Amanda Nelson wrote a longer and amusing rebuttal, pointing out that a lot of classics became classics because they pushed the boundaries of couth for their day. (Indeed, some of them, such as Huckleberry Finn, continue to be controversial right up to the present day!) She also points out that just because the sex and violence might be toned down in some of the works, that does not mean they are not there. (Indeed, I don’t know why people always have this idea of Victorian society as being prim and repressed. As a rule, the more repressed and respectable a front Victorians presented, the more carnal thoughts they were having in the privacy of their own minds.)

And Nelson also points out that a lot of those “dead white males” (and the occasional dead white female) wrote works focusing on injustice and the social causes of their day, such as slavery, women’s rights, the plight of the poor, and political oppression.

Of course, one more excellent reason for reading the classics is that, in this era of agency priced DRM-locked e-books, most of the classics are in the public domain and available free on-line. There are so many amazing books out there to be had at no charge, it’s like having a library of the wisdom of the ages instantaneously at your beck and call.

Over the last few weeks, I have been working my way through some of Jules Verne’s better (and a few lesser) known novels, since Google Books is one of the few websites I can access from work, and discovering they were very different from what I had been led to believe. They were exciting and entertaining, and just as fun to read now as when they were originally written. I also read and enjoyed all the stories of Sherlock Holmes that are in the public domain, and a couple of very interesting histories of playing cards by Mrs. John King Van Rensselaer, a very interesting woman about whom I would love to know more.

Of course, it’s not really too surprising that people are more interested in focusing on the new these days. We hunger for novelty, and think that “old” means “boring”. (It’s hard to get anyone to watch even black and white, let alone silent, films these days.) But if people could get past their preconceptions, I think they would find some of that great old stuff can be more novel than ever.

Disappointingly, the court ruled that Congress could indeed remove the works from the public domain—Congress did have the power to retroactively extend copyright on these works in order to bring the US into treaty compliance. The court rejected the idea that the First Amendment applied for orchestras that had been making a living performing these works without paying royalties because they could still perform them by paying royalties.

It’s not too big of a surprise, really; this is mostly the same court that issued a similar ruling on Eldred vs. Ashcroft nine years ago. And while it is disappointing, there is a danger that we can make too big a deal out of it. Unlike with Eldred vs. Ashcroft, the public domain was not really the central issue here—the main import of the decision regards what Congress can do in general to enforce compliance with international treaties. Copyright was just the subject of this particular treaty.

What might be more worrying are the implications this might have for things like the ACTA treaty that was signed last October, which at one point included three-strikes and global DMCA-style language. If Congress can remove works from the public domain—something that by and large had not happened before—what else can’t they do?

What about if programmers made e-books?

The Toronto Review of Books has an interview with Chris Stevens, the co-creator of the Alice in Wonderland iPad app that has gotten a lot of positive attention. The discussion of the development of the app out of a public domain title is interesting in its own right, but in part of this interview, Stevens speaks out about what he sees as a succession of “lacklustre iPad titles” coming from apathetic publishers.

What’s happening at the moment is that most publishers are handing their major titles over to app developers who are ruining these titles with rushed, unprofessional layout and design. There is this weird situation where programmers are suddenly being given free reign to design books. We watch as publishers like Random House outsource the design of cherished titles to programmers who—despite their excellence at programming—are not designers. The complete lack of care and attention paid to the production of digital books is genuinely mystifying.

Of course, he’s by and large talking about e-book apps, rather than the standard words-on-screen e-reader formats that people consume on their Kindles or Nooks (or Kindle or Nook iPad apps), but there have also been people who complain that slavish attempts to reproduce a print book on a screen rather than adapting it to make use of all the potential of the new medium are themselves a disservice to the material.

Still, words-on-screen e-books will probably be with us for a good long time, and it’s hard to see what a programmer could do to mess those up.

(Found via Slashdot.)

In the US, it’s currently the day we stare wistfully through the glass of copyright, like a homeless waif staring at a storefront food display, at the works that would have entered the public domain today—because in the US, thanks to recent copyright laws, there will be no new entries to the public domain until at least 2019. (And I wouldn’t count on getting any even then, Disney being who they are.)

Under pre-1978 copyright code, all works from 1955, and as many as 85% of works from 1983 (which didn’t have copyright renewed) would be entering the public domain. The Duke Law Center for the Study of the Public Domain has a post detailing the famous works that would include,: books such as J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King, C.S. Lewis’s The Magician’s Nephew, or Why Johnny Can’t Read; movies such as The Seven Year Itch, Lady and the Tramp, or Oklahoma, songs such as Unchained Melody, Folsom Prison Blues, and Tutti Frutti. And, of course, thousands of lesser-known but still potentially useful works.

