“Next time you visit London,” we wrote about a year ago, “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.” (See Can’t Sue for Libel In US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World.)

Apparently Americans aren’t the only people bothered by this barbaric legal practice, which is founded on the presumption of guilt. Some 10,000 Britons signed petitions sponsored by reform groups urging the government to overturn the law.

Calling it “an archaic and unbalanced body of law,” the new coalition government picked up the groundswell of protest and has encouraged parliament to fix the statute. “Freedom of speech is the foundation of democracy,” said the government’s justice minister, “We need investigative journalism and scientific research to be able to flourish without the fear of unfounded, lengthy and costly defamation and libel cases being brought against them. We are committed to reforming the law on defamation and want to focus on ensuring that a right and a fair balance is struck between freedom of expression and the protection of reputation.”

Details in UK government plans major review of libel law

Richard Curtis

Below are comments by Frances Grimble of Lavolta Press on the controversy triggered by NY Times Ethicist Randy Cohen’s support for a reader who downloaded a book from a pirate website (See our original blog on Cohen here). Ms. Grimble’s remarks were posted in the comments box but as we feel they shed particularly bright light on the issues we decided they deserve their own posting.

Ms. Grimble did not provide the accompanying image.

RC

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Part 1
It’s a lot easier to just sit down and read a paper book page by page, than to scan it page by page and then go through it page by page again on an e-reader. I just don’t believe that many people would want to read a book in e-form so very much that they will scan a paper book they paid for, without also transferring that scan to other people. Pirates often do so for praise by their social groups, by the way.

It is also a false assumption that every book will be released as an e-book, or should be released as an e-book. Therefore, it is false to comfortably soothe your morals and other people’s by _claiming_ you’ll buy the e-book “when it comes out” and that you are merely “time-shifting.” Books sell in different quantities in different formats–hardcover, trade paperback, mass-market paperback, e-book, audio book. The publisher needs to produce the format(s) and quantity(ies) suitable for that particular book’s contents, and that will make back the costs and overhead, and that will pay the author, and that will generate enough profit to keep the business going. There are many books that simply cannot work as mass-market paperbacks, and there are also many books that simply cannot work as e-books. Furthermore, the publisher often does not even decide/plan whether to issue a book in a given format until another format has been on the market for awhile.

Most cheap e-book advocates conveniently assert that writers work for fun, not money. Not true. Writing at a professional level is very hard, very time-consuming, often money-consuming work. Even if it’s enjoyable much of the time, so are most other professions for the people who pursue them. Writers need and deserve to make a living just like members of other professions.

Publishing is very expensive. Everything-ought-to-be-an-e-book advocates conveniently sweep away the costs of editing, proofreading, indexing, photography, illustration, graphic design, page layout, cover design, publicity, marketing, accounting, legal services, computer equipment, office overhead, travel, and other expenses. It’s not all the print run by a long shot.

E-book advocates also pass around this meme that publishers have “always opposed” the borrowing of books, or the sale of used books, or something. Actually, I’ve never seen any data to back this up. In any case, what we are talking about is now, not what somebody might have said when Andrew Carnegie was opening his first library. The issue is one of quantity/degree. Publishers do lose sales when books are lent and they do lose sales of new books when used ones are sold. And they do lose sales of books when readers photocopy library copies.

The fact that many publishers and authors have financially survived the reading of such books does not mean they can survive e-book piracy _in addition_. Amateur piracy does count. If everyone makes just one copy for one friend, that’s 50% of the book sales lost. It’s all an issue of quantity/unit sales; so it’s false to assert that everyone survived photocopy piracy so they can now survive e-book piracy.

Part 2
I do believe in effective DRM, but none is available yet for e-book readers. Yes, anyone can copy a book with a ream of paper and a pencil, but the easier it is to pirate, the more people do it–and the more acceptible they think it is, because the publisher did not try to prevent it. Even more, however, I believe in not publishing e-books at all in the current climate of piracy.

Pirates often assert that publishers “insult their customers,” by using DRM and by court prosecution of piracy. However, someone who steals or passes on stolen goods is not a customer. Furthermore, I can tell you from experience that it is not “fun” for a writer to have readers assert that books–even though they’re worth reading and copying page by page–are not worth paying for. Or to see them issue threats on Internet groups that if they don’t like the price or format they’ll just steal the book by one means or another. It’s not fun to hear them assert that publishing is just a “failed business model,” and that writers and publishers should just go do something else, who cares what.

