get them hauled into a British court. In one case a handful of copies of an American book made their way into England but that was enough to get the author sued. The costs alone can be ruinous, and damages? Don’t ask! “A protracted case could bankrupt an organization,” said one victim. “Even if a plaintiff is completely in the wrong, they could break you.”

Feel your blood boiling? There’s now hope: read Britain, Long a Libel Mecca, Reviews Laws by Sarah Lyall.

Richard Curtis

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

Google has been characterized by its critics as a one trick pony. Its CEO Eric Schmidt wryly admits it’s true. “You should think of Google as one product,” he says. The product? Customer satisfaction.

That’s the essence of an article by Ken Auletta in the October 12 2009 issue of The New Yorker about the behemoth corporation. Auletta cites some growing pains. We should all have such growing pains! Google’s revenues in 2008 were $21.795 billion, placing it ahead of the gross national product of 90 nations! Four out of every ten dollars spent on online advertising is collected by Google search.

Still, on its way to becoming the first $100 billion corporation in history it has experienced some aches and pains. Chief among these is its shift in its relationships with other giants like Apple and Amazon. For years Google was their ally; now it’s their rival.

As we pointed out recently, Google’s biggest problem is its scale. But is that fatal?

For at least one observer thinks it is. See tomorrow’s posting…

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 Yorker.

A year ago in a posting called Watching Books I wrote,

Reading text on a screen without sound, color, or movement, one develops the uneasy feeling that something is missing. We wonder, Is that all there is? I’m not a psychologist but it seems more than likely that we are bringing to text viewed on screens the same expectations we bring to television, movie and computer screens. Indeed, something is missing! How can we not be disappointed – even, God help us, bored – when these blocks of words fail to stimulate the same intense response as a YouTube video? We are trying to extract a linear experience out of a nonlinear medium

Today the New York Times, in an online feature called “Room for Debate”, began exploring the psychological issues arising out of reading e-books, touching in depth on many of the issues I explored in that first stab at understanding the new medium in which we have all been immersed.

“Is there a difference in the way the brain takes in or absorbs information when it is presented electronically versus on paper?” the Times‘s editors ask. “Does the reading experience change, from retention to comprehension, depending on the medium?”

Participating in the discussion/debate are:

* Alan Liu, English professor
* Sandra Aamodt, author, “Welcome to Your Brain”
* Maryanne Wolf, professor of child development
* David Gelernter, computer scientist
* Gloria Mark, professor of informatics

Does the Brain Like E-Books? is a significant must-read debate that may well affect the way we read in the 21st century.

Richard Curtis

Nicholas Carlson, employing a full complement of fingers and toes to perform his calculations, estimates that “it costs the Times about twice as much money to print and deliver the newspaper over a year as it would cost to send each of its subscribers a brand new Amazon Kindle instead,” according to his posting in The Business Insider. In all fairness to Mr. Carlson, he does say that asking its subscribers to switch to Kindle is not “anything we think the New York Times Company should do.”

If you want to check his math you can take your abacus in hand and click on Printing The NYT Costs Twice As Much As Sending Every Subscriber A Free Kindle but here’s how he arrived at his bottom line. First, using some publicly known financial information, he estimated the Times’s delivery costs at $644 million per year. Then…

“The Kindle retails for $359. In a recent open letter, Times spokesperson Catherine Mathis wrote: ‘We have 830,000 loyal readers who have subscribed to The New York Times for more than two years.’ Multiply those numbers together and you get $297 million — a little less than half as much as $644 million.

And that was before Amazon dropped the price of the Kindle by one sixth to $299, which makes the case for Kindle vs. paper even more cogent. And if that’s not cogent enough for you, Carlson points out that “a source with knowledge of the real numbers tells us we’re so low in our estimate of the Times’s printing costs that we’re not even in the ballpark.”

Carlson’s bottom line? :”As a technology for delivering the news, newsprint isn’t just expensive and inefficient; it’s laughably so.”

Thanks for telling us all this, Mr. Carlson. Now if it’s okay with you, we will now return to our laughably inefficient but utterly informative, entertaining, absorbing and indispensable paper edition of the New York Times.

