April Lady by Georgette Heyer

Tanya Simmons visits a classic romantic comedy and is enchanted by its light-heartedness and sharp humour

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Tanya Simmons
The Guardian, Tuesday 10 November 2009
Excerpt
Related articlesWhich authors are worth a whole conference? and Pulp romances 
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April Lady
by Georgette Heyer 246pp, Arrow Books, $24.95

Like a steaming bowl of chicken soup or a warm, fluffy blanket, a novel by Georgette Heyer is a comfort. Her heroines are always bright and dazzling and her waggish heroes firm but good-hearted. Heyer’s knack of balancing melodrama and wit keeps some of the most ludicrous plots fresh and engaging, and April Lady’s premise is utterly absurd. 

Earl Giles Cardross has recently married his considerably younger Lady Nell, choosing her from society’s debutantes by falling in love with her at sight. Their marriage is one of necessity to Nell’s noble but financially-stricken family and, unfortunately for Nell, her ninny-headed mother impresses this upon her. Nell, who is as struck with Giles as he is with her, is overly demure and distant as a new bride because she does not wish to be bothersome as a “convenient wife”. Naturally, she throws her energy into society, balls and the ton, but by settling the debts of her gambling brother, she runs up her own on gowns and bonnets. Nell reluctantly tells Giles that she has overspent her quarterly allowance and he promptly clears her accounts but is left with the impression that Nell has married him for his riches. When Nell discovers a forgotten bill she is ashamed and hides it from Giles, fearing to lose his affection and further excite his perception of her as a gold-digger. She enlists her black-sheep brother to raise the funds instead of risking Giles’ wrath by revealing her plight.
 
A multiplicity of mix-ups and preposterous schemes for procuring the “blunt” follow and although the reader knows Nell and Giles will be reconciled eventually, the journey to that point is erratic and unpredictable.
 
April Lady sprints along, juggling and incorporating subplots to create a finely-polished and enthralling tale. Heyer’s blend of historical romance and immaculately-timed comedy is like a Jane Austen and PG Wodehouse cocktail—charming and pithy.
 
Part of the success of April Lady is Heyer’s well-drawn characters. In other hands, Nell would be insipid and frustrating for not clearing up the misunderstanding with her husband immediately. Instead, she enchants with the cool management of her unruly brother, Dysart, and idealist sister-in-law, Letty, and has a ready-wit to counter the quibbles of her fashionable and fastidious cousin, Felix. Giles also is well-fleshed out as the charismatic and droll, much-put upon earl and his fast-paced dialogue keeps the pages turning.
 
April Lady’s comedy of manners is best shown, however, through Dysart, the compulsive gambler and loveable scamp whose aid to Nell includes holding her carriage up in a highway robbery. His inebriated antics are hilarious, especially at the climax of the book, and the quips of this good-natured daredevil are expertly rendered in the colloquialisms of Regency England.
 
Heyer wrote forty historical romances in meticulously-researched detail. Her novels, which were published from the 1930s to 1950s, may not suit all readers because her wild heroines are always and eventually tamed by their leading men. However, if some light-hearted, feel-good escapism is what you need, this book is for you.

The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs by Irvine Welsh

Tanya Simmons writes that the title of Mr Welsh’s sixth novel is misleading—there’s no food and little sex but plenty of bad writing

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Tanya Simmons
The Guardian, Tuesday 10 November 2009
Excerpt (PDF – contains explicit language)
Audio (contains explicit language)
Related articles Work exchange, The power of loathing, I’m still Mr Angry, Kitchen confidential, Scottish style and The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs by Irvine Welsh
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The Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs
By Irvine Welsh 391pp, Jonathan Cape, $32.95

Danny Skinner works for the Edinburgh council as a successful health inspector which he slots around his drug and alcohol binges. He is confident, stylish and has a way with the lassies but his love of a pint is estranging him from his ex-punk mother, endangering his career and destroying his relationship with his beautiful fiancée.

Meanwhile, he’s searching for the identity of his father, using information from a local, minor-celebrity chef’s latest publication, Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs, which is linked to his mother’s waitressing days at the time of his conception.

When the conscientious Brian Kibby comes to work at the council, Skinner forms an intense and irrational hatred towards the clean-living and shy teetotaller. Kibby is socially awkward and has a passion for model trains, Star Trek conventions and non-violent video games; he epitomises the nerdiness that Skinner doesn’t have and is an unlikely nemesis. But as Skinner’s alcoholism escalates—he loses his fiancée and nearly his job—and the two compete for a promotion, Skinner’s abhorrence of Kibby triggers a supernatural curse. The hex ensures that Kibby takes on all the effects of Skinner’s hard living: hangovers, violent injuries from soccer hooliganism, repercussions of a brutal rape, obesity and eventually the need for a liver transplant. Skinner relishes this lack of consequence and delights in inflicting as much physical and mental pain on the luckless Kibby.

Welsh has littered this book with confusing first-person perspectives where anyone and everyone—a nurse, a cashier or a lady getting her hair cut—will get a few pointless paragraphs then slip into obscurity. Amongst this clutter of periphery characters’ viewpoints, the plot occasionally surfaces but is laboured and predictable. The big reveal of Skinner’s father is obvious from very early on and Welsh leaves nothing to his reader’s imagination—Welsh is explicit about what will happen at the time of the hex but references Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray just in case.

The result is a tedious read full of some very contrived elements: Skinner, despite his full-time hedonism, is purported to be a thinker because his shelves are full of poetry; his behaviour is spuriously equated with that of Bush and Blair in a lame political spin; and his American love interest is called Dorothy Cominksy and has a “dot.com business” (shorten Dorothy’s name for the wit).