It’s not fun to hear people who know nothing about the business assert that it unnecessary to print books and that that is the only cost. It’s not fun to hear them assert that “publishers can always sell ads.” Supporting publications with advertising is now a failed business model. Look how badly most newspapers and magazines are doing, because people are not buying enough ads to support publication–even on the publications’ websites.

To me, as a writer and publisher, readers who denigrate the very books they simultaneously demand as some kind of right, and who either assert the right to steal them or who make all kinds of thin, roundabout excuses for stealing, are not customers I want. They are not readers I want. People who really value books cherish them and pay for them. They do not insult them and steal them.

Part 3
When someone has the right to sue you, it’s the law that matters–not what you feel ethically is OK. When you pirate, you risk getting sued by the copyright holder. If you are sued and you lose, you take the consequences–you may well end up paying tens of thousands more in damages and legal fees than you’d have paid for a legitimately bought book.

Therefore endless gyrations and arguments regarding what you personally morally feel is OK are pointless.

Magazine promo features photo by Jim Fiscus for ESPN The Magazine

The Internet is exhilarating. It grabs you. It’s impulsive.

But…

Magazines are enveloping. They embrace you.  They are immersive.

That is the message going out across the land on the heels of a major promotion aimed at reminding the world – especially the alien occupiers of our planet known as Young People – how wonderful magazines and newspapers are and how much we would lose if they were to succumb to the forces unleashed by the Web Revolution.  The campaign brings together rivals who recognize that, in Benjamin Franklin’s phrase, “We must all hang together or, most assuredly, we shall all hang separately.”

“Together, we can change the conversation about magazines and share what we in the business know to be true: magazines are relevant, play an important role in society and have a strong future ahead,” says Ann Moore, chairman & CEO of Time Inc. “This campaign showcases those messages of relevancy and longevity.”

The press release, which you may read in full here, uses some persuasive metrics to drive home its point:

• Magazine readership has risen 4.3% over the past five years
• Average paid subscriptions reached nearly 300 million in 2009
• Adults 18-34 are avid magazine readers. They read more issues and spend more time per issue than their over-34 counterparts
• During the 12-year life of Google, magazine readership increased 11%
• Magazine effectiveness is growing. Ad recall has increased 13% over the past five years. Action-taking—based on readers recalling specific ads—increased by 10%.
• Magazines outperform other media in driving positive shifts in purchase consideration/intent.

One reason to return to print reading, omitted from these talking points, is that it’s good for you, especially for young minds, which a number of scientific studies suggest may be compromised by the distractions of screen reading and viewing.  (See Watching Books and The Medium is the Screen. The Message is Distraction)

The magazine industry’s message is one we believe in and promoted in countless postings. Though the promo doesn’t include print books the implication is unavoidable. If you’re not sure, watch the video and say “book” every time you hear “magazine”.

RC

David Pogue, the wonderful blogger who tells technology like it is for the New York Times, has weighed iPad in the balance and found it not wanting.

He’s also weighed it on a scale and found it heavy compared to Kindle, 1.5 pounds vs. 10 ounces. But that is not a fatal factor in his evaluation.  In fact there are no fatal factors in his evaluation.  His biggest reservation is the fundamental concept of the iPad itself: why does the iPad exist? At first we were mystified by this enigmatic, existential question. But like a koan the answer came the next day.  More on that in a moment.

Pogue’s approach to appraising Apple’s tablet is divided in two: one column for geeks and one for shleppers.  We take umbrage at the distinction, because it doesn’t give much credit to a generation of lay users who are quite conversant with computer specs.  In fact this shlepper didn’t see anything so complex in Pogue’s “techie” section that could not be comprehended by an English major who did his Master’s thesis on Henry James.

Here are some highlights of Pogue’s analysis:

• There’s an e-book reader app, but it’s not going to rescue the newspaper and book industries (sorry, media pundits). The selection is puny (60,000 titles for now). You can’t read well in direct sunlight. At 1.5 pounds, the iPad gets heavy in your hand after awhile (the Kindle is 10 ounces).
• When the iPad is upright, typing on the on-screen keyboard is a horrible experience
• Things open fast, scroll fast, load fast
• The iPad can’t play Flash video…Thousands of Web sites show up with empty white squares on the iPad
• There’s no multitasking…It’s one app at a time
• The simple act of making the multitouch screen bigger changes the whole experience
• A great AT&T cellular deal
• 150,000 existing iPhone apps run on the iPad and 1000 specially designed for the iPad’s bigger screen

We said Pogue likes the iPad with an asterisk, but besides cavils like weight and glare, his specific reservations are so modest we won’t bother to reprint them here.  You can read them on Looking at the iPad From Two Angles

Pogue’s glowing bottom line is this: “The iPad is so fast and light, the multitouch screen so bright and responsive, the software so easy to navigate, that it really does qualify as a new category of gadget. Some have suggested that it might make a good goof-proof computer for technophobes, the aged and the young; they’re absolutely right.”

