As the press release from the publishers quoted above notes, Diglot Books were able to use iTunes to offer their ebook instead. Some might say this is a case of out of the frying pan into the fire, since in the past Apple too has shown itself inflexible in terms of what it will and won't accept. Had Apple refused to carry the title for whatever reason, it's arguable that the Cornish language, still struggling to re-establish itself after dying out a couple of hundred years ago, would have suffered as a result of this lack of access to the main ebook distributors.

Promoting Cornish may not be high on everyone's list of priorities, but Amazon's refusal to publish the first ebook in the language provides another worrying example of how it is failing to use its increasing global power responsibly.

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Amid the seemingly endless debates today about the future of reading, there remains one salient, yet often overlooked fact: Reading isn’t only a matter of our brains; it’s something that we do with our bodies.

To think about the future of reading means, then, to think about the long history of how touch has shaped reading and, by extension, our sense of ourselves while we read.

The original Kindle Fire

At this moment, he tells us, “I had no wish to read more and no need to do so. For in an instant, as I came to the end of the sentence, it was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.” Augustine closes the book, marking his place with his finger, and goes to tell his friend Alypius about his experience. His conversion is complete.

Nothing is more suspect today than the book’s continued identity of being “at hand.” The spines, gatherings, threads, boards, and folds that once gave a book its shapeliness, that fit it to our hands, are being supplanted by the increasingly fine strata of new reading devices, integrated into vast woven systems of connection. If books are essentially vertebral, contributing to our sense of human uniqueness that depends upon bodily uprightness, digital texts are more like invertebrates, subject to the laws of horizontal gene transfer and nonlocal regeneration. Like jellyfish or hydra polyps, they always elude our grasp in some fundamental sense. What this means for how we read—and how we are taken hold of by what we read—is still far from clear.

For Augustine, the book’s closedness—that it could be grasped as a totality—was integral to its success in generating transformative reading experiences. Its closedness was the condition of the reader’s conversion. Digital texts, by contrast, are radically open in their networked form. They are marked by a very weak sense of closure. Indeed, it is often hard to know what to call them (e-books, books, texts, or just documents) without any clear sense of the material differences between them.

• Riding a bike today isn't nearly as real as it was, what with not having to worry about your crotchal region and forearms being pounded mercilessly by the combination of solid rubber tires, no suspension system and a lack of decent pavement.
  
• Driving a car lacks the coarse physicality of driving a team of horses across dusty plains in search of a Slurpee and a pack of smokes.
• Watching a movie isn't nearly as "real" as watching a good old fashioned play, where actors were actual, physical human beings close enough to touch and/or interrupt with an ill-timed coughing fit/incoming call.
• For that matter, making an outgoing call is simply a matter of pressing some fake buttons (or simply mashing a thumb on a fake face in the Contact list). Our forearms and dialing finger have atrophied from under-use going all the way back to the days when friends with the most 0's in their numbers got the fewest calls.
• Today's cold scientific medical community, with its beeping machinery and wires everywhere can never be as real as it was in the past when the common cold was treated with a combination of leeches, heroin and a full frontal lobotomy.
  
• Firing up your local newspaper's website will never be as real as paging through the paper version, admiring the ink stains on your fingers and the box scores informing you that the game ended after press time. The website also can't offer you the physical pain of multiple scratches (picked up while retrieving the paper from your overgrown rose bush) or multiple bite wounds (picked up while retrieving the paper from your neighbor's Rottweiler-infested backyard).
• Nuking a quick meal for the kids? Get over yourself. Real people start their own fires from scratch, by doing whatever it is that Boy Scouts do to earn the "Firestarter" badge. And that Healthy Choice meal? Better get right to slaughtering your own flavorless chicken and growing some equally flavorless rice to accompany it.
• Writing an email can't possibly compare to the physical purity of placing quill to parchment and hand-scratching a lengthy URL onto it, along with "Yo, Ted. Check thiſ out."
• Buying stuff with a credit card online vs. biting gold pieces into "bits" at the trading post, online classes vs. sleeping through Philosophy in an uncomfortable chair, and etc. ad nauseaum.

