Category: publishing

Some publishers are complaining that Google’s print project violates their copyrights. But Google believes it has enough restrictions on searches that copyright is not in danger. “Under Google’s strictures, readers can see just five pages at a time of publisher-submitted titles — and no more than 20 percent of an entire book through multiple searches. For books in the public domain, they can read the entire book online. Not all publishers are opposed.”

A new book says French psychologists have it all wrong. “The Livre Noir de la Psychanalyse (The Black Book of Psychoanalysis) claims French mind-healers have become ‘fossilised’ in the ‘marginal, discredited’ teachings of Sigmund Freud. The practitioners have been saved from total disgrace, claims the book, only by the complicity of the French Foreign Minister. But France’s 6,000 psychoanalysts question the book’s motivation, claiming that its authors advocate cut-price American-style therapies, of the kind that involve locking up arachnophobes with spiders.”

“Since 1991, the American Library Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has compiled an annual list of books that librarians, teachers or others report have been challenged; there were 547 challenges in 2004, up 25 percent from 2003. This wave started with the religious right around 1980. And it’s contagious. It has spread, so that anybody, including the liberal left, can say, ‘I don’t want my kid to read that book, therefore I don’t want that book around for any kid to read.’ “

“Some writers achieve great popularity and then disappear forever. The bestseller lists of the past fifty years are, with a few lively exceptions, a somber graveyard of dead books. Yet permanence is not a wilful proposition. No one can write a book aspiring to immortality, for it would then court both ridicule and certain mortality.” And yet, “Don Quixote was a big bestseller when it first appeared in 1605, and has continued to sell ever since.”

“Publishing experts admit Russian literature is in a state of crisis and up-and-coming authors have been reduced to asking would-be readers to pay for books in advance in order to make sure they get published. The crisis in Russian publishing has seen the country’s own authors squeezed while publishing companies rely on cheap-and-cheerful detective and war novels and translations of foreign books.”

“Where is the literature of climate change? Where is the creative response to what Sir David King, the government’s chief scientific adviser, has famously described as “the most severe problem faced by the world”? Cultural absences are always more difficult to document than cultural outpourings. But the deficiency of a creative response to climate change is increasingly visible. It becomes unignorable if we contrast it with the abundance of literature produced in response to the other great eschatological crisis of the past half-century – the nuclear threat.”

More than 200,000 petitions have been gathered to repeal the section of the Patriot Act that pertains to libraries. “The Campaign for Reader Privacy has been collecting petitions at libraries and bookstores since March 2004. It gathered 100,000 last year. Supporters are the Association of American Publishers, the American Library Association, the American Booksellers Association and PEN American Center. There’s more urgency this year because of the law’s expiration date.”

Circulation for celebrity magazines is soaring. “Over the past year, Us Weekly and its competitors have soared in popularity even as the circulations of newspapers, business weeklies and practically every other print publication have been falling. The September cover of Conde Nast Publications Inc.’s Vanity Fair, featuring an exclusive interview with a tearful Aniston, was its highest selling issue ever. With Americans confronting grim news every day about war and natural disasters, “celebrities have become a sort of national distraction. They are hired entertainers, and the public demands to be entertained almost constantly.

Google has wandered into a mess of copyright traps with its attempts to make books searchable. “The legal action comes as yet another setback to Google’s goal of serving as a clearinghouse of a wide range of global information, legal scholars say. In addition to its publishing woes, Google has also drawn the ire of TV networks for its Google Video, which records and stores TV programs.”

After two years of reading classics, Oprah’s Book Club is going contemporary again. Oprah has chosen James Frey’s “A Million Little Pieces” It “was No. 1 on Amazon.com as of Thursday night. “I wanted to open the door and broaden the field. That allows me the opportunity to do what I like to do most, which is sit and talk to authors about their work. It’s kind of hard to do that when they’re dead.”