Unusually, Welsh’s signature Scottish-phonetic dialect is toned down and set against a more elegant third-person narrative but the two styles clash and grate, adding to the reader’s disorientation. Unfortunately, Welsh’s new-found style is damaged by clichés (“twisted like a knife”), tautology (“nodded affirmatively”), predictable adverbs (“meticulously prepared”) and bizarre turns of phrase (“a fart slipped out of him, as poignantly weeping as a lover’s last farewell”). This is aside from occasionally misplaced words that render passages ridiculous—characters don’t leave, they make “a defeated egress”.

Mr Welsh’s editorial team has done him a disservice—the book should have had a sound structural edit and a thorough copyedit prior to its publication. Then again, bad writing is bad writing.

Bedroom Secrets of the Master Chefs was a contender for the 2006 Man Booker shortlist. Although tarnished by labels of misogynistic sex scenes, the book’s failure to make the longlist is not surprising.

Marketweeting

http://www.flickr.com/photos/whassupbud55/ / CC BY 2.0

More and more marketers are relying on Twitter as an additional tool to promote their products. But for most marketers the microblogging platform is unfamiliar and confusing. However, if they are baffled about what Twitter is and how to make the best use of it, they'll need to learn fast as recent research from eMarketer predicts that there will be a 45 per cent growth in US users by this time next year.

eMarketer estimates that there are currently 18 million users of Twitter in the US and by next year there will be 26 million - a total of 15 per cent of the total US population. This kind of growth cannot be ignored and retail opportunities are being explored, and how-to principles devised that describe how Twitter's potential can be maximised for businesses. eMarketing Hubs has created such a guideline but there are many more out there, such as Harris Fellman's 35-minute video Coup de Twitter.

In terms of potential sales, businesses should take note of Dell Outlet which reported in June that its Twitter account brought in approximately $2 million in sales. This figure excludes Dell.com Twitter traffic.

Although Twitter can be lucrative to businesses, they'll need to be conscious of how they promote themselves if they wish to avoid potential alienation - Twitter 'spammers' are becoming more prevalent and a new name has been coined to refer to them: 'spitters'.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/keiya/ / CC BY 2.0

Cambridge University Press - the propagator of hatred?

A winner of the 2009 Australian Awards for Excellence in Educational Publishing has been withdrawn from sale after a complaint made by the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies. Cambridge University Press won the 2009 Secondary Single title for their first edition of Cambridge Studies of Religion by Christopher Hartney and Jonathan Noble. But after complaints received about content of the Judaism chapter contained in the book they've had to pull all stock until problematic passages have been resolved.

CUP's website cites that the chapter on Judaism is currently under review, the results of which will be included in all reprinted copies, if they re-issue the product. CUP will be using their academic resources and an independent expert in Judaism for the review - it is highly likely that once the appropriate changes have been made, the book will be available again.  

The website of the NSW Jewish Board of Deputies no longer has any information about the issue but did describe the book as having anti-Semitic slurs in a Sydney Herald Sun article on Tuesday. The lack of information on their website is probably due to the matter being swiftly and responsibly responded to by CUP's managing director, Mark O'Neill. CUP's marketing department has also been quick to follow up by contacted all stakeholders and informing them of the problems the text has. In fact, J-Wire, the Jewish online news from Australia and New Zealand, has applauded the actions of the publisher and their recognition of the text's unsuitability as an HSC learning resource.

I've read the material (chapter 12 - Judaism: the basic facts) that has sparked the controversy and it is easy to pinpoint the areas of text which are troublesome. To me, it is quite clear that there is no deliberate religious vilification at play, rather some very ambiguous sentence structure that should have been cleared up by the proofreading stage and some obvious editorial oversights which should not have been overlooked.

The Australian Jewish News' reaction on Monday sparked a few extremist and highly inflammatory comments - comparisons to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and concerns that the book was the product of some kind of Muslim conspiracy! (Perhaps that sentence shouldn't have ended in an exclamation mark, comments like these are highly disturbing and echo the stereotypical and racial vilification that the book has been accused of inciting.)

My Jewish boyfriend is a level-headed sort. He's read the Judaism chapter and sees that some of the facts need to be modified and some ambiguity cleared up. But he hasn't summoned an angry mob to appear outside CUP's doors or snuck into their offices to pin prawns underneath the desk areas of my CUP friends. Not yet anyway.... 

http://www.flickr.com/photos/freecat/ / CC BY 2.0

It seems like the crew at CUP have the matter calmly in hand and it is good to see that pillars of the Jewish community are working with the publishing house to resolve the situation amicably. Not much more to say really.

Ebooks in Australian educational publishing

http://www.flickr.com/photos/mattymatt/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The textbook market for ebook products has been slower to catch on than that of trade. However, educational publishers have actively developed ebook products for students and educators over the last few years, especially in the US, using partners such as Vital Source.

Vital Source has partnered up with many of the world's leading educational publishers and is fast becoming a major player in the ebook texbook market. Some of the main educational publishers on board include:

• Elsevier
• John Wiley & Sons
• McGraw-Hill
• Pearson Education Group
• Oxford University Press
• Blackwell Publishing
  

The principal educational publishers in Australia have also dipped their toes into ebook manufacture and are commonly using the VitalBook^TM format. For example, the first edition of McGraw-Hill's Advertising and Promotion, published in 2008, has an integrated ebook with the textbook that allows note-taking, search and highlighting abilities. Similarly, Wiley's second edition of Organisational Behaviour, published a couple of months ago, comes with a Vital Source ebook to assist the student's study.

However, when you look at Australia's leading educational publishers' websites it is not clear what types or even which ebooks are available. A simple search doesn't bring much up - indeed, I only know where to look because these books are my publishing house's competition.

Leaving this unusual non-promotion aside, it seems that the ebook market in Australia is largely unchartered and in its early stages of growth. Compared to the US (and even there it is a budding rather than thriving industry) Australia only started developing educational ebooks over the last three or so years.

On the whole, the trend seems to be in educational publishing to have an ebook as a standalone saleable item and then bundle it with a printed product after its first year. This is hardly an encouraging set of circumstances for the educational ebook - the need to bundle ebooks shows that there is not too much demand for them. 