So – what does Pogue mean when he says the iPad is a hit except for the concept? The answer came in an article by Brad Stone and Claire Cain Miller published in the Times the next day. “Many consumers do not understand the device’s purpose, who would want to pay $500 or more for it and why anyone would need another gadget on top of a computer and smartphone. After all, phones are performing an ever-expanding range of functions, as Apple points out in its many iPhone commercials.” A banker commented that “I can do everything on my MacBook Pro, cellphone and BlackBerry. I don’t need any more devices. I already have six phone numbers and enough things to plug in at night.” A Silicon Valley entrepreneur was quoted as saying “But let’s see: you can’t make a phone call with it, you can’t take a picture with it, and you have to buy content that before now you were not willing to pay for.”

But that very same entrepreneur said “The first five million will be sold in a heartbeat.” Not very enigmatic or cosmic, but until something comes along to top the iPad, this would seem to be the last word.

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.

Randy Cohen, E-Book Enemy #1

Randy Cohen writes the “Ethicist” column for the Sunday edition of the New York Times, in which he offers solutions to moral dilemmas for people who have a hard time figuring out for themselves the difference between right and wrong.

In the issue of April 4 2010, a reader posed the following dilemma:

I bought an e-reader for travel and was eager to begin “Under the Dome,” the new Stephen King novel. Unfortunately, the electronic version was not yet available. The publisher apparently withheld it to encourage people to buy the more expensive hardcover. So I did, all 1,074 pages, more than three and a half pounds. Then I found a pirated version online, downloaded it to my e-reader and took it on my trip. I generally disapprove of illegal downloads, but wasn’t this O.K.? C.D., BRIGHTWATERS, N.Y.

The preeminent ethicist’s solution? “In this case,” he pronounces, “it is not unethical.”

His reasoning? “Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.”

We’re sure this advice will warm the hearts of authors and book publishers desperately fighting to protect their literary properties from pirates and the ethical pygmies stealing e-books under the information-wants-to-be-free banner. (See I Want My E-Book and I Want It Now – Or Else!)

These dirtbags now have a champion in Randy Cohen. Go on, help yourself. The author and publisher have been paid once and don’t need to be paid for another edition of the same book.  While you’re at it, rip off the book club and the mass market paperback editions.

Cohen’s exculpation of this morally challenged idiot buying an e-book from a pirate site is the equivalent of condoning the purchase of black market goods from a fence. Does anybody know what Talmudic tractate he consulted to justify stealing – to describe it as “illegal” but not “immoral?” If so, we invite you to submit chapter and verse.

Though Cohen’s column and photo are undoubtedly protected by copyright and we may be flouting copyright law by reprinting them in full here, his moral position has liberated us to do just that. If he and the Times’s attorneys want to take issue with us, we will refer them to his disgusting perversion of morality spelled out in Exhibit A below.

Richard Curtis

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The Ethicist

E-Book Dodge by Randy Cohen

An illegal download is — to use an ugly word — illegal. But in this case, it is not unethical. Author and publisher are entitled to be paid for their work, and by purchasing the hardcover, you did so. Your subsequent downloading is akin to buying a CD, then copying it to your iPod.

Buying a book or a piece of music should be regarded as a license to enjoy it on any platform. Sadly, the anachronistic conventions of bookselling and copyright law lag the technology. Thus you’ve violated the publishing company’s legal right to control the distribution of its intellectual property, but you’ve done no harm or so little as to meet my threshold of acceptability.

Unsurprisingly, many in the book business take a harder line. My friend Jamie Raab, the publisher of Grand Central Publishing and an executive vice president of the Hachette Book Group, says: “Anyone who downloads a pirated e-book has, in effect, stolen the intellectual property of an author and publisher. To condone this is to condone theft.”