The blog post doesn’t cover works that would have entered the public domain under the post-1978, pre-Sonny Bono copyright regime. As that was a 75-year period, if I remember correctly, that would mean we’d have access to works from 1936—perhaps not as attractive as works from later years, but still better than we have now, which is not much since 1923.

I continue to cherish a faint hope that someday people will realize just how much we’re losing by extending copyright and let the pendulum swing the other day. But it may well be a forlorn one.

A number of the works in Cambridge’s library date from well before the 1710 Statute of Anne invented modern copyright, suggesting that they should definitely be in the public domain no matter what Cambridge says. Moody writes of these works:

Assuming that copyright dates from the "fixing" of the work, or from the date of the Statute of Anne, they would clearly have passed into the public domain long ago. One technique that libraries have tried to employ in order to maintain their control is to claim that the act of digitizing creates a new copyright, although this seems dubious. After all, the whole point of digitization is to capture as faithfully as possible the physical appearance of a text: an artistic interpretation of that physical appearance would defeat the object of the exercise. But without that artistic element there seems to be no grounds for claiming copyright.

Moreover, even if there were copyright in the digitized image, it’s hard to see how there is any basis for stopping people from transcribing the text, since that is undoubtedly in the public domain. But that’s precisely what Cambridge University is trying to do in its conditions quoted above.

Moody also points out that, thanks to the British Newspaper Archive, the British Library is removing physical access to public-domain papers and replacing them with digitized images that it claims are under copyright.

For that matter, even Google Books attaches a usage-terms boilerplate to the beginning of its book scans. (You have to download the file to see it; it doesn’t show up on the in-web display.) Google’s usage terms are a good deal more temperate, acknowledging that “public domain books belong to the public and we are merely their custodians” and couched in terms of “we ask” or “we request” that viewers use them noncommercially and so forth.

Project Gutenberg, on the other hand, still has this boilerplate on its books:

This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org

That’s the kind of terms that public domain works ought to have. It’s worrying that these newer projects are putting so many limitations on theirs, but given that they are the offspring of commercial concerns while Gutenberg was always intended as a nonprofit, I suppose it’s understandable. I wonder when or if those limitations will be tested in court?

In a follow-up to yesterday’s story about Universal’s allegedly fraudulent takedown of a Megaupload promotional video, Torrentfreak reports Megaupload has instructed its legal team to file suit against Universal over the matter. (One of my friends noted that, if Universal really did do what Megaupload accuses, it should also be liable for criminal charges of perjury.) It will be interesting to see what happens.

Meanwhile, Cory Doctorow’s latest column in the Guardian discusses a similar though unrelated abuse of YouTube DMCA takedown procedures. Google offers rights holders a service called ContentID, which allows them to claim videos as theirs and then request that the videos be removed. (This is apparently what happened to Megaupload’s video.) However, instead of removing them, the companies can instead choose to “monetize” them—having YouTube play ads with them and then give the rights-holder the revenue for the ads.

Doctorow notes that a project called FedFlix has been established to pay the fees associated with retrieving copies of public-domain videos from the Federal Government (by law, any government-produced media is automatically in the public domain, but the government can still charge fees for the media on which it is issued) and posting them to YouTube, the Internet Archive, and other video sites so the public can see them without paying fees.

However, Doctorow notes, these videos are being targeted by a number of media companies with hundreds of infringement claims. The claims could endanger Fedflix’s YouTube account, and what’s more the way ContentID is set up means that Fedflix doesn’t have any way to contest them. The dispute resolution procedure requires a “rights-holder” to send YouTube a written permission notice—but in the case of these videos, there is no rights-holder; they’re in the public domain.

[Fedflix founder Carl] Malamud’s report documents these troubles in Kafkaesque detail. It’s frustrating reading. The American public paid to produce these videos, and they own them, lock, stock and barrel. Multinational companies – the same ones who cry poverty and demand far-reaching laws like the Stop Online Piracy Act – have laid title to them, "homesteading the public domain", and they are abusing Google’s copyright peace offering to steal from the public.

