Google Giveth and Google Taketh Away

I'm a Google enthusiast, I admit it. I've switched from Internet Explorer and Firefox to Google Chrome. I enjoy Google Earth. I use Google Docs. I use Google Maps. I run Google Adwords. I blog on Google's Blogger.

But for every wonderful thing Google giveth, Google taketh away. 

Today, literary agent Lynn Chu of Writers Representatives took a microscope to the labyrinthine terms of the recent Google settlement and spelled it out in language even an author can understand .

Chu warns authors to pay attention (all authors who've ever had anything published in the United States) -

(by 5 May 2009) ... every author and publisher in America is supposed to decide whether to "opt in," "opt out," or simply "ignore" a vast compulsory licensing scheme for the benefit of Google.

Given that authors are notorious at procrastination, I am helpfully bullet-pointing the highlights of the article below. But do read the complete article in the Wall Street Journal  titled 'Google's Book SettlementIs a Ripoff for Authors: Why allow a single publisher to throw out a functioning copyright system?'. 

• who are the winners of the settlement? the lawyers get $30 million, the Book Rights Registry gets $ 35 million, and infringed authors? $ 60 a book.
  
  
• "every rights-owner in America is supposed to hand over all their private contract data, on every edition of every work they ever wrote -- and every excerpt permission ever granted to others -- at the peril of losing the money Google will be making on their backs"
  
  
• The Book Rights Registry - Says Chu:

  The Internet was supposed to eliminate middlemen, not pack multiple layers on. The BRR is in fact merely Google's contract negotiation and claims department

  • "Google's erstwhile adversaries are paid off with the aforementioned Book Rights Registry (BRR), which will compete with the U.S. Copyright Office and the federal courts"
  
  
  • "The BRR expects to read everyone's contracts to say who is owed what of Google's revenues -- net again of all its costs, which are sure to be huge"
  
  
• "The U.S. Constitution grants authors small monopolies in their own copyrights. Author market power is talent-based and individual, not collective. This class action seeks to wipe all this out -- just for Google. But U.S. law does not grant any single publisher monopoly power to herd all of us into its list"

Meanwhile, several authors have suddenly woken up to the realisation that books are fair game to the piracy that has previously plagued other media.

Publishers and agents representing the authors J. K. Rowling and Ken Follett were battling last night to get free copies of their novels removed from a Californian website that claims to be the most popular literary site in the world. Read More

Scribd.com has earned the dubious title of the "YouTube for books".

I kind of disagree with Liu's point that the current copyright system is good enough. 

I think it's under siege.

Add: Kristin Nelson of the Nelson Literary Agency posted this advice

Fighting the Sads

Siobhan Dowd has another book out, Solace of the Road

It's my constant companion at the moment, a great way to get the writing juices flowing. I read a little bit, then write a little bit. Then read a little bit. Then write a little bit more.

It's fantastic. How Siobhan Dowd could write.

And though I am so enjoying it, I can't help but feel sad.

Because Siobhan Dowd died in the summer of 2007 and this is it, the last one. Bog Child was the other Siobhan Dowd book published posthumously last year. And I am sad because when I come to the end of this book, there won't be another Siobhan Dowd to look forward to.

And tomorrow morning, the last ever issue of the DFC will plop through my letter box. Oh woe.

And I just got a sad email from Lookybook, the 'Try Before You Buy' picture book website, that it had decided to close. It had been named one of the 50 Best Websites of 2008 by Time.

Sad. That's me.

And then I meet up with friends Sue Eves, whose book The Quiet Woman and the Noisy Dog
is selling very well indeed, and Steve Hartley who you won't have heard of but soon will (Steve has signed a contract with Macmillan for not one, not two, not three but EIGHT books featuring his hero Danny Baker Record Breaker). Correction: it was FOUR books (two stories each)!

Steve and Sue

... and I remember that there is reason to hope and that the point of the whole exercise of trying to get published is that we are in the business for the sheer love it.

And to cheer myself up I watch the trailer for Where the Wild Things are
which was released today.

Google, Google Everywhere

I love that Google is today celebrating the 40th anniversary of Eric Carle's Very Hungry Caterpillar which apparently sells a copy somewhere in the world every 30 seconds.

Today is also the launch of Google's Street View, by which anyone can punch a city post code into Google Maps and see the location in 360 degree photographic views.

The launch of anything that smacks of new technology has of course prompted fear and trembling over issues of privacy, with Google acting quickly to remove objectionable photos. When the service was launched in the US, a new past-time of streetspotting was invented.

The literary possibilities of Google Street View are mind-boggling. Do have a listen to tonight's episode of Front Row (20 March, Friday), the radio arts programme, in which Ian Rankin and Graham Hurley discuss the cons (readers can visit fictional locations and the disconnect between story and reality might might get in the way of the story's believability) and the pros (oooh, the story ideas... Street View as murder alibi ... Street View revealing the future).

And then there's Google Earth. I had a Marketing Big Idea last week - if location is important to your story - like Sarwat Chadda's forthcoming Devil's Kiss which is set in dark and scary corners of London - why not use the new movie-making features of Google Earth and create a tour of your novel's locations? 

If you've written a book that has to do with archaeological digs and ancient civilizations like The Mummy Snatchers of Memphis by my friend Natasha Narayan - Google Earth claims to be able to give you access to the past, "With a simple click, take a look at suburban sprawl, melting icecaps, coastal erosion and more". As well as dive under oceans, etc etc.

There is some muttering that Google's ubiquity, so dangerously Microsoft-like, has pushed the corporation over to the Dark Side ... that Google has betrayed its famous motto, Don't Be Evil.

Are we in danger of being exploited by the Google juggernaut marauding into every corner of our lives?

Perhaps. 

Meanwhile why not exploit everything that Google has to offer first?