But perhaps this is because there's a climate of uncertainty on how best to incorporate ebooks in education. Everyone seems very eager - publisher and consumer - but textbook (hardcopy) sales are not dropping.

Educational ebooks are in an interesting place at the moment, there is demand but noone has really worked out how best to sell or use them. In terms of using them, for example, do they need to be online, downloadable or available through ebook readers? And with regards to selling them, should they be packaged with the textbook, sold as a standalone ebook (as a percentage of the printed price which is cheaper but doesn't allow the student to keep the ebook once it expires), or as individual ebook chapters?

My company feels that ebook chapters will be the way of the future - students can buy the chapters they need to save money. But the way educational ebook demand will go is not clear yet.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/knk/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

The institute of the future of the book

http://www.flickr.com/photos/butterflysha/ / CC BY 2.0

The institute of the future of the book is a US-based organisation and website that investigates, comments and acts upon the shift from the printed and bound to the digitally based. Their mission is to record this shift from the book to the networked screen, and to promote and assist the evolution of the book into its new format.

Their blog, if:blog, is a daily collection of news, thoughts, research and ideas about the transformation of reading and the tangible book. Fiercely positive about what digitising the book means, the blog is an archived plethora of material that includes (but is not limited to) discussions on the fate of independent booksellers, the morals of Wal-Mart, Amazon and Target's price setting, book-reading devices, vooks, copyright and copyleft, education and interactive media. One post I really liked was What I heard at MIT, which, although three years old, nicely encapsulates a lot of the jargon, uncertainty and mixed messages I hear flying around publishing proposal meetings.

However, it is the institute's projects that I find really interesting such as the blog-based peer review of Noah Wardrip-Fruin's manuscript published by MIT. Fruin, a professor of communication at UC San Diego,  submitted his manuscript in chunks over ten weeks to Grand Text Auto, a community of bloggers made up of writers and digital artists who are interested in multimedia, games and all things digital. They reviewed and gave feedback on his work - exactly the same as the traditional process of providing academic manuscripts for academic peer-review prior to being published. Except, this was an open-peer review using a community of bloggers. The institute helped by adapting the CommentsPress functionality to accommodate the reviewers' task.

Fruin's book, Expressive Processing: Digital Fictions, Computer Games, and Software Studies was published in September 2009.

Oddly, I can't find an ebook version...

Digital media in educational publishing - what I've seen happening over the past three years

http://www.flickr.com/photos/hinkelstone/ / CC BY 2.0

Most of my digital media experience in the educational publishing industry has been limited to CDs - and these have always been supplementary products rather than standalone-saleable items.

Although some of these CDs have been for student use, taking the form of podcasts that give practical examples to the theory the textbook contains, the majority of the CDs created have been solely for the instructor's use.

A typical instructor's CD would contain PowerPoint slides (for lectures and tutorials), an Instructor's manual (a guide on material to cover in lectures and tutorials), a Solutions manual (answers to all the questions in the textbook), ExamView testbank files (a database of hundreds of different types of questions formulated from the textbook that the instructor can use for assessment purposes), student quizzes (for homework and tests) and all the low res images contained in the textbook (for instructors to use however they wish).

Over the past year, we've abandoned the use of CDs - all content that was originally on CD is now uploaded onto our (now very stable) website instead. As each book has an automatic companion website dedicated to it, the process is a simple matter of uploading supplementary content for the textbook on to the companion website shell, then going live.

Some of our blockbuster books have more supplementary features and require something snazzier than the bog-standard companion site. In these cases our multimedia team builds individual websites from the ground up. Everything is password protected and bound up with the sale of the textbook, or adoption by a tertiary educator, so this link to MKGT will only provide you with limited access.

As well as acting as a central depository for instructors (and sales reps) the use of the internet as a platform for providing additional product has enabled the growth of numerous additional supplementary products for students. These include material such as: flashcards, crossword puzzles, quizzes (multiple choice, true/false, short answer, fill in the blank, etc), glossaries (with audio), weblinks, internet exercises and so on. In fact, one of my books, Principles of Macroeconomics in New Zealand 2e, has three additional chapters, only available online.

Currently, our US colleagues are promoting iChapters for products with electronic formats, which includes ebooks, individual chapters, audio and video. We'll be moving in to this iChapter market next year.

Update: Google books are swindling my authors and publishing house

http://www.flickr.com/photos/spunter/ / CC BY-SA 2.0

Last month I wrote about Jane Grellier and Veronica Goerkes' first-edition textbook which is in print and in copyright, but has been scanned in its entirety and is available on Google books.

Today, the electronic version of Communication Skills Toolkit can still be seen on Google books, free of charge. Consequently, Cengage Learning's US lawyers are now involved and have filed a claim regarding the use of this text by Google books - the publishing company remains part of the Google US settlement currently being played out in the courts.

As authors who have a royalty agreement with Cengage Learning,  Jane and Veronica have certain rights under the Google settlement agreement. The Google Book Search Copyright Class Action Settlement website has FAQs and information to help authors understand what their rights are as part of a settlement.

In a nutshell, Jane and Veronica can file their own claim if they wish as part of the settlement. This will be in addition to the one that Cengage Learning has lodged on their behalf. However, even if Jane and Veronica select not to take any action, the monies that are paid by Google to rightsholders with respect to the digitialising of their work will be collected by Cengage Learning. Cengage Learning will then pay Jane and Veronica a share of revenues as provided in their author agreement with the publishing house.

All claims from publishers and authors need to be made by 5 January 2010 - on 24 September 2009, the US court issued an order delaying the approval hearing for the Google settlement agreement in light of the parties' plans to modify the settlement agreement. Therefore, it is possible that the settlement agreement will change.

I think most publishers are supportive of the settlement with Google because it provides improved public access to out-of-print books while enabling publishers and authors to maintain control of their works (including deciding whether to allow Google to display them). The settlement also enables future and additional selling opportunities.