Richard Curtis

Next time you visit London, if you have an hour or two after visiting London Bridge, Westminster Palace and Big Ben, drop by a solicitor’s office and sue someone for libel. It will more than pay for the cost of your vacation.

When you do, you’ll be participating in the blood sport known as libel tourism, a legal ploy so appalling that victims have described it as a form of terrorism.

What’s it all about? “Unlike in the United States, where plaintiffs have to prove that the defendant’s statement is willfully false and defamatory,” writes Salil Tripathi in Wall Street Journal Europe, “the burden of proof is reversed in Britain. According to U.K. libel laws, the plaintiff has to show only that the statement harms his reputation — which is the case with almost any accusation, true or false. It is the defendant who must then prove that his allegations were not libelous.”

Because of this radical difference between the British (guilty until proven innocent) and American (innocent until proven guilty) approaches to libel, American authors and publishers and their lawyers have deliberately withheld UK publication rights to many books that might give offense to rich and/or powerful persons or entities that might bring a lawsuit in a British court. If you have any doubts that this is a sword hanging over the neck of every author and journalist, some examples will erase them. You can find them in Tripathi’s article or this one in the New York Times, Britain, a destination for “libel tourism” by Doreen Carvajal.

If you’re wondering why I’ve refrained from identifying the plaintiffs it’s because, frankly, I’m afraid of being sued. This blog is read worldwide and it’s all too likely that some litigious bastard who objects to being called – well, a litigious bastard – would take offense and haul me into a British court, tie me up for years and bankrupt me with legal bills (including the plaintiff’s) and damages.

So, you see, this cruel, stupid and toxic provision of English law has done its job on me, just as it will do on you should you venture over the line. And what does “venture over the line” mean? It means that if even a single copy of your US edition finds its way to English soil, you’re potentially liable.

Recently, two New York State officials proposed a bill that would render foreign libel judgments unenforceable “unless,” as it was reported, “the country in which they are made had free speech protections similar to the First Amendment.” And the New York Times ran an editorial supporting such a measure. “If authors believe they are too vulnerable,” the editorial concluded, “they may be discouraged from taking on difficult and important topics, like terrorism financing, or from writing about wealthy and litigious people. That would not only be bad for writers, it would be bad for everyone.”

The citizens of our nation have made terrible sacrifices, include the shedding of their blood, to defend our Constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech. That a foreign country, let alone the very one in which the foundations of democracy were forged, could have a license to reach into our homes and workplaces and deprive us of our most sacred right is intolerable and unconscionable. I wish I could say it is also unimaginable, but in fact this outrage is being perpetrated on our countrymen – on your fellow authors – as I write this. Every writer, agent and publisher organization must combat it. The British laws that foster this disgrace must be repealed. What is the Authors Guild, the American Publishers Association, the Association of Authors’ Representatives, the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN and other rights organizations doing about 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 Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.

King Gillette lives! The spirit of the mogul, who transformed product marketing by giving away the razor and selling the blades, hovered over Amazon’s press conference unveiling the big-screen Kindle DX. There, New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. pledged to subsidize the full price of the jumbo reading device for subscribers committing to long-term subscriptions. The retail price of the DX is $489.00.

We did a little research and learned that a daily subscription to the Times in our area of Manhattan will cost $5.30 per week at current rates. At that rate, we would have to enlist for one year and forty weeks.*

It’s not a bad deal for subscribers – you end up with a Kindle that you can use for many other things besides reading the newspaper. But is it a good one for the Times? Gawker, the snarky media website, doesn’t think so. In fact, Gawker doesn’t think so at all. The site’s Owen Thomas thinks Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos “has managed to scare the press lords into shelling out their precious remaining cash into funding the distribution of his pricey e-reader…” and “…he’s cajoled the gullible likes of Sulzberger into handing him a pile of cash.”

“If he’s such a big believer in supporting journalism,” asks Thomas, “why didn’t Bezos announce he was personally giving away 160,000 Kindles to people who agreed to sign up for a newspaper subscription?”

Well, maybe Bezos never heard of King Gillette.

