Supreme Court Says No to Copyright Law Review

From MediaPost:

The Supreme court has refused to review a case that may have resulted in declaring an element of copyright law unconstitutional. (Lots of 'ifs' there). From the article:

In the case, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle challenged the copyright protection given to so-called "orphan" works, or material for which the owner can't be found. Currently, if Kahle or other Web companies post such material, but the owner later steps forward and sues, the companies can't defend themselves on the grounds that they couldn't locate the owner. Kahle, represented by the Center for Internet and Society at Stanford, had hoped to change that by arguing that the law protecting orphan works--passed before widespread Internet access--violated the First Amendment.

News From England: New Fairy Tales

The UK produces a number of great newspapers. In recent years, the larger national newspapers have produced their respective big versions on Saturday rather than Sunday. This allows readers to meander over the paper through the entire weekend. All continue to publish on Sunday but it is the Saturday version that is my preference. Leaving London on Saturday after spending two weeks with the family, Mrs PND and I loaded up on three of the big dailies.

There is a lot of publishing industry and book related news in these newspapers. This weekend The Times reported on the ranking of the top 50 best post war British writers. Philip Larkin was ranked at the top of the list for those who care. Personnally, I only have a casual interest in lists like these. I think the composition of these lists is subject to whim and justification is hard to fathom. Here is how they put it: "Because there is no scientific method for making such a list in the correct order, we applied no scientific method. But we considered a number of factors — sheer quality of writing, longevity, lasting impact and, naturally, commercial success." The Times asked a number of current authors to write some of the profiles which is an interesting twist.

Other interesting news in The Times was the news that the BBC is developing several bo0k derived projects. Unknown in the US, Arthur Ransom wrote a series of adventure titles for boys and girls refered to as Swallows and Amazons. I found these titles when I was eight or nine and loved them. The BBC is close to gaining options on all 12 titles. From the article:

Inspired by the success of The Dangerous Book for Boys, the BBC is betting that camping, fishing and messing about in dinghies will seem as thrillingly exotic to modern children as any special-effects-laden superhero movie. The producers believe that the resourceful young heroes of Swallows and Amazons and the book’s idyllic Lake District setting possess an allure that they did not have when the tale was last filmed in 1974, before childhood hobbies became as sedentary, solitary and technology-driven as they are today.

Unknown to me until I read this article was that Ransom married Trotsky's secretary and spied for the Bolsheviks. Who knew?

The BBC is also broadcasting new versions of old fairytales. This effort is similar to their ShakespeaRe-Told series which ran on BBC American early last year. The BBC will broadcast Rapunzel on Thursday in the UK and I suspect it will be here soon. From The Times tv guide:

After the success of their updated Chaucer and Shakespeare dramas, the BBC have set their cross hairs on the fairy tails of the Brothers Grimm, Han Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault. Fairy tales work on subconscious levels, quite unlike normal stories and plays. Their plots are weird and the characters are symbolic rather than human. For Rapunzel, the writer Ed Roe has concocted a farcical little fantasy about a useless Eastern European tennis player who pretends to be a woman in the hope of beating Rapunzel the long haired woman's champion.

All told an interesting weekend in the British press for publishing. Rent the Shakespeare titles if you can find them.

McGraw Hill Job Cuts

MGH announced yesterday that it will cut 3% of their workforce (about 600 jobs) and take a charge for the upcoming quarter. From Reuters:

The cuts will result in a $43.7 million pretax restructuring charge and reduce fourth-quarter earnings by $27.3 million after taxes, or 8 cents per share, McGraw said.
"For 2007, we still expect double-digit earnings per share growth" excluding the restructuring costs and other charges, McGraw said.

Also of note, MGH shares have fallen 39% over the past 12 mths in part because of what some have seen as faulty advice from its S&P unit with respect to the sub-prime banking crisis. While McGraw attributed the restructuring to the financial market issues the largest cuts look to be in their education unit. Given the amounts being invested by the other large players this seems counter intuitive.

NYTimes

Macmillan Acquisition

The NYTimes reports that Macmillan has acquired a custom educational textbook publisher named Hayden-McNeil Publishing for an undisclosed sum.

Brian Napack, president of Macmillan, said that custom publishing was the fastest-growing arm of the textbook market. He said that while Hayden-McNeil was “not huge at this point,” its revenue had been growing by double-digit percentages in the last five years.

Some of the larger educational publishers have established custom publishing operations already having built them organically. They have also reported similar growth percentages in revenues.