However, in cases such as this, where books are in copyright and in print but displayed in their entirety, there is a gross violation of author and publisher rights, and unless a publishing house or an author actively searches through every publication, copyright infringements such as this have the potential to be rampant.

Here is a 30-minute talk on Google Books and their version of 'fair use'.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmU2i1hQiN0

Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

Tanya Simmons is disappointed by the thin plot in Palahniuk’s latest novel but still manages to get a laugh at its ludicrousness

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Tanya Simmons
The Guardian, Tuesday 13 October 2009
Excerpt (PDF)
Audio
Related articles Foreign Bodies and Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk 
This article contains sexual content
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Pygmy
by Chuck Palahniuk 241pp, Jonathan Cape, $32.95

Written in a stilted pidgin English, Pygmy is the narrative of agent number 67 who is sent to the United States as a 13-year-old exchange student to complete “Operation Havoc”. Nicknamed “Pygmy” because of his small stature, agent number 67 has been indoctrinated against all things American, and is highly trained in chemistry and martial arts—“Flying Giant Stork Death Kick”, “Lashing Lynx” and “Cobra One-Strike No-Blood” are amongst his repertoire. He comes from a nameless totalitarian country—a mixture of Communist China, Cuba, North Korea and Nazi Germany—and is accompanied by a team of teenage assassins, similarly hosted by white, middle-class American families. Although the details of Operation Havoc are unclear, the mission is definitely a terrorist attack and involves an exploding science project.

This satire on American indulgence is written as an epistolary of 36 dispatches sent from Pygmy to his homeland. Decoding the bizarre syntax is challenging but often amusing: “American holiday food of Thanksgiving. Present: vast cow father, pig dog brother, chicken mother, cat sister host family all hands linked so create fence surrounding bounty food table.” Other sentences try the reader’s patience: “Revered soon dying mother, distribute you ammunitions correct for Croatia-made forty-five-calibre, long-piston-stroke APS assault rifle?”

Once accustomed to Pygmy’s fractured dialect—it takes dedication—the usual Palahniuk subject matter and style unravels: extreme violence, explicit sex scenes, unrelenting profanity and content beyond taboo. By the second dispatch Pygmy has brutally raped a boy in a Wal-Mart bathroom and later violates his host mother to retrieve the batteries of her sex toy. Palahniuk even manages to include a high-school massacre, Columbine style.

Palahniuk is known for his novels’ disturbing content, marginalised characters and acerbic humour, but in Pygmy the outrageous and the shocking are pegged on a loose plot line—the novel reads as a gratuitous vehicle for the author’s subversive bombshells.

Pygmy does have flickers of brilliance and dark wit though. The spelling bee that never ends because Pygmy and his comrades can spell anything smacks of irony, and the inflation and distortion of Pygmy’s xenophobia is very entertaining. Palahniuk also cleverly pits totalitarian propaganda against western culture’s laissez-faire attitude which makes a thought-provoking backdrop to the novel’s absurdity.

However, the plot is flimsy and obscured by a string of repetitive jokes that are borderline puerile (the reader is treated to numerous alternative names for breasts). The suspense of belief needed to follow one scene to the next may also be too fantastical for some readers. And the sudden happy-ever-after ending—Pygmy falls in love with “cat sister”, rejects the homeland in favour of America and prevents Operation Havoc from happening—jars with the hatred that precedes it.

Diehard Palahniuk fans will be enthralled but the novel is probably too transgressive for a wider audience. Perhaps this is inconsequential for an author whose book readings are more like rock concerts, and whose fan-based website “The Cult” boasts a membership of 47,000, with over 700,000 page views a month.

Palahniuk’s other novels set a high standard—perhaps this is why Pygmy is ultimately dissatisfying.

Palahniuk’s nine previous novels are Fight Club (made into a film by director David Fincher); Survivor; Invisible Monsters; Choke (made into a film by director Clark Gregg); Lullaby; Diary; Haunted; Rant; and Snuff. He has also published non-fiction works.

Dog Boy by Eva Hornung

Meticulously researched with stingingly simple prose, Hornung creates a disturbing but believable portrayal of a young boy’s adoption by a pack of wild dogs, says Tanya Simmons
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Tanya Simmons
The Guardian , Tuesday 13 October 2009
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Dog Boy
by Eva Hornung 293pp, Text, $32.95

Set in post-perestroika Russia where homelessness and poverty are rife, Dog Boy gives the account of four-year-old Romochka who is abandoned in a cold and desolate Moscow apartment by his mother and uncle. Left to fend for himself, Romochka’s hunger forces him to ignore his mother’s threats of ever leaving the building unattended although he adheres exactly to her advice “Don’t go near people.” On the snow-laden streets, a pale-yellow dog rescues him from a dog attack and he follows the friendly stray to her den in the basement of a deserted church. There, amongst the stench and filth, Romochka satisfies his instinct for survival, suckles his “Mamochka” (little mother) and is kept nourished and warm from the freezing-cold winter.

And so begins Romochka’s existence as a feral dog where he is quick to follow the lead and language of his fellow puppies and older pack members. He learns to communicate through observation and mimicry, using his body rather than words; and is taught to forage, hunt, mark boundaries, attack, defend and understand the pack hierarchy, all under the watchful eye of his protective dog-mother. Sometimes Romochka is ashamed and conflicted by his stubby teeth, small ears and poor sense of smell but gradually he realises his contribution to the pack is unique and important. By balancing his canine skills with his human intellect, Romochka is able to lead his family to survive four Russian winters, street gangs, rival dog packs and the brutal militzia raids to “clean up” the Moscow streets.

Hornung skilfully creates a raw and plausible world; her vivid and matter-of-fact style conjures up the smell, taste and texture of being amongst and belonging to a wild pack of dogs. At times, Hornung’s descriptions are confrontational, even disturbing, but are rich with detail, insightful and ring of authenticity because they omit nothing and are dispassionately told.