This puts me in mind of the way that some publishers have previously taken public-domain books, added a new introduction or foreword, and then claimed copyright to the whole book. It’s not too far-fetched to imagine that what some companies will do for movies, others might do for electronic renditions of printed matter. The same copyrights apply to all of it. We should all be seriously scrutinizing proposed laws like SOPA that have the potential for even worse abuses.

After that, I happened onto an interesting Conan Doyle work called Through the Magic Door, in which the author looks at his own bookshelf and discusses each of the works that are dear to his own heart. The first few paragraphs of the book especially resonate for me, and seem more than mildly prophetic in some ways.

Here, just let the magic of Conan Doyle’s words wash over you:

I care not how humble your bookshelf may be, nor how lowly the room which it adorns. Close the door of that room behind you, shut off with it all the cares of the outer world, plunge back into the soothing company of the great dead, and then you are through the magic portal into that fair land whither worry and vexation can follow you no more. You have left all that is vulgar and all that is sordid behind you. There stand your noble, silent comrades, waiting in their ranks. Pass your eye down their files. Choose your man. And then you have but to hold up your hand to him and away you go together into dreamland. Surely there would be something eerie about a line of books were it not that familiarity has deadened our sense of it. Each is a mummified soul embalmed in cere-cloth and natron of leather and printer’s ink. Each cover of a true book enfolds the concentrated essence of a man. The personalities of the writers have faded into the thinnest shadows, as their bodies into impalpable dust, yet here are their very spirits at your command.

It is our familiarity also which has lessened our perception of the miraculous good fortune which we enjoy. Let us suppose that we were suddenly to learn that Shakespeare had returned to earth, and that he would favour any of us with an hour of his wit and his fancy. How eagerly we would seek him out! And yet we have him—the very best of him—at our elbows from week to week, and hardly trouble ourselves to put out our hands to beckon him down. No matter what mood a man may be in, when once he has passed through the magic door he can summon the world’s greatest to sympathize with him in it. If he be thoughtful, here are the kings of thought. If he be dreamy, here are the masters of fancy. Or is it amusement that he lacks? He can signal to any one of the world’s great story-tellers, and out comes the dead man and holds him enthralled by the hour. The dead are such good company that one may come to think too little of the living. It is a real and a pressing danger with many of us, that we should never find our own thoughts and our own souls, but be ever obsessed by the dead. Yet second-hand romance and second-hand emotion are surely better than the dull, soul-killing monotony which life brings to most of the human race. But best of all when the dead man’s wisdom and strength in the living of our own strenuous days.

Come through the magic door with me, and sit here on the green settee, where you can see the old oak case with its untidy lines of volumes. Smoking is not forbidden. Would you care to hear me talk of them? Well, I ask nothing better, for there is no volume there which is not a dear, personal friend, and what can a man talk of more pleasantly than that? The other books are over yonder, but these are my own favourites—the ones I care to re-read and to have near my elbow. There is not a tattered cover which does not bring its mellow memories to me.

Some of them represent those little sacrifices which make a possession dearer. You see the line of old, brown volumes at the bottom? Every one of those represents a lunch. They were bought in my student days, when times were not too affluent. Threepence was my modest allowance for my midday sandwich and glass of beer; but, as luck would have it, my way to the classes led past the most fascinating bookshop in the world. Outside the door of it stood a large tub filled with an ever-changing litter of tattered books, with a card above which announced that any volume therein could be purchased for the identical sum which I carried in my pocket. As I approached it a combat ever raged betwixt the hunger of a youthful body and that of an inquiring and omnivorous mind. Five times out of six the animal won. But when the mental prevailed, then there was an entrancing five minutes’ digging among out-of-date almanacs, volumes of Scotch theology, and tables of logarithms, until one found something which made it all worth while. If you will look over these titles, you will see that I did not do so very badly. Four volumes of Gordon’s "Tacitus" (life is too short to read originals, so long as there are good translations), Sir William Temple’s Essays, Addison’s works, Swift’s "Tale of a Tub," Clarendon’s "History," "Gil Blas," Buckingham’s Poems, Churchill’s Poems, "Life of Bacon"—not so bad for the old threepenny tub.

They were not always in such plebeian company. Look at the thickness of the rich leather, and the richness of the dim gold lettering. Once they adorned the shelves of some noble library, and even among the odd almanacs and the sermons they bore the traces of their former greatness, like the faded silk dress of the reduced gentlewoman, a present pathos but a glory of the past.