Read A Bigger Kindle Makes Jeff Bezos Richer and Newspapers Poorer.

RC
*(Of course, the Times would get a discount for buying Kindles in volume; on the other hand, subscribers who commit to long-term subscriptions also get discounts, so the two discounts wash each other out.)

After its latest round of cost-saving reductions, The New York Times may have to change its name to The New York Times Newsletter, and its motto to “All the Skinny That’s Fit to Print”. Bill Keller, the daily’s executive editor, announced the elimination of a number of weekly sections that are much beloved by readers but a luxurious liability for a newspaper fighting for its life. A number of sections have already been merged, such as business and sports (on most days, at least).

The Times‘s Richard Pérez-Peña reports that “The affected sections include Escapes, published on Fridays, and Sunday sections that only readers in the New York metropolitan area receive: City and regional sections named for New Jersey, Long Island, Westchester and Connecticut.” They will be absorbed into a new Sunday section that should slim the paper down. Some say it will be slim enough to slip under your front door. Even now it sometime has the heft of a supermarket circular inserted into a grown-up newspaper from an earlier, happier era.

Furthermore, the Sunday magazine section is ditching its regular back-of-the-book fashion layout, so say goodbye to those fey, leggy mannequins on location in Brazilian favelas clad in nothing but boa constrictors, and male models in garish plaid tuxedos, short-shorts and basketball sneakers biking to their Wall Street management jobs.

But the unkindest cut of all is the elimination of “Escapes” as an autonomous travel section. For years its coverage of faraway places illustrated with photos of exquisite landscapes and local chefs proudly displaying platters of irresistible gourmet specialties have evoked unbearable pangs of wanderlust in the hearts of countless housebound New Yorkers. Mr.Keller, can’t you save “Escapes” and drop “Automobiles”? Screw automobiles, I want to fantasize about living in a rain forest tree house in Costa Rica.

And don’t we feel it for those globetrotting freelance writers whose ranks are to be reduced by 10-15% and who as a result will have to curtail their travel plans? You can expect lots of stories about living in tree houses in, well, Patterson, New Jersey.

RC

Students, your term paper worries may be over. Just submit your topic to Kosmix. It’ll collect and assemble information from the Internet, then “build a sort of multimedia encyclopedia entry on the fly,” writes New York Times‘s Miguel Helft. “For many queries, the results are pretty satisfying and look as if they have been compiled by a human editor, not a computer.”

“Type in ‘Kauai,’ for example, and Kosmix will return a fairly rich page that includes an entry from WikiTravel, a user-created travel site; restaurant recommendations from The New York Times; photographs and videos from services like Flickr and YouTube; audio clips of local music; reviews of guidebooks, bed-and-breakfasts and other services; blog posts and more. It also has top results from Google, and suggests a list of related topics.

Company founders Venky Harinarayan and Anand Rajaraman recognize that the magnitude and complexity of the Internet have made aggregation and integration of information for reports, theses, term papers and the like overwhelming. Enter Kosmix, which Helft points out “has built a huge taxonomy, a set of nearly five million categories on topics from people and locations to car models, music groups and types of cheese.”

The taxonomy includes millions of connections mapping the relationship among those categories. That allows Kosmix to recognize that Kauai is not only a place, but also a popular travel destination, a tropical island and a beach resort. Based on those and other categories, it chooses the types of content sources most relevant for a query on Kauai and organizes them by using a proprietary algorithm. It draws that content not only from Web sites, but also from more than 1,000 specialized Web services, search sites that focus on single topics, and databases connected to the Internet.”

Helft thinks Kosmix can give Google a run for its money. The founding team is battle-tested, having already developed a number of successful services demonstrating that their system works. Kosmix may be the icing on their cake. Says one of the partners, “With the explosion of information on the Web, it is very hard to have an editorial function with only humans. We are giving you an automated editor for any topic.”