In the latter part of the novel, the introduction of dialogue, humans and their theoretical ideas about Romochka’s pack clashes with the simple and primal urgency of dog boy’s world. This deliberate juxtaposition sharply relays the intrusion and ultimate intervention in Romochka’s dog life.

The novel’s themes of identity, alienation and displacement compliment Hornung’s award-winning literary criticism and fiction, and relate to her tireless activism for human rights. But admirably, Hornung’s prose is objective when describing the callous treatment of the Russian homeless and refrains from moralising.

Similarly, Hornung does not sentimentalise the relationships between the dogs and Romochka or romanticise their life. Instead she enables their immense love and strong loyalty to be heart-wrenchingly felt especially when the pack is subject to incredible acts of cruelty and misguided help.

Hornung’s novel was inspired by Ivan Mishukov, a Russian boy who was raised by dogs. She studied Russian for nine months, read extensively and observed dog behaviour before visiting Moscow to complete her research. The result is an astonishing and stark tale of survival that neatly dismantles the construction of humans and dogs, and explores what belonging means.

Hornung is an Australian author of six novels published under the name Eva Sallis. Her first novel, Hiam, won the 1997 Vogel Literary Award and The Marsh Birds won the 2005 Asher Literary Award. She is the co-founder of Australians Against Racism and an advocate for the rights of asylum seekers.

Google Books is swindling my authors and publishing house

An author who I'm working with contacted me during the week:

Not sure if this is your concern - I've just been shown a Google books' link to a book called Ethical Practice for Health Professionals by Heather Freegard - and it's actually the first edition of our textbook.

It is my concern. But not because the link incorrectly leads to the first edition of Jane Grellier and Veronica Goerkes' textbook rather than the Freegard book. I'm concerned because the entire first edition of my authors' textbook is available on Google Books. This first edition is still in print and in copyright.

Google states:

If we've determined that a book is out of copyright, or the publisher or rightsholder has given us permission, you'll be able to page through the entire book from start to finish, as many times as you like.

Ahem! How did Google determine that this book was out of copyright? And no permission was given, thank you very much!

I'm working on the second edition currently and it will be published at the end of the year. But despite this the first edition will continue to be in copyright - it is highly unlikely that permission to have the entire first-edition text online will be given.

Suffice it to say, I've written to Google demanding that they take this unauthorised version of the book down from their website and the senior management of my publishing house is following up the issue further. I wrote four days ago but the material is still available for viewing.

Last year Google agreed to pay US$125 million to authors and publishers to settle two three-year old lawsuits over its scanning of out-of-print but copyright-protected books and placing them online. As a consequence, out-of-print but copyright-protected books now have charges - although it is up to publishers to discover that their books have been placed online and ask for purchase options to be made.

Although the court cases' findings are US-based and do not hold internationally, negotiations are underway between Google Books and Australian publishers. The publishing house I'm employed at has agreed to work with Google Books (with a can't beat 'em, join 'em attitude) but the details are still being finalised and nothing definitive has been decided on.

I've checked out books I've worked on over the last three years and happily none appear in their entirety on Google Books. Interestingly many of the books with higher plate costs I've worked on are not listed which suggests that Google Books' decisions are arbitrary and not even based on market share.

I didn't work on Jane and Veronicas' first edition but I'm very annoyed for them. This is their work displayed free of charge, without royalties being paid. I'm also annoyed for my publishing house because displaying electronic versions of books that are still in print and in copyright is a potential loss of profit - and I'm annoyed for my own sake because loss of profit affects my employer's ability to keep me employed.

The third party will pick up the tab

In Chris Anderson's 2004 article The Long Tail (Wired) he talks about three rules for entertainment business success on the Internet:

1. make everything available
2. cut the price and
3. help consumers find what they want.

His article describes how aggregating the long tail of niche markets is where the money is - an idea which he expands in his book The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business is Selling Less of More published in 2006.

Chris' article was groundbreaking for me as I always thought that across-the-board profit was generated through the popular-blockbuster staples which naturally sidelined subcultural, artistic and unusual products. It was relieving to learn that through individuality there is market power and that the Internet flips the traditional market mechanism through its capacity and distribution powers.

Because I wanted to know more, I looked at Chris' blog, also called The Long Tail, and found other ideas he has. Currently, he is talking most about the concept of "Free" (Video 3:19). In his Wired article earlier this year, Free! Why $0.00 Is the Future of Business, Chris outlines that providing products for free is the new Internet economy, all the winners do it (Google, Yahoo!, Amazon etc.) and the benefits are enormous.

The benefits, as he puts it, are "a three way market. Here a third party pays to participate in a market created by a free exchange between the first two parties."

He points out that we are already familiar with this experience by describing the traditional media market where radio and television are free to air and paid for by advertising. He also highlights that newspapers rely on advertising to cover their costs of print and distribution so that the high prices are not passed on to the consumer.

He admits that advertisers will not pay for everything but describes ways to make money from providing products for free: "selling information about consumers to brand licensing, 'value-added' subscriptions, and direct ecommerce (see How-To Wiki for a complete list)."

In July this year Chris' book about this topic was published. Unsurprisingly, Free: the Future of a Radical Price is available at no cost in electronic and audio format. There is also the option to purchase the physical copy as well.

Disclosure policy -

Following on from week 5's reading on blogging and conflicts of interests I've written my own disclosure policy (with help from disclosure.policy.org which generates a personalised disclosure through a step-by-step process).

I appreciate the ludicrousness of having a policy for a zen-minimalist-type blog that has absolutely no conflict of interest except my personal preferences (my favourite colour is green) and my employment (I work in book publishing) but reading Penelope Trunk's views on blogging and conflicts of interest compelled me to get something down.

Penelope writes a well-polished spin of the truth, and although her post is fascinating (in a I-can't-look-away-from-the-car-crash way) I thought her blog eradicated her credibility and painted her as an exploitative opportunist. The comment by Aussie writer (right near the end) summed up my response to her view that

"[r]eaders should not care about the business dealings of the writers or their publishers."