Yet it is a curious sort of theft that involves actually paying for a book. Publishers do delay the release of e-books to encourage hardcover sales — a process called “windowing” — so it is difficult to see you as piratical for actually buying the book ($35 list price, $20 from Amazon) rather than waiting for the $9.99 Kindle edition.

Your action is not pristine. Downloading a bootleg copy could be said to encourage piracy, although only in the abstract: no potential pirate will actually realize you’ve done it. It’s true that you might have thwarted the publisher’s intent — perhaps he or she has a violent antipathy to trees, maybe a wish to slaughter acres of them and grind them into Stephen King novels. Or to clog the highways with trucks crammed with Stephen King novels. Or perhaps King himself wishes to improve America’s physique by having readers lug massive volumes.

So be it. Your paying for the hardcover put you in the clear as a matter of ethics, forestry and fitness training.

Apple’s new iPad tablet gives newspaper and magazine publishers an opportunity to claw back what they’ve given away: profitability. The potential for reading a newspaper on a screen of reasonable size and shape and in a format that actually resembles the paper-paper you hold every morning, has been boosted sky-high by the introduction of Apple’s tablet.

Actually, for an inveterate reader of newspapers the format issue remains, whether you read one on a Kindle, iPad, Skiff (pictured left) or other device. If you hold the device vertically (portrait format) size you see just one page at a time and thus lose the option of viewing at a glance what’s on both sides of your newspaper, even peripherally. If on the other hand you hold it horizontally (landscape format) you can see both sides of the paper but cut the size down to an uncomfortable dimension. If this is the price we pay to shift from paper to plastic, I say so be it, but I say it with a big sigh. Because, dammit, I love my newspaper just the way it is.

But throwing a tantrum won’t stop the clock, so we must expect a day when today’s “paper” will be plastic, and reading the paper will become an anachronism as quaint as the “cc” in our emails that describes carbon copies. Newspaper publishers are rethinking their business model and considering a variety of solutions aimed at sealing the leak of content into the digital river from which all currently come to drink their fill free of charge. Last fall the Wall Street Journal started forcing news-hungry website visitors to become subscribers or miss out on breaking news. The New York Times has announced a similar initiative.

Though dropping today’s news into e-book format seems simple enough to do, there are land mines, As Brad Stone and Stephanie Clifford of the NY Times point out “Media companies may have to swallow hard before tethering their futures to any high-tech company, let alone Apple.”

“Many publishers believe their economic health depends on finding a direct line to their customers, and it is not clear whether Apple — and other aggregators of Internet content — will allow that.

“Magazine publishers, for example, maintain sophisticated databases about their customers, which lets them cross-sell products, renew subscriptions and entice advertisers with statistics about their wealthy readers. A big part of the business is automatic renewals charged to credit cards.

“But when magazine publishers sell applications through the iTunes store, they do not get credit card information or even the name of the buyer.”

To make sure they aren’t jumping from the frying pan into the fire, Stone and Clifford report, some powerful magazine and newspaper publishers have formed a consortium that will operate its own online store, sell its own content, and collect its own consumer information.

You can read about it online here. Enjoy the pleasure while you can; the day will come when you’ll have to become a subscriber to access this content.

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.

Those who think android is a noun have obviously never androided a dress or book in a retail store. The Google application enables cell phone users to point their device at the bar code on a piece of store merchandise and gather vital information about the product (including where to buy it cheaper down the street or online). You can read about it in Please Don’t Android the Merchandise.

But, instead of going shopping, suppose you want to check out merchandise you read about in a magazine or newspaper? Stephanie Clifford, writing in the New York Times, has surveyed a variety of cell phone and other devices dedicated to scanning bar codes or URLs printed on paper. In theory you should be able to achieve as much in your armchair as you can by walking into a store and waving your device at a rack of dresses or a wall loaded with television sets.

Clifford writes: “With the sudden ubiquity of smartphones, which have apps that can read bar codes, and cameraphones, which can easily snap pictures of icons, magazines like Esquire and InStyle are adding interactive graphics to their articles, while Entertainment Weekly and Star are including them in ads.”

It sounds simple, fun, efficient and cool. Unfortunately, many of the products have been anything but. Something called :CueCat required installation of software. Then, in order to research a product you had to tether :CueCat to your computer and “wave it over the printed bar codes.” In addition to being clunky, people just didn’t know how to pronounce “:CueCat”. Was the prefixed colon a variant on Xhosa click language? In any event this gadget seems to have bit the dust.

