The Business of Publishing

It is somewhat sad, but we can see how this is going to work: the girl you’re trying to score with calls, all excited. “You’ll never believe this, but Kurt Vonnegut will be coming to my dinner party. You’ll be sitting right next to him — how cool is that? You can talk about Welcome to The Monkeyhouse all night.” It is only after she hangs up that you realize that your little white lie has come back to haunt you. You were trying to impress her with your intellectual intellectualness and hoped that she’d never heard of the book

If you pay attention (and surely you do), you know that the World of Patents is where the strangest and most dangerous battles are fought. Patents are dangerous because they don’t necessarily involve things as much as ideas. You cannot copyright an idea, but you can patent one. Appropriate caveats duly noted. This plays out all the time in the world of technology: overly broad ideas are patented and held like gold* until someone else builds something similar and makes lots of money. It is especially interesting when the patent is filed long after the technology has been in place.

Last week, someone mentioned that Microsoft is starting its own digital library project — yes, kids, we’re sitting on the sidelines of what may become the world’s most fascinating* pissing match; let’s call it “My Digital Library Is Bigger Than Yours”. Despite the legal opposition, we’re putting our money on Google. Call us old fashioned, but we believe companies that primarily do data indexing are better suited to the task than companies that sort of do data indexing. . .in addition to everything else. Focus, people, focus! Microsoft is also playing it interestingly safe. Last week’s correspondent mentioned something about

Some of you may recall a post or six where we discussed the notion that consumers really want to consume entertainment in the manner most convenient for them. For example, most of the world wants MP3s they can migrate between machines without a hassle. What does the music industry do? Anything but. And then they grumble when iTunes rules the world. One would think life lessons would be learned; one would be waiting for proof this happened. And so it goes — the publishing industry is terrified of the Google Print program. The motion picture industry sees pirates under the

It stands to reason that more than a few authors and publishers support Google’s book scanning initiative. We once took a statistics class and there was a technical term for people like this. It will likely come to us next week after our attention has moved on. Wired tracks down several authors and gets a sense of where they stand on the controversy. While we are pretending to focus on authors who favor the project, it was the comment of one that struck us the most: “Listing my book in a cybercatalog isn’t the problem,” wrote Ron Franscell, author of