Aussie writer's response:

"Your argument for not disclosing is self-serving and flawed. I refer you to the cash for comments scandal in Australia."

And so, because Penelope does not accept responsibility (a theme linking to my last blog about defamation on the net), I've knocked up a disclosure policy (um, without having much to disclose...).

This policy is valid from 04 September 2009

This blog is a personal blog written and edited by me. This blog does not accept any form of advertising, sponsorship, or paid insertions. I write for my own purposes. However, I may be influenced by my background, occupation, religion, political affiliation or experience.

As owner of this blog I am not compensated to provide opinion on products, services, websites and various other topics. The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely mine. If I claim or appear to be an expert on a certain topic or product or service area, I will only endorse products or services that I believe, based on my expertise, are worthy of such endorsement. Any product claim, statistic, quote or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer or provider.

This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest. However, I am employed by Cengage Learning and so am naturally biased towards them.

Book reviews in online newspapers - an evaluation of an area of web publishing

The Age’s Book Reviews

The homepage of The Age’s Book Reviews has a clean design where advertisements don’t impede the content. The non-serif font gives an approachable feel and the simple four-colour scheme (red, black, blue and grey) makes skimming and scanning easy. Information is chunked into three columns, providing the reader with the paratext that articles are on the left, book reviews are in the centre and advertising material is on the right.

The book reviews are given half as much space as the articles and less space than the advertising column. But eight out of nine of the reviews have images which draw the reader’s eye—much more than the article section. Each image carries through to the review page in a larger format with a caption but sometimes these captions are not explicit—in ‘Affection’, a quote with no citation is used and who the photograph is of is not explained.

Headlines, dictated by the book’s title, are typically five words and standfirsts are less than 20 words (there are no kickers). What is shown on the homepage is taken directly from the review so content repeats as you move into the review page. Since the headlines use the books’ titles, they make excellent use of keywords, although the standfirsts are not always as successful. Affection’s standfirst is misleading, describing the memoir as arrogant but having an opposite opinion in the review. It also provides no information about the author or content of the book. On the other hand, ‘The True Story of Butterfish’ has a much better standfirst—the author is named and a synopsis of the book is given so the keywords are pinpointed.

Each review is about 1000 words and usually two ‘pages’ long with the option of viewing it as one page. The body text of the reviews does not make use of links, external or otherwise, despite there being ample opportunity to do so—author websites, publishers, other book reviews and so on. In fact, out of nine reviews, there is only one link (to the NGV). There are plenty of cross-promotional links around the review however, mainly to other sections of The Age or Fairfax Media companies (RSVP, Essential Baby and Stayz). Other external links are provided through advertising.

Unfortunately, advertising, often dynamic, is always slapped in the middle of a review which is distracting particularly because the review’s content has to wrap around it. A more elegant solution would be to move the advertisement to the far left and fill the space with the features currently on the right: Find a Book (list of links to the latest reviews) and Today’s Entertainment Coverage (list of links to articles from the Entertainment section of The Age). Ideally, Today’s Entertainment Coverage needs to be replaced with features about books (as does the links to Today’s Top 10 Articles also on the right).

In terms of reader interactivity, The Age has a top-down approach, establishing what is important with virtually no input from readers. The reader is limited to emailing reviews, adding reviews to facebook and del.icio.us, Digging the story and getting a general RSS feed to The Age’s Entertainment section. Because commenting is not available—even links to the most popular book articles and reviews is not available—there is no real reader interactivity. Asking readers for a response and actively seeking out their opinions would allow readers to engage with the website at a deeper level. It would also allow an objectivity that is currently not there.

Overall, The Age’s book section does not offer much in content or variety and reviews are not updated regularly (the latest review is from 16 August, over two weeks ago). Populating the website with content from The Age’s Saturday A2 book section would be a resourceful solution, and adding multimedia and interactive content (blogs, podcasts and videos) would give the reader options and variety. There are also numerous inconsistencies in editorial style (standfirst formatting and location of byline/publication details) and mistakes (incorrect copyright year throughout the pages). These aspects erode the website’s accuracy, authority, credibility, currency, coverage and value.

The New York Times’ Books

The homepage of The New York Times' Books is full of features. Along with reviews, articles, news and essays, a selection of these are: ‘Sunday Book Review’ (main book reviews), ‘The Future of Reading’ (article series on reading and education), ‘Best Sellers’ (best-seller lists), ‘Book Review Podcast’ (one a week since April 2006), ‘Paper Cuts’ (blog about books), ‘Time’s Critics’ (more book reviews) and ‘Browsing Books’ (pages dedicated to specific genres). The breadth and volume of coverage is complimented by imagery, podcasts, slide shows and commenting facilities.

The homepage would be overwhelming if not for the ordered structure and clear delineation between elements. Kickers also help—‘The Future of Reading’, ‘Essay’ and ‘TBR’ (Times Book Review) are used to label what a segment’s niche is. Content is grouped into sections that fall into one of three columns and the colour scheme is simple—black, blue and grey. Although a non-serif font for the body text may work better with this amount of information.

The Sunday Book Review is given the most prominent position on the left-hand side, accentuated by the lead review’s headline having a larger font size and image. Headlines (maximum of eight words) are the titles of books under review—a technique that pins down keywords. The reviews’ standfirsts (typically around 25 words) always name the author and give a brief synopsis of the story, soundly incorporating keywords as they do so. Also included in the teaser information is the author of the book and a byline—a detailed touch—and links to excerpts of the books, blogs and multimedia content.

Clicking on a review takes you to the review page but with a different headline. For example, ‘Strength in What Remains’ takes you to ‘Against the Odds’, the review of the book (1650 words). The standfirst synopsis of the book does not appear in the article itself. Instead, the review leads with an appropriate feature or opinion style. The photo shown on the homepage is carried through and enlarged on the review page with a magnification option and relevant caption. Advertisements are not intrusive and the reader can opt for a one-page view if preferred.