Another one called SpyderLynk “surrounds client logos with a coded ring, and asks consumers to snap photos of the images, then text or e-mail them to a certain address.” says Clifford. We’re not sure the SpyderLynk comes with a decoder ring or you have to send in fifty Cheerios boxtops, but we’ll probably give it a pass.

Esquire readers will have an opportunity to try a different approach in the March issue, where they will find an article about “the 30 items a man would need to get through life,” according to Esquire’s editor in chief. “Printed near each item will be a small code that looks like a group of black and white squares,” writes Clifford. “Readers scan the code into an Internet-enabled phone, and the code takes them to a mobile menu that provides Esquire’s styling advice for the item and information on where to buy it.” We’ll have to wait until March to learn if one of the 30 items a man needs to get through life is a woman, but if anyone learns the code for one please let us know at once.

For more details read Stephanie Clifford’s From Print to Phone to Web. And a Sale?

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.

The “Last Look” feature on the last page of Vogue is usually reserved for the most chic and preposterously priced items like $20,000 handbags, megastylish shoes and ragingly expensive bling. The last item you’d expect to see on that page is an e-book. But there, on the “Last Look” page of Vogue’s January 2010 issue, opened to Chapter 2 of Pride and Prejudice, is Barnes & Noble’s entry into the e-book sweepstakes, The Nook, advertised for a modest $259.00.

It shares the page with a deliciously buttery-looking calfskin case called the “Electronic Porta Libro,” manufactured by Tod’s, in which you can, um, show your Nook off at the Venice Biennale or the casino at Monte Carlo. At $525.00 it’s a little closer to the opulence and elegance one expects on that page of the magazine. If that’s too rich for your blood you can pick up a leather Kindle jacket with one of three New Yorker cover images from Conde Nast for $49.99.

RC

Saying Barnes & Noble clearly rushed the Nook out prematurely “in hopes of stealing some of the Kindle’s holiday cheer,” tech columnist David Pogue issued a sharp critique of the device in the New York Times.

Here’s an abstract of Pogue’s analysis:

• “That ‘color touch screen,’ for example, is actually just a horizontal strip beneath the regular Kindle-style gray screen…Worse, the touch screen is balky and nonresponsive…It takes nearly three seconds to turn a page — three times longer than the Kindle — which is really disruptive if you’re in midsentence.“
• “It takes four seconds for the Settings panel to open, 18 seconds for the bookstore to appear (over Wi-Fi), and 8 to 15 seconds to open a book or newspaper for the first time, during which you stare at a message that says ‘Formatting’.”
• “’Over one million titles?’” Yes, but well over half of those are junky Google scans of free, obscure, pre-1923 out-of-copyright books, filled with typos.“
• “Fact is, Amazon’s e-book store is still much better. Of the current 175 New York Times best sellers, 12 of them aren’t available for Kindle; 21 are unavailable for the Nook.”
• “Kindle books are less expensive.”
• “What about the Nook’s built-in Wi-Fi? It’s there, but you get no notification when you’re in a hot spot. And if the hot spot requires a login or welcome screen, you can’t get onto it.“
• “And the ‘loan e-books to friends?’ part? You can’t lend a book unless its publisher has O.K.’ed this feature...Furthermore, the book is gone from your own Nook during the loan period (a maximum of two weeks). And each book can be lent only once, ever.“
• “It’s buggy. In four days, my Nook locked up twice and displayed an ‘Android operating system has crashed’ message twice.“

Does Pogue have anything good to say? Well…”Now, the Nook may have some hardware advantages — a removable battery, a memory-card slot and (because of narrower plastic margins) a slightly trimmer shape — but the Kindle is still a better machine. It’s faster, thinner, lighter and much easier to figure out. Its battery lasts more than three times as long (seven days versus two).”

The bottom line for Pogue? “Those missing features are symptoms of B&N’s bad case of Ship-at-All-Costs-itis.”

Read the full review here.

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.

This bulletin from Richard Perez-Pena of the New York Times:

“Editor & Publisher and Kirkus Review, two venerable chronicles of the newspaper and book publishing industries, are closing as their owner, Nielsen Business Media, gets out of the trade publication business.

“Nielsen said Thursday that it is selling The Hollywood Reporter, Billboard, Adweek, Mediaweek and other publications to a joint venture of Pluribus Capital Management and Guggenheim Partners. But Kirkus and Editor & Publisher simply will go out of business. Nielsen intends to hang on to some print properties, including Contract magazine and Progressive Grocer.”

RC