If you're looking for an old favorite or a lost “gem,” many long out-of-print titles by popular authors are finally available again. Every week, we feature a handful of titles from the hundreds on our site. Be sure to check out the latest featured titles!
Despite the fact that most trade book publishers are paying authors a 25% net royalty (25% of what the publisher actually receives after retailer discount), Random House UK is offering considerably less than that - indeed, considerably less than what its own US sister-house is paying. In October 2008 Random House US set its e-book royalty at 25% net and four months later Simon & Schuster followed suit.
Some agents are so ticked off at Random UK that they've stopped offering books to them. "I find it completely ludicrous that one branch of an international publisher is trying to say that 17.5% or 20% is the norm, when every other publisher in the UK has gone public on 25%," Carole Blake of Blake Friedmann is quoted as saying. Another says, "Random House is the only publisher not offering 25% as its best standard rate but not all agents are getting 25% from all publishers." "Industry sources said that a figure of 25% was becoming standard, though some admitted that it could be 'variable'," writes Benedicte Page in the article.
(As a matter of full disclosure, E-Reads pays a 50% net royalty to all authors.)
It's probably a good idea right now to make something clear to authors, agents, and other members of the book community: it is against the law for publishers to collude in the setting of royalty rates, at least in the United States. Though 25% of net receipts may be settling down as the the standard e-book royalty, it would be in restraint of trade for publishers to sit down in a room and agree on that rate. Though we often, in negotiations, agree on a "standard" royalty for an adult hardcover - 10% of the list price on the first 5,000 copies sold, 12.5% on the next 5,000, and 10% on all sales thereafter - there is no written code fixing the royalties at those rates. If there were, it would be considered price-fixing. Same goes for e-book royalties.
Random House UK defends its position by asserting that "The e-book market is still a very young market which will continue to evolve and our royalty rate is just part of an overall very attractive author package."
We can't comment one way or the other on how attractive the rest of Random UK's author package is, but we can certainly support its right to pay 2/3rds of what the rest of the industry calls standard; we will certainly support them if they decide to pay twice what the rest of the industry calls standard. What we don't support is agents and authors rolling over and accepting a "standard" royalty. Any time a publisher tells you "That's the going rate," ask where is that written? I guarantee you won't find it written in the minutes of the American Association of Publishers or any other book industry trade organization.
More importantly, it should not even be an unwritten law.
Reading Fine Print: What Are The Terms For The Books You Buy?
This week, thanks to the retraction of 1984 from Kindle customers and the uproar/apology that ensued, there are a lot of people raising the flag of consumer rights for ebooks. It seems the corporate expectations for control are revealing themselves to be out-of-step with the popular expectations of ownership. But maybe we get the service we deserve. How complicit are we in enabling the controls that irk us?
When we quoted Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, who said "The real issue here is Amazon's use of DRM and proprietary software. They have unacceptable power over users," we knew that he had touched on a sensitive nerve.
But I'm afraid I disagree with Peter Brown and his perspective of the broader implications. And while the Reddit discussion is engrossing, there's not much being said about one little word.
Liability.
When Peter Brown says Amazon has "unacceptable power," the truth is that we grant companies this power when customers accept the opaque and deliberately over-protective terms of use that we all too often gloss over to get to the good stuff as quickly as possible.
How many Kindle owners have read the terms that state:
Use of Digital Content. Upon your payment of the applicable fees set by Amazon, Amazon grants you the non-exclusive right to keep a permanent copy of the applicable Digital Content and to view, use, and display such Digital Content an unlimited number of times, solely on the Device or as authorized by Amazon as part of the Service and solely for your personal, non-commercial use. Digital Content will be deemed licensed to you by Amazon under this Agreement unless otherwise expressly provided by Amazon.
Changes to Service. Amazon reserves the right to modify, suspend, or discontinue the Service at any time, and Amazon will not be liable to you should it exercise such right.
Termination. Your rights under this Agreement will automatically terminate without notice from Amazon if you fail to comply with any term of this Agreement. In case of such termination, you must cease all use of the Software and Amazon may immediately revoke your access to the Service or to Digital Content without notice to you and without refund of any fees. Amazon's failure to insist upon or enforce your strict compliance with this Agreement will not constitute a waiver of any of its rights.