Against the Odds has numerous links in the body text (as do all the reviews) but nothing external to the archives of The New York Times. The insularity of the links is not off-putting as the articles are well written, professional and come from differing viewpoints. However, external links would give greater objectivity to the prose. Nevertheless, the review cleverly makes the most of the newspaper’s database, cross-linking to anything relevant to the book being discussed. This mastery of cross-referencing provides context and extends to a ‘Related’ selection of links on the left-hand side of the review, and a ‘Past Coverage’ and ‘Related Searches’ selection of links at the bottom of the page.

Links included under the Related section are to the author’s website (the only truly external link), an excerpt of the book, a blog post related to the book and a 15-minute podcast of a review of the book by New York radio station WQXR (also owned by The New York Times Company). Although comments are not enabled for reviews (they sometimes are for the articles), there is scope for interaction with a range of share tools (Recommend, Linkedin, Mixx, Permalink, Digg, Myspace, Facebook and Yahoo! Buzz). Annoyingly, the ‘Most Popular – Books’ section shown on the right-hand side of the homepage changes to a general ‘Most Popular’ when on the review page. However, the fact that readers are able to email and blog about book reviews, and that this popularity is recorded is constructive—it’s highly likely that it is used by The New York Times to inform the future content of the website.

Overall, The New York Times is consistent in style and approach, and regularly updated. It makes the most of the resources it has and provides readers with valuable, diverse and intelligent reviews with various interactive and multi-formatted options. The online content also makes the most of its print-media resources, adapting reviews, features and articles from the print newspaper—often exploiting its immediacy by appearing before the print version.

The Guardian’s Books

The Guardian’s Books homepage is visually stimulating—it makes use of large imagery and colours to provide a slick and polished design. The formatting is in a clear readable style that clearly sections all components within features. The choice of pink to edge and highlight also gives the site a contemporary and sophisticated feel. As does the treatment of blogs on the right-hand side which are made to look like book covers—hovering over these ‘blog books’ gives the reader a ten-word summary of the content, a quick and easy alternative to clicking to find out more.

The homepage offers a range of choices to the reader: articles, book reviews, blogs, ‘More from our blogs’, ‘Latest multimedia’ (podcasts and audio), ‘Quizzes’, ‘Book club’, ‘Buy books’, ‘This week’s reviews and features’, and ‘Most viewed in Books’. Many of these features are reader interactive which the Guardian actively encourages as commenting is a staple of the articles and blogs. In fact the sheer number of blogs available—17 options are presented on the homepage—show that interactivity is a priority. Consequently, the homepage feels like a reader-generated website, where there is a great deal of input from readers and content is shaped by their contribution. Bloggers also take the time to respond to comments providing more than a reader-to-reader interaction.

Book-review headlines are determined by the title and author name of the book, and are ten words at most. The standfirsts are summaries of the book being reviewed and usually around 20 words. The names of the book author and the review author are always in the standfirsts, and the overall writing style of the headlines and standfirsts captures all the pertinent keywords. Pictures of the book’s covers, rather than images of the author, are provided which is more relevant to the subject matter of the review than author photographs.

Clicking on the review ‘Juliet, Naked by Nick Hornby’ takes the reader through to the same headline and standfirst, and the book cover image is repeated and enlarged with some publication details as the caption. There is also a discreet option to buy the book at the Guardian bookshop, a subtle cross-promotion. A different standfirst and headline for the review page would be beneficial here but on the whole the review page is crisp and clean, taking design elements from the homepage, and relegating distracting advertising to the side.

In the review’s body text (800 words), there is only one link to the Guardian’s coverage of the author. This is surprising as there is ample room for internal and external links (American singer-songwriter Tucker Crowe, Julie Myerson, Anne Tyler, The Lost Child and so on). However, there are author-related links on the right-hand side and plenty of book links surrounding the review. Refreshingly, most links surrounding the review are book related excluding a GuardianJobs section in the bottom-right-hand corner. The body-text links need to be a slightly bluer in colour as they are difficult to see.

There are no comment options for reviews but Buzz up! Digg it, Clip it, Send to a friend and Share are available. Audio is very common on the Guardian Books homepage but none is available on this review page—a track from Crowe could have been used.

Overall, the Guardian is a fun and funky site with a strong focus on reader input—I particularly like the Not the Booker awards voted on by readers. The reviews are informed and balanced and surrounded by like-minded content.

Google forced to reveal blogger’s identity

In a precedential move, a US court has ordered that Google reveal the identity of a 'slanderous' blogger.

The anonymous 'Skanks in NYC' blog, published a year ago on blogger.com, made malicious statements about model Liskula Cohen. Below is a sample:

“[she's] a psychotic, lying, whoring, still going to clubs at her age, skank.”

The blog has been removed but apparently there were five nasty and vindictive posts dedicated entirely to debasing Cohen's appearance, hygiene and sexual conduct.

The Sydney Morning Herald reported yesterday that Cohen was compelled to sue Google so that the person responsible for the blogs could be revealed.

In court, the blogger's lawyer argued that the blogs "serve as a modern-day forum for conveying personal opinions, including invective and ranting". But the Manhattan judge disagreed and ruled that the blogs were more than "trash talk".

Now that the US supreme court has ruled that Cohen is entitled to the information from Google, she is deliberating about whether to sue the blogger.

Google has assured the public that they:

“sympathise with anyone who may be the victim of cyber bullying ... take great care to respect privacy concerns and will only provide information about a user in response to a subpoena or other court order."

It's difficult to comment on the ruling without having seen the photo content and exactly what was written in the blogs but I do think that cyber-defamation laws eventually need to be introduced. I believe we all have a responsibility about the manner in which we contribute to the Internet and I don't think that extending our real-life laws to cyberland will curb our freedom of speech. I've seen many posts that completely disagree with me but I think defamation on the Internet needs to have legal ramifications. Opinion, of course, is different to slander. What do you think?