Just for fun, I visited the Kosmix website, which is (per the website’s masthead) in “Beta-ish,” and typed in ‘literary agent”. In a few seconds it spat out a succinct description. However, it seems to have been taken in its entirety from Wikipedia. There were links to Wikipedia and Google in case I wanted to learn more. I had expected Kosmix’s definition to be original or at least more of a true synthesis. If I wanted to get my definition from Wikipedia or Google, I didn’t need to take an extra step visiting Kosmix. Did I say term paper worries are over? Students, if you get caught quoting Wikipedia verbatim, proceed straight to Flunk City.

When I entered some other test words in the Search box, cookies popped up that were weirdly far from what I was looking for, and they disappeared before I had a chance to explore them.

For all that, Kosmix is an original concept and we look forward to seeing the next iteration when the Beta-ish wrinkles have been ironed out.

RC

My first encounter with the term “fair use” scarred me for life.

I was an apprentice literary agent and one of the agency’s authors had quoted, without permission, a single line of a poem composed by a late distinguished man of letters. We received a major lawyer letter from the poet’s estate threatening to sue our author’s sorry behind into fine fragments for appropriating a copyrighted work without permission or payment.

I was instructed by my boss to tell the lawyer that the author had every right to publish the line on the grounds of the doctrine of fair use. And where, we asked, did this lawyer get off claiming that a single line of verse violated the doctrine? Whereupon I received an even more vitriolic letter threatening to name me and my boss in what would be the mother of all infringement lawsuits. The gist of the lawyer’s position was something like this: “If you put a thousand authors in a room for a thousand years, none of them would remotely be able to write that deathless line.” And you know what? I think he was right. That line was as inspired as Robert Frost’s “Whose woods these are I think I know” or Dylan Thomas’s “Do not go gentle into that good night.”

The flap was settled with a generous permission fee and the author’s behind lived to sit another day.

I was reminded of this incident by an article by Brian Stelter in the New York Times about the thin line that bloggers walk when they extensively quote other people’s work. “Some media executives are growing concerned that the increasingly popular curators of the Web that are taking large pieces of the original work — a practice sometimes called scraping — are shaving away potential readers and profiting from the content,” writes Stelter.

Though reputable bloggers are usually unstinting in linking and giving credit to the writers and publications whose work they quote, the revenue accruing to the quoted publications is negligible, even when the blogsite is a high-traffic one such as Huffington Post or Google News that can be expected to send a certain number of visitors to the original source. Now, those original sources are getting cranky about underwriting the salaries of editors and journalists, generating original story ideas, conducting research and fact checking and legal diligence only to see bloggers step in and collect the credit, traffic and revenue. Says Stelter:

“Copyright infringement lawsuits directed at bloggers and other online publishers seem to be on the rise. David Ardia, the director of the Citizen Media Law Project, said his colleagues kept track of 16 such suits in 2007. In 2004 and 2005, it monitored three such suits each year. And newspapers sometimes send cease-and-desist orders to sites that they believe have crossed the line.”

As my author learned to his regret, US Copyright Law does not define fair use in terms of words, lines, sentences, paragraphs or pages. The test is more amorphous and calls on a variety of qualitative and quantitative tests that are not consistent or dependable. In the ambiguous universe of Fair Use, the first eleven words of Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem “Howl” (“I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness”) may carry as much legal weight as hundreds of words lifted from a tome of lesser distinction.

Stelter’s article, Copyright Challenge for Sites That Excerpt, examines efforts to create a conduct code that navigates between legal, responsible citation and unabashed scraping. One important criterion cited by Arianna Huffington is whether value is added by bloggers to texts they cite in their columns and comments. If a blogger can spin borrowed material in a way that creates fresh insights, the way a jazz musician riffs on someone else’s tune, that spin may arguably be defensible. On the other hand, in Huffington’s code verbatim appropriation without enhancement would be harder to justify.

Of the 1256 words in Mr. Stelter’s Times article, I have used 101. I have cited him and the New York Times as the source, and linked to his article. Have I fairly used his material? Have I added value to his work? Or will I be getting a lawyer letter from the newspaper’s legal counsel? Do I deserve to? And those lines from Frost and Thomas? Is my own behind in jeopardy for having quoted them without permission or fee?

Your guess is as good as mine. And that’s as good a definition of fair use as any I’ve heard.

Richard Curtis