As I begin to read, the kids begin to lean into me. Our bodies assume positions of rest, the book our shared column of support. No matter what advertisers say, this could never be true of the acrobatic screen. As we gradually sink into the floor, and each other, our minds are freed to follow their own pathways, unlike the prescribed pathways of the Web. We read and we drift. “The words of my book nothing,” writes Walt Whitman, “the drift of it everything.”

I've been buried in a book deadline for all of October, and haven't been paying much attention to anything else. When I finally took some time to catch up reading email, I noticed I had many authors (more than twenty) contacting me because their Amazon reviews were disappearing. Some were the ones they wrote. Some were for their books. One author told me that reviews her fans had written--fans that were completely unknown to her--had been deleted.

I took a look at the reviews I'd written, and saw more than fifty of them had been removed, namely reviews I did of my peers. I don't read reviews people give me, but I do keep track of numbers and averages, and I've also lost a fair amount of reviews.

My reviews followed all of Amazon's guidelines, and had received hundreds of helpful votes. They informed customers, and they helped sell books. They represented a significant time investment on my part, and they were honest and accurate and fully disclosed my relationships with the author I reviewed if I happened to know them. And these reviews were deleted without warning or explanation.

Obviously Amazon can do whatever it wants to on its site. It isn't up to me to dictate policy. It's your company, your rules, and I fully respect that. But I believe Jeff Bezos is very much about treating customers fairly, and I've heard it said many times that Amazon considers its authors to be valuable customers. So you should know that I'm just one of dozens of authors who are saddened by this, and those are just the ones who have emailed me.

The community you're trying hard to nurture is upset by your actions. They feel those actions are unwarranted and harmful.

Please express our disappointment in Amazon to anyone who needs hear it, and let them know I'll be blogging about it. People are seriously disappointed in how Amazon handled this. It was a knee-jerk, inappropriate reaction to a ridiculous case of unjustified moral panic, and a Big Fail.

The settlement acknowledges the rights and interests of copyright-holders. US publishers can choose to make available or choose to remove their books and journals digitized by Google for its Library Project. Those deciding not to remove their works will have the option to receive a digital copy for their use.

Apart from the settlement, US publishers can continue to make individual agreements with Google for use of their other digitally-scanned works.

• Guaranteed end-of-term buy-back of the custom text (dollar amount to be announced next week); they want to take it out of circulation.
• Provision (free) of print copies of the Stokstad text (which contains the vast majority of missing images) to all students who have purchased the reader, to use as a print-based cross-reference; these would be the relevant volumes of the portable version of Stokstad (much easier to carry) – details on how this will roll out next week.

Publisher’s Weekly is reporting the Author’s Guild, publishing’s own rearguard Luddites, is now objecting to the services provided by 1DollarScan.

1DollarScan offers a cheap book scanning service. You mail them the book and they scan it and email you the PDF. Their process usually results in a destroyed book, so it isn’t of much use for rare and valuable books. But it does offer an opportunity to get an ebook for a title that might not be available digitally.

According to the Author’s Guild, what 1DollarScan is doing is illegal. PW reached out to Author’s Guild executive director Paul Aiken, and this is what he said: “If the information on its website is accurate, this is a copyright infringement service. Their fair use defense is laughable.”

I love it when someone in power spouts off about topics they clearly don’t understand, and Paul proceeded to dig himself a deeper hole: “There are differences between digitization projects of 1DollarScan and Google and HathiTrust, but they share this: each is subverting the author’s fundamental right to choose whether or not to make a work available digitally, and under what terms. Though it makes sense for most authors to enter the digital book market, digitization has clear risks. It’s not up to unlicensed third parties to choose whether to take those risks with an author’s work.”

What’s more, I seriously doubt that any copyright infringement suit against 1DollarScan will succeed. A basic reading of the website will tell you that the customer gives up the original book in order to get the PDF. As I see it, to show that a copy was made you’d have to show the judge the original book as well as the PDF. That’s going to be a little hard, given that the original book was likely destroyed as part of being scanned.