PIRs. My thoughts and response to Allan Fels

Thanks for the additional links to recent articles from The Age, Reneespeak. I'm glad you listed Allan Fels' Reading through the Lines, I’ve got a general response to his article…

The PC does not say that repealing PIRs will lead to cheaper books – I don't know how Fels can assert that it does when this is not in their report. He’s made his own theoretical leap (and even if there are savings to booksellers ensuing from an open market there’s no assurance that these will be passed on to the consumer). Perhaps the fact that this is inconclusive is one of the reasons why the federal government has asked for a working group to be formed to respond to the PC report prior to any decisions about PIRs being made. (This is not the sole reason: scrapping PIRs will have large and negative consequences for employment in the industry – 10% shrinkage the PC says; the suggestion from the PC of subsidies instead of PIR protection needs to be developed and explored in greater detail if it is to have any credence; and if PIRs are removed, how to curb the extent of the negative effect on cultural externalities – as the PC terms it – needs to addressed.)

Fels also asserts that the PC report finds books more expensive in Australia than in comparable foreign markets and that this is due to Australian PIRs. Again, another leap, the PC does not state this. Instead, the report consistently mentions that it doesn’t have accurate, current and relevant data to make price comparisons and that comparisons are largely dependent on (amongst other factors) the strength of the Aussie dollar (which in most of 2008-9 made Aussie books on average comparably cheaper). Even the price comparisons that the report does use do not overwhelmingly show that books in Australia are more expensive than the same editions in overseas markets. Many publishers also provided the PC with their own analyses which points to the same result. But perhaps this is off track. After all, when did anyone say that Aussie books were always cheaper (Fel’s second sentence)? Leaving this aside, what the PC report did conclude was that PIRs exert an ‘upward pressure’ on book pricing (NOTE: the PC reached this conclusion through economic theory rather than actual evidence). But this conclusion is different to Fels’ assertion that Australian books are more expensive than in comparable foreign markets and that this is all because of Australian PIRs.

So what’s the problem? If Aussie books can compete in pricing with their foreign counterparts why can’t PIRs be removed? Well, I have a limited understanding of this whole issue (and am readily confused) but I think the crux is this: if PIRs are removed Australia could be inundated with a flood of remaindered stock from foreign markets – stock that foreign markets can’t sell which will be picked up cheaply by book wholesalers and retail chains, and dumped in Australian stores. This remaindered stock, injected into the Aussie market, will mean that there are ‘cheap books’. These dumped books could then potentially compete with Australian products. There is a distinction between these types of books and the price-compared books mentioned earlier – these books will be unsellable product from other markets, their value in their own domestic markets has crashed, so they can now compete with Aussie books at an unbeatable level. Cheaper, yes, but…

From what I can see, most of the content of this cheap supply of books will be crud and there will be no Australian equivalent (same book, different version) so really there is no problem (apart from this crud being read by Aussies potentially at the opportunity cost of other, better Aussie books). But perhaps as Bernard Keane (Crikey) points out we should have faith in the Aussie consumer and in what they will and will not purchase/read. There will be a problem if the dumped books compete with Australian (unremaindered) versions of the dumped books – if there is the same book available from a foreign publisher and it is a lot cheaper, the consumer may not necessarily know what they are missing out on – price will be the only hook.

A primary export designer I work with is often asked to change content of our primary educational textbooks to meet the needs of overseas markets. Over the last two years, these are some of the content modifications she's made:

1) for a book on where milk comes from: remove the udders on a cow as it was too sexually explicit
2) for a book about Ancient Egypt: add tops to the men so nipples and chest are not seen (the men now have toga tops which is historically inaccurate)
3) for a book on building dams: remove the word ‘dam’ from title and in-text citations, ‘dam’ is too close to ‘damn’.

These examples are humorous but sobering. Can you imagine this content reentering our shores and being purchased instead of the original Australian version? This goes beyond ‘mom’, ‘color’, ‘gridiron’ and ‘faucet’…

So, back to Fels. The PC report did not say that removing PIRs will make books in Australia cheaper nor did it say that our price comparisons with like books in foreign markets show that Aussie books are more expensive because of PIRs. Yes, there is the potential that removing PIRs will enable cheap books to be available to Australians but most of these will be the castoff crud not wanted by other territories (why should we?) or, much more dangerously, they will compete in price but not quality of their Australian equivalents. I doubt this dumping will make Australian books cheaper on the whole.

Again, I don’t know extensive amounts about this issue and I do get befuddled so correct me if I’m missing something or oversimplifying. Also, apologies for length – I wasn't going to blog about this issue further as it isn't strictly class content... but I got swept along when writing about it.

Parallel importation of books - what's the issue? Useful links to keep you informed

On 14 July 2009, the Productivity Commission released their final report on Australia's book parallel importation restrictions (PIRs). They disagreed with the numerous submissions on keeping PIRs lodged by Australian writers, illustrators and publishing houses, and instead recommended that the government repeal PIRs for books. The report has created an uproar in the industry and there are many who see the findings as a potential death knell for Australian books and writing.

The educational publisher I work for is diametrically opposed to the recent recommendations, a view shared by most members of the Australian education publishing industry. Many educational publishers believe that the Productivity Commission doesn't understand the textbook market and that repealing PIRs will lead to a sharp decline in the quality and availability of Australian-produced content.

If you are new to this industry issue, a concise and informative piece of writing on the debate, and an outline of the key stakeholders involved (consumers, authors, publishers and retailers), is Sally Murphy's A Layman's Guide to the Cheaper Books Debate.

For those who want a comprehensive look at the controversy, Tim Coronel, the publisher of WBN (Weekly Book Newsletter), provides regularly updated links.

And, just to be balanced, here is what the Coalition for Cheaper Books has to say.