Reading is made too easy nowadays, with cheap paper editions and free libraries. A man does not appreciate at its full worth the thing that comes to him without effort. Who now ever gets the thrill which Carlyle felt when he hurried home with the six volumes of Gibbon’s "History" under his arm, his mind just starving for want of food, to devour them at the rate of one a day? A book should be your very own before you can really get the taste of it, and unless you have worked for it, you will never have the true inward pride of possession.

Look at that last paragraph. “Reading is made too easy nowadays…” What would Conan Doyle think if he were alive today? In his time, people at least had to bestir their lazy rumps from their sofas and trot down to the library if they wanted to read. Now we have Project Gutenberg and Google Books and dozens of other free e-book sites, legal or not. Yet it seems that reading is at an all-time low.

And even those of us who do read don’t read like Conan Doyle did. I’ve gotten about a third of the way through the book, and have never read a single one of the books he describes. (Well, I take that back. I have read Ivanhoe, a long time ago.) It’s a credit to Conan Doyle that he makes them sound interesting enough that I almost want to, but it was hard enough to find the desire to read his books. And to be honest, I probably wouldn’t have gotten around even to reading Holmes if it hadn’t been that my workplace’s whitelist now blocks out any e-book site except Google Books.

If you read any literature from those days, it seems as though the educated men of the era were much better educated than educated men of today. The classics were something that you read as part of your education, or even read for fun and your own edification. Perhaps it was that they didn’t have as much else they could be doing as we do today, as many distractions as movies and TV and computer games and the web as we have.

But then again, it could be that the dichotomy has always been with us. Even as Conan Doyle complained people weren’t reading any more because it was too easy, the educated classes despaired of the popular tripe that less educated people were reading. I’ve mentioned Christopher Morley’s Parnassus on Wheels and The Haunted Bookshop, in which booksellers at the turn of the 20th century despaired of the Nick Carter and Edgar Rice Burroughs novels that were so much in demand. One department store bookseller laments of a colleague in the furniture department who occasionally uses books as decorations on storefront window displays:

Last summer he asked me for "something by that Ring fellow, I forget the name," to put a punchy finish on a layout of porch furniture. I thought perhaps he meant Wagner’s Nibelungen operas, and began to dig them out. Then I found he meant Ring Lardner.

Perhaps we can’t really know to what extent people back then were reading more of the classics without actually being there. It could just be a case of the proverbial grass being greener. All I can say is, it seems as if Conan Doyle’s opinions about the ease of reading leading to its decline are just about dead on. You really only appreciate things you’ve had to work and sacrifice for, not things that are handed to you on a silver platter.

(I suppose that’s partly why publishers felt they had to implement agency pricing. While I still can’t say I agree with the decision, it does become more understandable when viewed in that light.)

Looking at the download numbers for some of these books tells a pretty sad story. The Project Gutenberg edition of Through the Magic Door has only had 126 downloads. Parnassus on Wheels has 61. The Haunted Bookshop has 126. (And how many of those were web bots on search crawls?)

Apart from the genre classics like Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Jonathan Swift, and so on, how many of us are in the habit of sitting down for an hour of entertainment in books that are over a hundred years old? (There are probably a lot more of those in this blog’s readership than in general, but I’m speaking rhetorically.) What Conan Doyle says is even more true now than it was in his day: we have the accumulated wisdom of the ages literally at our fingertips, and yet we rarely ever bother to reach for it.

While I’m a bit “iffy” on the utility of stand-alone appbooks, I have to admit that this one has some interesting features. Some of them, such as the “original music score” or “buckets of gory animation”, sound like needless gimmicks, but I am intrigued by the way the app incorporates both the “And Zombies” version and the original novel, Pride and Prejudice. When held right-side-up, the device displays the zombified work; turned upside-down it displays the original, and held in landscape it displays both side by side for a comparison.

This does sound like a case where the interactivity of an electronic platform adds something more than just portability to reading. I’d like to see more of this kind of thing.

However, Project Gutenberg EBook #26, from February 1992, was a revision of, literally, the oldest etext known to Project Gutenberg. It pre-dates Hart’s famous decision to type the Declaration of Independence by a good six years, dating back to 1964-1965 and originally rendered in all capital letters by Dr. Joseph Raben of Queens College, New York.

To give you an estimation of the difference in the original and what we have today: the original was probably entered on cards commonly known at the time as “IBM cards” (Do Not Fold, Spindle or Mutilate) and probably took in excess of 100,000 of them. A single card could hold 80 characters (hence 80 characters is an accepted standard for so many computer margins), and the entire original edition we received in all caps was over 800,000 chars in length, including line enumeration, symbols for caps and the punctuation marks, etc., since they were not available keyboard characters at the time (probably the keyboards operated at baud rates of around 113, meaning the typists had to type slowly for the keyboard to keep up).