It may seem Draconian, but essentially Amazon is stating that it has rights, too, to protect itself from companies or individuals using its service. Without those protections, Amazon and other companies would have little incentive to partner-up with new technologies that are ripe with the opportunity to exploit, harm, and cause serious problems without strict legalese behind them.
I think the digital reading experience provided by the Kindle and Amazon cannot be equated with older notions about ownership and traditional physical books. The digital service industry is built around licenses, permissions, and tacit agreements about copyright. What would the Kindle be without its 3G cell phone service (a special license), or the internet cloud functionality of Whispernet, which is a service with terms of use agreements?
When we buy a book in a system comprised of those complex arrangements, what we're really doing is licensing the book for our use so long as those terms are offered. This isn't how we traditionally think about shopping for goods. But in the last 30 years, our society is increasingly becoming familiar with this arrangement, whether it's music or movies or software. It's renting disguised as ownership. We have a hard time acknowledging that this is in fact happening under our noses while we stick to antiquated ideas of entitlement.
It may not seem fair, especially to those who like to reverse engineer and repurpose everything they purchase, but it is a perfectly valid business objective. However, where the business objective comes undone is in enforcement. DRM and unexpected retractions aren't the only enforcement companies use. It can get much more heavy-handed.
As Stephen Fry recently lamented about copyright law, the prosecutions used to criminalize young users are obviously both overzealous and unfair in most cases. A single teenager stealing music doesn't deserve a worse financial penalty than most white-collar criminals with deliberate intent to profit.
The truth is that the intent of most people breaking their terms of use is not to profit, but to enjoy an experience or connection with artists.
But that's not always the case. It may be the most popular reason, but there are always sneaky deviations. And so enters the legalese of terms of use, which try to foreshadow any and all possible infringements and damages. By inducing you to quickly accept their terms, they try to stave off worse case scenarios that could bankrupt a company with litigation. And there's the rub: we want the toys and media these companies develop but we must risk that accepting their terms might not be in our best interests. Everytime we agree to unread terms of use (and we do, don't we?), we may be complicit in feeding that beast that can bite us. And what about the free media that has no such terms - are we all willing to take a risk that we trust free media to cause us no harm, with no recourse if it does? It's a murky problem in these dark days of DRM.
A visitor to our website recently posted this comment in connection with what we call The Orwell Kindle Caper:
Yeah, I did not see a big problem here. As long as customers got a refund, no big deal. As far as the possibility of Amazon arbitrarily deleting content they actually had a right to provide in the first place - I don't ever see that happening. They do actually want customers, after all.
Sorry, pal - it's a big deal. There are some who not only think Amazon's ability to reach into customers' Kindles is a big problem, they are genuinely terrified by the prospect of far graver abuses. Because it's not just about taking back our e-books but taking back our fundamental liberties. At least that's the way technology columnist Farhad Manjoo sees it, and he's stated the case with chilling logic in a blog posted on Slate.
Here's Manjoo's position in a nutshell:
"The worst thing about this story isn't Amazon's conduct; it's the company's technical capabilities. Now we know that Amazon can delete anything it wants from your electronic reader. That's an awesome power, and Amazon's justification in this instance is beside the point. As our media libraries get converted to 1's and 0's, we are at risk of losing what we take for granted today: full ownership of our book and music and movie collections.
Manjoo builds on this disturbing premise. Here are a few excerpts to keep you awake tonight:
"If Apple or Amazon can decide to delete stuff you've bought, then surely a court—or, to channel Orwell, perhaps even a totalitarian regime—could force them to do the same. Like a lot of others, I've predicted the Kindle is the future of publishing. Now we know what the future of book banning looks like, too."
"Most of the e-books, videos, video games, and mobile apps that we buy these days day aren't really ours. They come to us with digital strings that stretch back to a single decider—Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, or whomever else."
"In Amazon's view, the books you buy aren't your property—they're part of a "service," and Amazon maintains complete control of that service at all times. Amazon has similar terms covering downloadable movies and TV shows, as does Apple for stuff you buy from iTunes."
"In The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It, Harvard law professor Jonathan Zittrain argues that such "tethered" appliances give the government unprecedented power to reach into our homes and change how our devices function."
