The Guild "sold us down the river," she wrote. "You decided to deal with the devil, as it were, and have presented your arguments for doing so. I wish I could accept them. I can't. There are principles involved, above all the whole concept of copyright; and these you have seen fit to abandon to a corporation, on their terms, without a struggle."
On its website, the Authors Guild responded to Le Guin, writing that it would have been "deeply satisfying, on many levels," to sue Google, but that litigation would have been "irresponsible, once a path to a satisfactory settlement became available....
"The lessons of recent history are clear: when digital and online technologies meet traditional media, traditional media generally wind up gutted. Constructive engagement--in this case turning Google's [copyright] infringement to our advantage--is sometimes the only realistic solution....
"The settlement is a good one for authors. It will open up new streams of revenues for authors from out-of-print books, books that provide no income to authors now. The settlement allows authors to decide whether, when and to what extent to make their works available through Google. In an increasingly challenging online environment, authors need every bit of income they can earn."
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BlackBerry wasn't the only company suffering service problems yesterday.
Websites operated by Amazon and several other e-retailers, including Wal-Mart, were attacked yesterday, shutting them down for short periods, according to Mashable. No culprit was identified.
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People who were promised delivery of Barnes & Noble's nook e-reader by Christmas will receive it on time, the company told the Wall Street Journal. Last week, B&N had said some shipments might not make it on time and was offering $100 online gift certificates to those whose orders arrived late.
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Books-A-Million is continuing to expand in the mid-Atlantic region. The retailer, which has 200 stores in 22 states, is opening a store in the Paramus Park Mall in Paramus, N.J., which will be its second store in the Garden State.
BAM is also opening a store in Willow Grove Park in Willow Grove, Pa., the company's third store in Pennsylvania.
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The Waldenbooks in Lufkin, Tex., is another of the 20 or so Walden stores slated for closing in January that will stay open after all, the Lufkin Daily News reported.
Last month Borders Group announced that it would close 200 Walden stores in the New Year. Yesterday we noted that the Walden in Easton, Pa., was issued a reprieve.
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An amplification on our story yesterday about ABA staff working in member stores during the holiday: this year the Book Stall at Chestnut Court, Winnetka, Ill., has sold 546 copies, not "just" 350, of Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese, 93 of them in December alone, owner Robert Rubin proudly wrote. The novel is her book of the year.
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The Stranger had a book--The Christmas Hirelings by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, a contemporary of Charles Dickens--printed by the new Espresso Book Machine at Third Place Books in Lake Forest Park, Wash.: "Besides the generic cover (just the title, author's name, and the name of the bookstore, in aqua blue), the finished copy of the book is virtually indistinguishable from any other paperback in the bookstore. It's still warm, and it smells of ink. Total time, from inception to completion: 15 minutes. Like all the other public-domain Google Books, the cover price is $8."
Third Place is also printing books by self-published authors and has founded its own imprint, whose first title is Pioneer Days on Puget Sound by Arthur A. Denny ($10), "a richly illustrated journal of the earliest days of Seattle by one of its founding fathers. The book has been in and out of print for a century."
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Speaking of which, the Book Industry Study Group has published Digital Book Printing for Dummies with the help of Wiley and the sponsorship of CreateSpace, Hewlett-Packard, the Independent Book Publishers Association and Lightning Source. Featuring case studies, the book aims to "de-mystify the short-run, ultra short run and on-demand printing process for publishers." The book draws on the expertise of Barnes & Noble, Blurb, CreateSpace, Harvard University Press, Hewlett-Packard, IBT, On Demand Books, Xerox and the Independent Book Publishers Association, among others.
Copies of Digital Book Printing for Dummies are available on the BISG website and the IBPA website (where they are discounted for IBPA members).
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Christmas season in the U.K. this year may belong to Dan Brown (Shelf Awareness, December 22, 2009), but the decade in books was all J.K. Rowling's. The Guardian
reported that Harry Potter's creator sold "more than double the number
of books shifted by her closest rival." Roger Hargreaves finished "a
surprising second, having sold a whopping 14 million volumes of his
low-cost children's tales." According to Nielsen Bookscan, the
top-selling authors in the U.K. during the "noughties" were:
- J.K. Rowling (29,084,999 books)
- Roger Hargreaves (14,163,141)
- Dan Brown (13,372,007)
- Jacqueline Wilson (12,673,148)
- Terry Pratchett (10,455,397)
- John Grisham (9,862,998)
- Richard Parsons (9,561,776)
- Danielle Steel (9,119,149)
- James Patterson (8,172,647)
- Enid Blyton (7,910,758)
- Bill Bryson (7,409,656)
- Patricia Cornwell (7,355,180)
- Jamie Oliver (7,244,620)
- Daisy Meadows (7,149,788)
- Ian Rankin (6,848,039)
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James R. Gray, chief strategy officer at Ingram Content Group, is leaving the company at the end of the year. He joined Ingram as CEO of Ingram Digital in 2006, when Ingram bought Coutts Information Services and MyiLibrary. Gray was CEO of Coutts at the time of the purchase. Ingram Digital was later merged into the Ingram Content Group.