How much work that must have taken! Carmody compares it to the work of Latin copyist monks—entering a text slowly and obscurely, for the recognition of just a handful of people. Even though Gutenberg had already rendered a perfectly serviceable copy of Paradise Lost a few years earlier, it is easy to see why why Michael Hart and his volunteers might have wanted to clean up and publish Dr. Raben’s version as well—keeping intact that connection going all the way back to the first known creation of an electronic text.

As Carmody points out, Michael Hart actually didn’t “invent” the e-book—someone else had done that first. But he certainly invented the e-book repository.

Ars Technica claims the case rose from the ashes of Eldred v. Ashcroft, in which the court ruled that Congress was entitled to extend copyright because "when, as in this case, Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary." So copyright reformers looked for cases where Congress had changed those contours and came up with the 1995 Uruguay Round Agreements Act, which restored copyright to foreign works that had previously passed out of copyright in the US due to failure to meet formalities (registration, renewal, etc.) or lack of treaty between the US and the country of origin of the work.

However, a little further research shows the case, Golan vs. Holder, was originally filed in 2001, two years before the Ashcroft decision. (So long ago, in fact, that it’s changed defendants twice due to different people being appointed to the Attorney General’s office.) So while the copyright reformers might have had new ammunition after 2003, I don’t think the case can be seen as a reaction to that defeat. (We previously mentioned this case here and here, and probably elsewhere too.)

Regardless, the case has taken ten years to work its way up to SCOTUS, but it finally arrived, and the court has been giving it due consideration. Solicitor general Donald Verrilli, representing the Obama administration, claimed the law was necessary to gain reciprocal protections for American copyrights in foreign countries. Anthony Falzone, arguing for the plaintiffs, pointed out "If the government can get around First Amendment limits by signing a treaty, then the First Amendment is defined only by the perceptions, the complaints, and frankly the imagination of foreign countries, That can’t be the way it works."

Some justices displayed skepticism toward the plaintiff’s arguments, others toward the defendant’s. But given that Eldred was a 7-2 decision, and one of the dissenting justices retired last year, pessimism seems to be in order.

The whole thing confuses me a little, I’ll admit, as one of the precepts I keep reading every time I read about the public domain is that, by its very nature, once a work has entered the public domain, it’s there for good—it can’t just be plucked right back out again. But in this case, Congress seems to have done just that, and the court might let them. It doesn’t make much sense to me

First, SF and fantasy novelist Elizabeth Moon strongly opposes the use that the universities and HathiTrust are making of scanned works. Moon is up in arms over HathiTrust’s plans to allow unlimited free download of “orphaned” works from the trust (though she seems to be under the impression that it would allow download of all works, not just the orphaned ones). She is also rather upset that she had to put in a great deal of time and effort hunting down all scan of her books and opting them out of Google’s process when Google is the one that violated copyright to begin with. She also points out that her own works are definitely not orphaned.

Evidently, no one looked: not the librarians who took my books off the shelf and sent them to Google for scanning, and not Google. No contact was ever made asking my permission to use my work this way. Instead, someone at some library gave Google the books to scan–without ever considering my rights–and Google scanned them with the same lack of concern. When I found out about it, I went through the laborious process (it took several days because of Google’s clear intent to make it difficult) to refuse Google permission to allow the scans’ use. Google indicated it would "probably" not use the scans for which permission was refused, but that was the best I could do. 

Moon feels that the universities should remove every copyrighted work from their files and not put any back until they can establish a solid procedure for researching the ownership of works thought to be orphaned.

From the other side, Corynne McSherry of the Electronic Frontier Foundation points out some commonly-held misconceptions about the HathiTrust situation (found via BoingBoing) that suggest it might not be as bad as authors fear. She notes that the legality of the scans is already being litigated in the Author’s Guild vs. Google case, and filing a separate suit over the same issue isn’t going to do anything but enrich the lawyers. And since the libraries are making noncommercial use of works, and only providing full access to public-domain books for now (only factual information is provided about works still under copyright), the libraries are in a better position, legally, than Google.