"The difference between today's Kindle deletions and yesteryear's banning is that the earlier prohibitions weren't perfectly enforceable."
"Amazon deleted books that were already available in print, but in our paperless future—when all books exist as files on servers—courts would have the power to make works vanish completely."
"The power to delete your books, movies, and music remotely," Manjoo concludes, "is a power no one should have."
Does he have a prescription for reversing this potential erosion of our liberties? "Here's one way around this," he writes. "Don't buy a Kindle until Amazon updates its terms of service to prohibit remote deletions. Even better, the company ought to remove the technical capability to do so, making such a mass evisceration impossible in the event that a government compels it."
In light of Manjoo's well argued contentions, a threatened class action lawsuit against Amazon reported by Publishers Lunch might bring some of these issues to the forefront of our consciousness.
So yes, faithful correspondent, the Orwell Kindle Caper is indeed a big deal. It's a very, very big deal.
Orwell Kindle Caper: Did Amazon Do the Right Thing?
Publishers Lunch's Michael Cader has commented in depth on Amazon's yanking of unauthorized uploads of two George Orwell books, 1984 and Animal Farm. Cader's views are particularly cogent. In fact I've seen a lot of cogent commentary. What I haven't seen is a contrarian viewpoint defending Amazon. Amazon needs defending? Read on.
Despite all the e-ink spilled over Amazon's seemingly high-handed act of reaching into everyone's Kindle and vaporizing their Orwells, nobody seems to be trying to understand Amazon's motivation let alone support it. Amazon certainly didn't help by failing to apologize or even explain, thus turning a heavy-handed gaffe into a public relations black eye. Nevertheless, we owe it to Amazon to imagine what they - or their lawyers - might have been thinking when they sent down the order to zap the Orwells.
I said lawyers and that's the key. If I were Mr. Amazon (hmm, who could that be?) I would be gravely concerned about my company's liability for infringing on someone else's copyright. Furthermore I would be concerned that those who purchased the copyrighted work from my website might be liable as well, and my actions - simply offering the books for sale - might be responsible for my customers getting sued. Were these infringements inadvertent? Sure. Would that exculpate you and me from a legal action brought by an aggrieved copyright owner? Not necessarily. Ignorance of the law has never shielded the innocent from being drawn into lawsuits. Would you like to be named as a John Doe in an infringement suit? I don't think so. Would I (Mr. Amazon, that is) want to show good faith to the copyright owners by recalling the unauthorized product? My mouthpieces say Yeah, do it now and apologize later.
I haven't seen the communications between Amazon and Kindle owners informing them their books had been yanked, but had Amazon emailed customers saying "We're doing this for your own good so you don't get sued," it might have gone far to snatch some good will from the jaws of intense embarrassment. As it was, Amazon's conduct was lead-footed clumsy, and offering credit towards another purchase just didn't make up for the sense of violation most Kindlelach felt when they woke up to discover their Orwells had vanished. It's still not too late for an explanation (I've just given them one) and apology.
There. I've defended Amazon. But it was damn hard work. Can I go back to picking on them?
Barack Obama Stands at Door of No Return Through Which Slave Girl Ama Passed
"I am a human being; I am a woman; I am a black woman; I am an African. Once I was free; then I was captured and became a slave; but inside me, I have never been a slave, inside me here and here, I am still a free woman.”
This defiant declaration is made by Ama, the eponymous heroine of a stunning novel of the Atlantic slave trade by Ghanian author Manu Herbstein which E-Reads published as an original - one of the few originals it has ever undertaken - in 2002. In validation of our judgment, it was awarded the Commonwealth Prize for Best First Book of that year.
We immediately thought of Herbstein's heroine, who has drawn comparison to Kunta Kinte, protagonist of Alex Haley's Roots, when we learned that President Obama planned to travel to Ghana. There he and his family visited a site known to every African American family that has investigated its African origins. Here is how the New York Times's Peter Baker reported it:
"His one-day stop blended his vision of the future with echoes of the past. He stood in the Door of No Return at Cape Coast Castle, a notorious slave port perched on the windswept sea here where men who looked like him were once held in dungeons until they were marched in shackles to waiting ships. He brought his wife, Michelle, a descendant of slaves, and their daughters, Malia and Sasha.