Redroom.com: Author Central

The San Francisco Chronicle reports on the launch of a new author/publisher/reader community site named Redroom.com which went live December 21. Redroom is founded by
Ivory Madison who wants to create a site that is "...a household name, where people start when they're looking for an author, a book or what people are saying about current ideas or events...Because we have the writers, we have the potential to be the smartest conversation on the Web."

The site is starting off with a number of well known authors including Amy Tan and Salman Rushdie and Madison expects as many as 400 to establish their web presence in the short term. From the article:

All writers join the Web site for free, and soon readers will be able to have their own free pages, too. Publishers also will be invited to have free Web pages on Redroom.com, with Chronicle Books serving as the Web site's first test case. Madison has collected $1.25 million in venture capital for the business and has hired a staff of 15, and anticipates raising $2 million more in the coming months. She said she expects to break even in 2008 and make $15 million in gross revenue in 2009.

Revenues will be generated by ad revenues and tranaction fee and a portion of revenues will be designated for charity.

Whether this will succeed is any ones guess. It does seems a long shot to me that this will develop into a sizable web presence that a significant number of consumers will be interested in. I am of the belief that the market for author sites or book sites is fairly narrow. Witness the long list of consumer oriented magazines about books and authors that have failed over the years. These outlets failed both because ad dollars were sparse and subscritions were minimal.

On the other hand, the initiative is worth attempting and it is worth noting that potentially 'natural' developers of a site like this such as Publisher's Weekly or Kirkus (or even Bowker) continue to be non-players. Innovative projects like Librarything.com and possibly Redroom fill gaps that for some reason the existing players don't see or can't react to. Redroom may be worth keeping track of and I do like the design and navigation of the site: It is very well done.

Raincoast Gives Up On Canadian Publishing

Raincoast announced today that it was abandoning its domestic publishing operations which it set up in 1995. According to management the operations have remained unprofitable. The operation has published between 20-30 titles per year and will finish this year with 15.

Raincoast is the Canadian partner of Bloomsbury and has published and distributed the Harry Potter series. It is on the back of the success of these titles that the company has built their distribution business into the "preeminent distributor in Canada" (Globe&Mail).

As a result, yesterday's announcement should be seen as a
back-to-the-basics move, and a return to Raincoast's core competency, as a distributor that represents an estimated 50 domestic and foreign-owned publishers, including Bloomsbury U.K., Bloomsbury U.S., Chronicle Books, Lonely Planet, Grove Atlantic and Harcourt/Houghton Mifflin.

Whether this will have a material impact on Canadian publishing is doubtful although some commentators will be all doom and gloom. The domestic Canadian publishing industry is a strange beast with significant amounts of government money distributed to small publishers on the basis of maintaining cultural heritage who wouldn't survive commercially without the funding. In fairness, this active nurturing does produce some great Canadian titles but no doubt most are less than commercially viable.

More ominously the article also contains a veiled suggestion that Raincoast may be planning to rightsize some of their distribution clients as well. More news on that "in the next several weeks".

George Macdonald Fraser

Tom Brown's School Days is a famous book set in the context of Tom's experience at an English boys boarding school. In that book, a boy named Flashman makes a minor appearance as a bully and cad. Forward to 1968 and Flashman makes his literary debut as a self-penned chronicler of some of the epic events of English and World history during the 19th century. Flashman is everywhere from the Crimea to the American Civil War, apparently saving the day and playing a material role in the events in question. At the same time he manages to bed over 400 women (while also maintaining a marriage to a nymphomaniac), is routinely captured, tortured (in some unlikely ways) and escapes. Through complete incompetence and cowardice he always manages to end up looking like the hero.

The entire series of books was based on G M Fraser finding a collection of memoirs at a house sale and it written in the first person narrated by Flashman. They are all hilarious and historically accurate but with respect to Flashman entirely fiction. Fraser made up the entire story of Flashman's travels through British History but what a ride it was. Each book included a sizable addendum that noted the significance of the events, places and people mentioned in each episode. As someone interested in history, these sections were almost as interesting as the fictional work that preceded.

At 82, Fraser died this week after a year long battle with Cancer. As the Times puts it "There will be no more Flashman books chronicling the the life of Brigadier-General Sir Harry Paget Flashman, VC, outstanding Victorian soldier, coward, bully, womaniser, cad, bounder and hugely admired all-round bad egg." Times