I don’t claim to be a lawyer, but I will bet dollars to donuts that so long as 1DollarScan maintains a process that’s one to one it’s going to be rather hard to convince most judges that they’re committing copyright infringement. But more importantly, it’s going to be hard to convince most readers... After all, no one would blink if the reader did it themselves. How could a service that does the exact same thing be illegal?

Yeah. That sounds about right. 

"It all started with Scam School Book 2 – Brian’s magic book," Justin said. "He found out as he was pushing that book that the top ten in iTunes was all erotic fiction. Even to the point where established authors, like Janet Evanovich, couldn’t break into the top five of the iBooks store—because of all the erotic fiction that was capitalizing on Shades of Grey. And he thought—we could do that!"

Justin said, "It’s a hoax in that we are not erotic fiction writers. We don't genuinely think it’s any good. But I will stand behind our product that it delivers what we believe to be the most important component in this genre: sex."

And the book does deliver. Though it has over 1,000 user reviews, only one of them calls out the hoax. "If you look at it, right now," Justin said, "There’s only one comment that says it’s a joke. One review says: Don’t pay money for this. It’s what they want."

Users are the content creators today – so they made the listeners of their podcast the authors.

The Internet Archive is now offering over 1,000,000 torrents including our live music concerts, the Prelinger movie collection, the librivox audio book collection, feature films, old time radio, lots and lots of books, and all new uploads from our patrons into Community collections (with more to follow).

It's a clever idea, but I have a couple of problems with it. One is that this seems like a waste of resources: a book is printed and bound, with all that this implies in terms of energy, but at the end you have only blank pages. Yes, you could write on them, but how many people would do that? Alternatively, you could recycle it, but that uses even more resources to produce basic paper pulp.

I'm also troubled by the pressure the vanishing ink implicitly puts on readers. The idea that you must finishing reading a book within a set time or otherwise you'll have lost the opportunity is hardly conducive to enjoyment. It smacks rather of the classroom, where teachers tell you to finish a book by a certain date, with the justification that the experience will be good for you.

It seems to me that a much better idea would be to give away representative works as ebooks -- with no pressure that they must be read by a certain date. There's minimal waste of resources, since electrons don't cost much to deliver. And best of all, if you really like the book, you can give a copy to your friends in order to share the pleasure (provided there's no stupid DRM to stop you.)

Surely that's the best way of encouraging people to read new authors -- or try out new creations in general: getting those who already enjoy something to pass it on to people they know with the powerful added ingredient of a personal recommendation. No clever tricks involving vanishing ink can compete with something as strong as that.

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As far as I can tell, nobody’s flipped it around and tried to commission a musician to play for fans. Most bands already play corporate events and private parties. If fans collectively raise the same amount of money, why not play a house show for them instead? For fans, it’d be a once-in-a-lifetime experience to see an artist they love in an intimate setting. For musicians, it’d pay well without the malaise that comes from playing the Intel holiday party.

The source of that massive fall-off at the midpoint is seemingly simple: all books published in the U.S. in 1922 or earlier are in the public domain. What's immediately apparent from this graph is the fact that copyright is limiting the public's access to older works—but why and how, exactly? The answer lies in the reality of what a copyright is really worth, commercially, and how long it retains that value—and it sheds light on another problem with copyright law.

To better understand this, we can look to some earlier study from William Patry in his book Moral Panics and the Copyright Wars. For works created between 1923 and 1963, creators or publishers had to register to receive copyright protection for 28 years, and could then renew for another 28. Patry looked at data from 1958/59, and saw that in every medium except film, the majority of creators didn't bother to renew their copyright registrations:

If an author or publisher didn't renew the copyright on a book, it means they didn't think they could make any more money with it. The monopoly of copyright had lost its value—so much so that it was worth less than the time it takes to submit a form. But, as Heald's graph shows us, that doesn't mean the work itself has lost value, because lots of publishers clearly want to publish pre-1923 public domain books. This is something most copyright supporters ignore: entering the public domain can actually renew the value of art, and can (and does) stimulate the economy by allowing others to exploit additional commercial value from a work beyond what was possible under copyright. The commercial usefulness of a monopoly on a book has a shorter shelf-life than the monopoly actually granted by copyright law. Based on Patry's findings, that shelf life is somewhere under 28 years, otherwise more people would have renewed their registration—but copyright lasts much longer than 28 years. Thus you get the giant gulf on Heald's chart: in between the pre-1923 public domain books and the books that are new enough to still be actively sold, there are several decades of titles that are no longer worth anything to their rightsholders, but can't be offered by anyone else because they are still effectively under copyright.