"Mr. Obama, rarely one to display emotion, seemed especially sober. He said the castle reminded him of the Buchenwald concentration camp and underscored the existence of “pure evil” in the world.
“'Obviously, it’s a moving experience, a moving moment,'” he said. “'As painful as it is, I think that it helps to teach all of us that we have to do what we can to fight against the kinds of evils that, sadly, still exist in our world.'”
As Barack Obama toured Ghana he was greeted by chants of "Yes We Can!" We wonder what he would say to Ama if he had a chance to bring her back through that door. Perhaps it would be the same thing he said to the people of Ghana: “You can do that. Yes, you can. Because in this moment, history is on the move.”
We asked Manu Herbstein, author of Ama, to record his personal impressions of President Obama's visit. You may read his thought-provoking essay here.
Richard Curtis
**************************** Ama
Thrust into a foreign land, passed from owner to owner, stripped of her identity. This is the life of Nandzi, who was given the name Ama, a name strange to her and her tribal culture. A life of struggle and resignation, bondage and freedom, passion and indifference, intense love and remorseless hate. Though forced into desperation, Ama never lets her soul be consumed by fear. While the stories of individual slaves have been blurred into one mass, Ama’s story personifies the experience of eighteenth-century Africans in an unforgettable way. Her entrancing story of defiance and spiritual fire starts from the day she is brutally seized, raped, and enslaved, and ends with her breathing the pure air of freedom. Ama is a deeply engrossing and colorful novel, packed with violence, sex, and action. The resiliency of her spirit will grip readers from the first page to the last of Manu Herbstein’s spellbinding novel. One reviewer said she wished she could award Ama six stars. Read this and other stunning reviews of Ama.
To read an unforgettable scene from Ama, click here. ********************************** 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.
A popular tune reminds us that "The best things in life are free." It lists among other benefits the moon, the stars, the flowers in spring and the robins that sing. Omitted from the lyrics is information, because there are a lot of people who don't think free information is one of the best things in life. In fact "Free" has become one of the nastier four-letter words in the English language, or at least one of the most controversial.
Two authors, Chris Anderson and Corey Doctorow, have invested a good deal of their time (and ours) attempting to redefine free, not merely as an abstract concept but as a template for action. I'll state my view upfront: I agree with economist Milton Friedman who said "There is no such thing as a free lunch." Free always has a price, and anyone who believes otherwise will end up either paying it or sticking someone else with the bill. I will even go so far as to say this is an immutable law.
But read on and judge for yourself.
As digital media mature and the financial stakes in the e-book industry soar on a double-digit trajectory, a task force of businesspeople, entrepreneurs and managers, backed by righteously indignant writers, musicians and artists is confronting a generation of Web users that stubbornly refuses to pay for content.
Some members of this generation grew up with a strong sense of entitlement; some simply have little or no comprehension of copyright; still others, taking Robin Hood as their role model, deliberately and defiantly hack protected files or download pirated content to get around the law, asserting their right to liberate it from capitalist exploiters. And still others are, simply, thieves. They all march under the banner "INFORMATION WANTS TO BE FREE" or sport the "Copyleft" symbol displayed here (I'm not sure if Copyleft is copyrighted). Media news reports daily clashes with content providers tired of seeing the fruits of their creativity dissipated, given away or stolen.
The slogan, the movement and the tension between free and commercial date back to the dawn of the modern computer era, indeed to the dawn of copyright protection itself when the conflict between content creators and legitimate users (like scholars) was resolved in a complex body of law that governs intellectual property rights to this day.
Standing between these clashing armies is a contingent of men and women dedicated to understanding the relationship between content given away and content sold. Their observations - some scientific, some anecdotal - have begun to yield some thought-provoking hypotheses that might shape e-business strategies in the next generation. Few of them have as much to say as Chris Anderson, editor-in-chief of Wired and bestselling author of The Long Tail. Anderson's book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, has just been published, and an interview with him conducted byPublishers Weekly's Andrew Richard Albanese reveals just how complex the word - and the concept - is. Free, Anderson states, is "a word with economic, psychological, historical meaning, a word with incredible misunderstanding and paradoxical diversions in definition."
