The post from Thursday about the Google “windfall” provoked a lot of information sources to help me understand the settlement, large parts of which I clearly did not. We’ll go over the answers I got (as I understand them; my understanding seems to be a moving target…) to the questions Michael Cairns and I posed […]
Archives for April 2009
The Google settlement and unanswered questions, particularly about the windfall
Michael Cairns and I have both been frustrated with most of the conversation surrounding the Google Book Search settlement. The principal concerns of most of the participants in the dialogue seem to be: 1. Has Google unfairly captured a monopoly on some content? 2. Has the “class” of “orphan authors” been dealt with fairly, since […]
A serious issue for big publishers
The Google settlement brings into bold relief what has been a quiet issue for book publishers, particularly the biggest ones. They are largely in the dark about what rights they own. It is not really hard to understand why they’re in this position and it isn’t really anybody’s “fault”, but it sure is a mess. […]
Times Book Review on advances, and related thoughts
The NY Times Book Review published a piece on advances online today to which I was first pointed by Twitter early this morning. I couldn’t tell whether author Michael Meyer was “for ’em or agin’ ’em”. On the one hand, he seemed to suggest that publishers are inclined to overpay, and he cites Public Affairs head […]
A technology that could unlock a door to the future
Michael Cairns blogged yesterday about a deal SharedBook has just made with ourenergypolicy.org to use an annotation technology SharedBook has. SharedBook is a client and I spent some time this morning getting updated by CEO Caroline Vanderlip about this new technology. This is wikipedia-type capability with a spin that publishers and authors will really like. […]