Yes, just effectively—not actually. As you may have noticed, there seems to be a contradiction here: if the majority of copyright registrations went un-renewed, then the majority of books published between 1923 and 1963 have lapsed into the public domain alongside the books from 1922 and earlier, so the drop-off in Heald's chart should be much, much smaller. This is not a conflict in the data, it's a symptom another massive and entirely separate problem with copyright law which I discussed in a recent post: the difficulty of determining a work's status.

The fact is, the majority of 1923-63 books are indeed in the public domain because they weren't renewed, but there's only one way to know this for sure: checking the records held by the Copyright Office. None of the records from that period have been digitized yet, so the only way to check them is by actually going to Washington and visiting the physical card catalogue, or paying a researcher to do it for you. Obviously this added effort and expense drastically limits the appeal of these suddenly-not-so-public domain works—and as the numbers from Amazon demonstrate, it's having a very real effect. Publishers are clearly eager to offer public domain titles, but are only comfortable doing so when the lack of copyright is guaranteed. All those later works are effectively removed from the public domain, preventing economic activity and making them hard for people to obtain.

Now, of course, neither registration nor renewal is required: everyone is granted a copyright on everything they create, lasting until long after their death, despite clear evidence that the value of a commercial monopoly almost always expires in a fraction of that time. Sometime in the future, someone is going to reprise Heald's graph, and that gulf of forgotten works that benefit nobody is going to be a whole lot bigger.

Recently, PayPal gave online publishers and booksellers, including BookStrand.com, Smashwords, and eXcessica, an ultimatum: it would close their accounts and refuse to process all payments unless they removed erotic books containing descriptions of rape, incest, and bestiality. The result would severely restrict the public's access to a wide range of legal material, could drive some companies out of business, and deprive some authors of their livelihood.

Financial services providers should be neutral when it comes to lawful online speech. PayPal’s policy underscores how vulnerable such speech can be and how important it is to stand up and protect it.

The topics PayPal would ban have been depicted in world literature since Sophocles’ Oedipus and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. And while the books currently affected may not appear to be in the same league, many works ultimately recognized for their literary, historical, and artistic worth were reviled when first published. Books like Ulysses and Lady Chatterley’s Lover were banned as “obscene” in the United States because of their sexual content. The works of Marquis de Sade, which include descriptions of incest, torture, and rape, were considered scandalous when written, although his importance in the history of literature and political and social philosophy is now widely acknowledged.

Both of these make clear why it's good to have physical copies as well as digital versions: analog books can't be deleted easily, and you can re-scan them as technology improves.

But there's a problem: as more people turn to digital books as their preferred way of consuming text, libraries are starting to throw out their physical copies. Some, because nobody reads them much these days; some, because they take up too much space, and cost too much to keep; some, even on the grounds that Google has already scanned the book, and so the physical copy isn't needed. Whatever the underlying reason, the natural assumption that we can always go back to traditional libraries to digitize or re-scan works is looking increasingly dubious.

Fortunately, Brewster Kahle, the man behind the Alexa Web traffic and ranking company (named after the Library of Alexandria, and sold to Amazon), and the Internet Archive -- itself a kind of digital Library of Alexandria -- has spotted the danger, and is now creating yet another ambitious library, this time of physical books:

In a wooden warehouse in this industrial suburb [in Richmond, California], the 20th century is being stored in case of digital disaster.

Forty-foot shipping containers stacked two by two are stuffed with the most enduring, as well as some of the most forgettable, books of the era. Every week, 20,000 new volumes arrive, many of them donations from libraries and universities thrilled to unload material that has no place in the Internet Age.