The first thing that strikes you about the book's title is its subtitle. Free is a price? That's hard enough to absorb, but free as a radical price is a real head-scratcher.
Anderson says the definition of free as the opposite of paid is an artificial one. If it were not, how do we explain that people are making money giving products and services away? The answer is to view free as adding value to products that are offered for sale. We've often referred to the Gillette Razor model of giving away the razor but selling the blades. That concept can be applied to just about any product or service, and indeed that's just what is happening. Anderson employs a word we've heard a lot of lately, "freemium," meaning "using free to market paid." The biggest misunderstanding of my work," he tells Publishers Weekly, "is that I believe everything should be free. Not the case! Free should be a price point in the marketplace, but the free stuff should market the paid stuff. "
You would think so. But as Malcolm Gladwell points out in his review of the book in The New Yorker, "...in the middle of laying out what he sees as the new business model of the digital age Anderson is forced to admit that one of his main case studies, YouTube, “has so far failed to make any money for Google.
"Why is that? Because of the very principles of Free that Anderson so energetically celebrates. When you let people upload and download as many videos as they want, lots of them will take you up on the offer. That’s the magic of Free psychology: an estimated seventy-five billion videos will be served up by YouTube this year. Although the magic of Free technology means that the cost of serving up each video is “close enough to free to round down,” “close enough to free” multiplied by seventy-five billion is still a very large number. A recent report by Credit Suisse estimates that YouTube’s bandwidth costs in 2009 will be three hundred and sixty million dollars. In the case of YouTube, the effects of technological Free and psychological Free work against each other."
In other words, free is simply the glamorous side of capitalism that we prefer to see. But it's really an illusion. In capitalism as in Newtonian physics, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. If you're getting something free, someone else is paying for it.
Another name heard most frequently in connection with free is Corey Doctorow, the Canadian science fiction author, blogger and (depending on which side of the controversy you're on) either a hero or a subversive. His articulate efforts to shake up the traditional publishing establishment have placed him on the leading edge of the digital paradigm shift. By putting his money where his mouth is he has singlehandedly altered our thinking about what works and what no longer works in the book industry.
Doctorow's latest experimental venture exemplifies his philosophy. According to Locus, the trade publication of the fantasy and science fiction world, Doctorow's latest short story collection, A Little Help, will be self-published in at least four different editions: "A free Creative Commons-licensed online edition in various formats; a free audio-book 'featuring high-quality readings by a variety of voice-actor friends'; a print-on-demand trade paperback with five variant covers; and a limited edition hardcover to be sold in the $100-$250 range'...in batches of 10. The hardcover will feature bound-in SD cards or USB sticks including the e-book and audiobooks, and unique-to-each-volume endpapers made of signed and annotated paper ephemera by Doctorow's writer friends," Locus reports.
He will also produce a "super-premium" edition of one copy, including a story written specifically for the purchaser, for $10,000 (don't bother, it's already sold!). He will offer custom editions for conferences and other events with cover art of the organization's choice, for a premium price. He will donate 10% of income from the book to Creative Commons, a non-profit organization dedicated to promoting the licensed sharing of creative works.
"There're plenty of reasons to do this," says Doctorow, "but for me, the most interesting one is the ability to empirically test some of the oft- bandied hypotheses about 21st century publication, the spectrum that runs from 'Self-publication is a narcissistic money-pit that absorbs your time and money without returning as much as a real publishing deal could' to 'Publishers are obsolete dinosaurs and writers can do just as well going it alone.'"
Though some of this sounds positively Marxo-communo-anarcho-iconoclasto (Wikipedia says his parents were Trotskyist activists and he campaigned for nuclear disarmament and Greenpeace as a child), we cannot overlook the good old capitalistic enterprise underlying his experiment. By interweaving free and paid - freemium - Corey Doctorow is the poster child for Chris Anderson's theories.
Can't Sue for Libel in US? Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World
Next time you visit London, 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.
What's it all about? "Unlike in the United States, where plaintiffs have to prove that the defendant's statement is willfully false and defamatory," writes Salil Tripathi in Wall Street Journal Europe, "the burden of proof is reversed in Britain. According to U.K. libel laws, the plaintiff has to show only that the statement harms his reputation -- which is the case with almost any accusation, true or false. It is the defendant who must then prove that his allegations were not libelous."
Because of this radical difference between the British (guilty until proven innocent) and American (innocent until proven guilty) approaches to libel, American authors and publishers and their lawyers have deliberately withheld UK publication rights to many books that might give offense to rich and/or powerful persons or entities that might bring a lawsuit in a British court. If you have any doubts that this is a sword hanging over the neck of every author and journalist, some examples will erase them. You can find them in Tripathi's article or this one in the New York Times, Britain, a destination for "libel tourism" by Doreen Carvajal.
If you're wondering why I've refrained from identifying the plaintiffs it's because, frankly, I'm afraid of being sued. This blog is read worldwide and it's all too likely that some litigious bastard who objects to being called - well, a litigious bastard - would take offense and haul me into a British court, tie me up for years and bankrupt me with legal bills (including the plaintiff's) and damages.
So, you see, this cruel, stupid and toxic provision of English law has done its job on me, just as it will do on you should you venture over the line. And what does "venture over the line" mean? It means that if even a single copy of your US edition finds its way to English soil, you're potentially liable.
Recently, two New York State officials proposed a bill that would render foreign libel judgments unenforceable "unless," as it was reported, "the country in which they are made had free speech protections similar to the First Amendment." And the New York Times ran an editorial supporting such a measure. "If authors believe they are too vulnerable," the editorial concluded, "they may be discouraged from taking on difficult and important topics, like terrorism financing, or from writing about wealthy and litigious people. That would not only be bad for writers, it would be bad for everyone."
The citizens of our nation have made terrible sacrifices, include the shedding of their blood, to defend our Constitutionally guaranteed right of free speech. That a foreign country, let alone the very one in which the foundations of democracy were forged, could have a license to reach into our homes and workplaces and deprive us of our most sacred right is intolerable and unconscionable. I wish I could say it is also unimaginable, but in fact this outrage is being perpetrated on our countrymen - on your fellow authors - as I write this. Every writer, agent and publisher organization must combat it. The British laws that foster this disgrace must be repealed. What is the Authors Guild, the American Publishers Association, the Association of Authors' Representatives, the American Civil Liberties Union, PEN and other rights organizations doing about it?
Richard Curtis
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times.
Let's test your RQ - your rudeness quotient. On a scale of 1= No Problem and 10=Hanging at Dawn Without Benefit of a Trial, rate the following:
You go to a business lunch and your dining companion puts a BlackBerry on the table and checks it compulsively throughout the meal.
While you're conducting a seminar you notice that half the attendees are staring at smartphones and some are working them with their thumbs.
You're out on a date and you reach out to grasp your lover's hand, but there's a cell phone in it.
Your wife is discussing resort plans for your second honeymoon. She asks you something important. You ask her to repeat what she said because you were too absorbed checking fantasy baseball scores on your Palm Pre.
The bored concertgoer beside you is checking his email during a tender pianissimo passage of your favorite symphony.
These vignettes exemplify an evolving crisis in etiquette prompted by a new generation of smartphones and other handheld communication devices. New York Times reporter Alex Williams has chronicled the challenge of holding the social fabric together while gamers, bloggers, tweeters, and email checkers succumb to the temptation, if not the compulsion, to indulge their private pursuits in public.
Obviously your RQ depends on which side of the device you're on. "A spirited debate about etiquette has broken out" Williams writes. "Traditionalists say the use of BlackBerrys and iPhones in meetings is as gauche as ordering out for pizza. Techno-evangelists insist that to ignore real-time text messages in a need-it-yesterday world is to invite peril." Like it or not, the field is tilting in the direction of the techno-evangelists. Williams reports that a third of some 5300 workers pulled by a job listings website said "they frequently checked e-mail in meetings." However, out of those that do, "Nearly 20 percent said they had been castigated for poor manners regarding wireless devices."
You may be lucky to get away with mere castigation. Employees have been fired when caught using their device frivolously. Business leaders instruct attendees to turn off all electronic devices at meetings on pain of ostracism or worse, and visitors to President Obama's Oval Office are required to leave their BlackBerrys with his secretary (though its well known the President himself is addicted to his). Fistfights have broken out in theaters over cellphones ringing at critical moments in a performance.