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But maybe publishers can have it both ways – selling high-volume, low-price e-books, and small-run, high-price physical books. As a recent feature in the Guardian devoted to the rebirth of "beautiful books" put it:

What the rise of electronic publishing has done, rather, is create a context in which the book's two distinct incarnations – as beautiful object and as a set of vaporous pixels - are linked not by "or" but "and".

This is certainly what they believe at the Folio Society. You might think that a company that has dedicated itself since 1947 to publishing exquisite editions of classic texts – everything from Beowulf to Elizabeth David's Italian Food – would be feeling glum about its chances in this new landscape. But David Hayden, the publishing director and a bookselling veteran, is feeling perky. An unabashed fan of new technology, he reckons the result of the seismic shifts in publishing will mean "fewer and better-produced books". In particular he believes in the model of the "retroactive purchase", which goes something like this. You buy an e-reader and, at a stroke, have access to thousands of out-of-print classics via Project Gutenberg. One evening, at a loose end, you download The Mill on the Floss, having always wondered vaguely what it was about. You find yourself transfixed. You love this book, you really do, and want to suggest it to your book group. So you buy the Penguin Classic edition, because it's easy to scribble on and pass around. And then, when your Mum's birthday comes around – she loves George Eliot and has been on at you for ages to take the plunge – you give her a handsome presentation copy of the book, bound in buckram and silk, the sort of thing that the Folio Society does surpassingly well.

This phenomenon is why publishers should not see low e-book prices – which are likely to come, whether they want it or not, not least because of Amazon's growing power – as the end of the world. In the digital age, where raw information can and will be copied freely, it no longer makes sense to pursue a business model based largely on selling what's inside the book. Instead, publishers should think about the unique elements of the content's packaging, which can't be shared in this way. That's exactly what companies built around open source have done, and Red Hat is now a billion-dollar business.

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In their eyes, borrowing an e-book from a library has been too easy. Worried that people will click to borrow an e-book from a library rather than click to buy it, almost all major publishers in the United States now block libraries' access to the e-book form of either all of their titles or their most recently published ones.

To keep their overall revenue from taking a hit from lost sales to individuals, publishers need to reintroduce more inconvenience for the borrower or raise the price for the library purchaser.

Ms. Thomas of Hachette says: "We've talked with librarians about the various levers we could pull," such as limiting the number of loans permitted or excluding recently published titles.

Ms. Nesbitt adds, however, that many of the library's patrons aren't aware that other publishers are withholding e-books from it.

While many major publishers have effectively gone on strike, more than 1,000 smaller publishers, who don’t have best-seller sales that need protection, happily sell e-books to libraries. That means the public library has plenty of e-books available for the asking — no waiting.

"My writing has been shoehorned into a place that's not right for it," she said this morning. "It is commercial fiction, it is not literary, but the real issue I have is that it has been completely defined as women's fiction … Yes it is page turning, no it's not War and Peace. But it shouldn't be portrayed as chick lit."

[....]

"I'm not averse to the term chick lit," said Courtney, "but I don't think that's what my book is. The implication with chick lit is that it's about a girl wanting to meet the man of her dreams. [My books] are about social issues – this time about a woman in a lads' mag environment and the impact of media on society, and feminism."

The jacket, which displays the chick-lit staple of a pair of slender legs, misrepresents the novel, Courtney believes. "The titles and covers have been a problem with all three of my HarperCollins books, right from the start," she said. "If I had my time again I certainly wouldn't have signed with them. There's a feeling that any author should be grateful for any attention they can get from any publisher – that they should take what they can get. But I don't think they should have looked to sign me on the basis of what I'd written so far."

Her decision to publicly ditch her publisher was the result of "three years of pent–up frustration", she said. "People are looking at my books and saying 'you've turned chick lit'," she said. "The irony is that what's inside the books hasn't changed. To give Avon their due, in terms of the editorial process they didn't try to change what's inside into something different. It's the packaging. From the reader's perspective, they'll see it on the shelf and think this is chick lit, and it's not."

I am sure I do not have to tell you that libraries, including those that intend to participate in the Hathi Orphan Works project, are not your enemies.  We are in the business of helping authors find readers, which hardly seems like it should be an objectionable activity.  So let’s think for a minute about The Lost Country and what might be best for it and for you.

The sad fact is that The Lost Country has become a pretty obscure work.  Amazon.com shows only two used copies available for sale.  In the Duke Libraries, the last transaction record we have for your novel is in 2004, when our copy was sent to high-density storage.  It has not left the facility once since then, and our system shows no circulations in the prior decade, either.   One of the famous “laws” of librarianship is that every book should have its readers, and the current system, I am afraid, is failing to connect your book to new readers.

It has to be said that the Authors Guild is not going to help you in this regard.  They are not going to publish a new edition of The Lost Country for you, nor will they pay you any royalties on the out-of-print edition.  The Authors Guild simply does not have the ability to create a new market for your book.  Even if they were to succeed in a grand strategy to impose a licensing scheme for orphan works in general, there is no reason to believe that you would profit from it. With such an obscure work, potential users who had to pay a fee would probably just skip the planned use.

Where you can find help for this problem is with the HathiTrust.  Their goal, and the goal of the libraries that plan to participate in the orphan works project, is to make it easier for readers to find works like your novel, which might otherwise languish on shelves or in large warehouses of books.  Digital access to low-use titles through our catalogs will encourage users to discover resources, for study and for entertainment, that they might not have bothered with before.

The story starts with Google’s scanning agreements with the libraries: each time Google scans a book, it returns both the physical book and a digital copy to the library that gave it the book. The libraries then gave their scans to the HathiTrust, which functions like a digital version of a shared off-site storage warehouse. HathiTrust makes multiple copies of each file, storing versions on hard drives and tape backups at both Michigan and Indiana. It offers the public bibliographic information about the books, and provides a full-text search engine. Unlike Google Books, however, which shows “snippets” from the books as search results, HathiTrust will only tell users the page numbers where the search terms occur. If a book is in the public domain, HathiTrust turns on full view, letting users read it online. (If you’re affiliated with one the member institutions, you can also download the book as a PDF.)

This spring, HathiTrust announced the “Orphan Works Project,” which aimed to investigate the rights status of the books still in copyright. It would investigate the author and publisher information available about the book; if they could not be located and the book was unavailable, it would be flagged as a possible orphan and put on a list of candidates. If at any time a copyright owner is identified and located (e.g. because they step forward), the book is removed from the list.

Applying these principles to the facts of this case, we conclude that the District Court correctly decided that Kirtsaeng could not avail himself of the first sale doctrine codified by § 109(a) since all the books in question were manufactured outside of the United States. In sum, we hold that the phrase “lawfully made under this Title” in § 109(a) refers specifically and exclusively to works that are made in territories in which the Copyright Act is law, and not to foreign-manufactured works.

The statutory text does not refer to a place of manufacture: It focuses on whether a particular copy was manufactured lawfully under title 17 of the United States Code. 17 U.S.C. § 109(a). The United States law of copyrights is contained in title 17. Accordingly, the lawfulness of the manufacture of a particular copy should be judged by U.S. copyright law. A U.S. copyright owner may make her own copies or authorize another to do so. 17 U.S.C. § 106(1). Thus, regardless of place of manufacture, a copy authorized by the U.S. rightsholder is lawful under U.S. copyright law. Here, Wiley, the U.S. copyright holder, authorized its subsidiary to manufacture the copies abroad, which were purchased and then imported into the United States.

Economic justifications also support applicability of the first sale doctrine to foreign made copies. Granting a copyright holder unlimited power to control all commercial activities involving copies of her work would create high transaction costs and lead to uncertainty in the secondary market. An owner first would have to determine the origin of the copy -- either domestic or foreign -- before she could sell it. If it were foreign made and the first sale doctrine does not apply to such copies, she would need to receive permission from the copyright holder. Such a result would provide greater copyright protection to copies manufactured abroad than those manufactured domestically: Once a domestic copy has been sold, no matter where the sale occurred, the copyright holder’s right to control its distribution is exhausted. I do not believe Congress intended to provide an incentive for U.S. copyright holders to manufacture copies of their work abroad.