And inappropriate use of a device can be fatal. A growing number of car crashes involved drivers talking on cellphones or looking at text message screens, and these practices are being banned in several states. A fatal train accident in California was traced to the engineer's being distracted by text messages.
And concentration on the screen of your gadget instead of the eyes of your beloved is wreaking havoc in relationships and can contribute to breaking up. On the other hand, if you're determined to break up with someone, a cell phone can come in handy. A Malaysian government official notified his wife that he was divorcing her - via cell phone. (An Islamic court overruled him, but nice try, huh?) You can read both sides of the debate in Mind Your BlackBerry or Mind Your Manners. Then let's review the score on our RQ quiz. How'd you do?
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.
Authors: Are Your Readers Zoning Out on You? It May Not Be Your Fault
Like many publishing professionals I've trained myself to step outside of my mind while I read a manuscript and monitor the intensity of my involvement in the work. In a perfect reading experience my disbelief, in the famous phrase of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, will be willingly suspended from beginning to end and I will never become conscious that there is a world outside of the one I am reading about. Unfortunately, perfect reading experiences are as rare as perfect experiences in every other field of endeavor.
And so, sooner or later as I turn the pages of a manuscript, I will become aware of a police siren or the sound of a television program in the next room, and the spell of the book I'm reading will be broken. If it's a good book I'll plunge back in and soon lose myself again. If it isn't, my monitor will sound with growing frequency. I will make a mental note of the places where my attention flagged so that I can help the author analyze where he or she lost me.
Non-professional readers - the public at large, that is - may not have the same powers of self-observation, but they have little trouble speaking up when a book fails to hold their attention. "Boring." "Couldn't finish it." "Put it down, never picked it up again."
In most cases the responsibility for failure to keeping readers interested rests with the author. But not always. An article by Carl Zimmer in Discover magazine informs us that distractability is far more normal than we may realize. Zimmer cites an experiment conducted by a team of University of California Santa Barbara psychologists led by Jonathan Schooler. The test had to do with a book, and not just any book: "In 2005 he and his colleagues told a group of undergraduates to read the opeing chapters of War and Peace on a computer monitor and then to tap a key whenever they realized they were not thinking about what they were reading. On average, the students reported that their minds wantered 5.4 times in a 45-minute session."
Wandering minds are one things, but zoning out completely is quite another. Here's what Schooler and his colleagues discovered:
"Schooler and Smallwood, along with Merrill McSpadden of the University of British Columbia, tested the effect of zoning out by having a test group read a Sherlock Holmes mystery in which a villain used a pseudonym. As people were reading the passages discussing this fact, the researchers checked their state of attentiveness. Just 30 percent of the people who were zoning out at the key moments could give the villain’s pseudonym, while 61 percent of the people who weren’t zoning out at those moments succeeded."
One of the most striking discoveries repoat imbibing a moderate amount of alcohol actually sharpened concentration. However, before you reach for the vodka bottle, note that there is evidence that a wandering mind offers many significant benefits. "The regions of the brain that become active during mind wandering belong to two important networks," Zimmer explains. "One is known as the executive control system. Located mainly in the front of the brain, these regions exert a top-down influence on our conscious and unconscious thought, directing the brain’s activity toward important goals."
"The other regions belong to another network called the default network. In 2001 a group led by neuroscientist Marcus Raichle at Washington University discovered that this network was more active when people were simply sitting idly in a brain scanner than when they were asked to perform a particular task. The default network also becomes active during certain kinds of self-referential thinking, such as reflecting on personal experiences or picturing yourself in the future."
So, next time you find your mind drifting off while reading a book, it is appropriate for you to ask yourself whether it's the author's fault for failing to keep you involved; or is it, rather, just you reflecting on a matter of great importance or solving a problem you couldn't master before you started reading.
Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by Discover magazine.
Despite the fact that most trade book publishers are paying authors a 25% net royalty (25% of what the publisher actually receives after retailer discount), Random House UK is offering considerably less than that - indeed, considerably less than what its own US sister-house is paying. In October 2008 Random House US set its e-book royalty at 25% net and four months later Simon & Schuster followed suit.