As for the matter of orphaned works, McSherry mentions that the owners of those works are not actually members of the Guild (and, indeed, in some cases are not even known), which brings into question whether the Guild even has standing to file the suit. And as for the works that the Guild was able to de-orphan with a few minutes’ work, those works are already being pulled from the orphaned works collection, as the libraries promised would happen if their rights-holders came forward.

The lawsuit gamely claims the libraries are causing “great and irreparable injury” to the authors the Guild claims to represent, as well as several additional individual authors, but it is hard to imagine what that harm might be. Presumably, most authors would like to have their works preserved, which is what the original scans are for, and can hardly object to the public having access to bibliographic information about them. The Guild claims there is an “intolerable” risk that the repository will be hacked – but offers no reason to imagine this will happen, or that the digital repository is less secure than the places where physical books (and digital works on microfiche, etc.) are stored. The Guild also complains that the problem of orphan works should be solved by Congress. That would be great, but it doesn’t seem to be happening anytime soon and denying academic communities (and indeed all communities) access to these works while Congress fiddles seems deeply wrong.

The Author’s Guild did score a public relation coup by easily locating authors of several works HathiTrust considered orphaned. Standing or not, it doesn’t make HathiTrust look very competent. But the proof of the pudding is in the eating; it will be interesting to see how this case fares in court.

Stackpole is best known for his extensive work in writing BattleTech and Star Wars tie-in novels, and he also wrote the novelization of the recent Conan movie. We have covered Stackpole’s blog posts on self-publishing fairly extensively over the last few months, as well as his GenCon panel seminar.

In this first part of the interview, we largely discussed the early history of e-books and e-publishing, with a diversion into how to restock the public domain. We get more into direct self- and e-publishing matters in the further segments.

Me: I’d like to start by asking: how did you get into self-publishing?

Michael: Well, probably the very first stuff I was self-publishing was my how-to-write newsletter, The Secrets, which I taught classes at GenCon and other conventions for many years and decided to do a newsletter. Decided to make it Internet subscription only, so starting about 7, 8 years ago I was doing this bi-weekly newsletter as PDFs. So that was the very first thing that I did. Right there I realized the possibilities for doing this.

Many years ago I had gotten Apple Newtons and gone through a series of Palm Pilots and every time with the Apple Newtons, with the Palm Pilots, always get the software that would allow me to make electronic books that would work on those devices. Because again I just found it fascinating, and found that huge potential there.

You fast-forward to the Kindle coming out and now all the tablets and all the dedicated readers and suddenly all that potential that I was seeing those many years ago both had devices that made it easier for other people to use and also put in place marketplaces that suddenly made it possible to have an economy based on selling your own work.

Me: It’s funny, you know, those of us who’ve been reading e-books ever since the nineties had gotten to the point of despairing that anybody would ever be interested, and finally Jeff Bezos came along and basically single-handedly created the e-book market.

Michael: Right. You know, I really thought when the Newton came out, because it had on more reader software—I really had high hopes for that. And then when Apple abandoned the Newton and didn’t do anything else to follow that up and didn’t keep that software alive, I felt that that was unfortunate.

And then the software that was being used to make books for the Palm Pilot—unfortunately the company that put it out hit on the plan of charging a royalty for the authors who used their software. [eReader, nee Peanut Press. When Fictionwise bought the company, it discontinued this practice. —CM] And I absolutely balk at that. I mean, this is like the guy who built your house having a percentage every time you sell it. No, no, this job was done along time ago! So I didn’t like that.

So again, now we finally do have both a means to make it convenient for people and an economic structure that makes it very viable for authors to be able to do things, even original things, which is kind of cool.

Me: Yeah, it’s funny that eventually one of the companies that was using eReader’s, or rather Peanut Press’s software back then eventually bought it.

Michael: Right.

Me: And that was Fictionwise, and they completely opened it up, but by then it was kind of too late.

Michael: It was, and down through the years I’ve gotten in touch with Fictionwise and what they wanted for an author to self-publish was they wanted you to have at least ten things—ten novels or whatever—that you were going to be able to bring to that. And even as a published novelist who owns the rights to certain things, I didn’t have and I really didn’t think anybody else was going to have a catalog of books that we’d be able to toss out there just ready to go.

I also think I didn’t like the terms of their contracts—and fortunately we’ve seen the exclusives aspects of contracts going away now, which is good. That’ s always just been stupid. Especially when you’re watching new formats and new platforms come out, why would you sign something away forever when you know in the next week somebody may come up with a brand new thing that will be the new hot thing, and suddenly you’ve signed those rights away. That doesn’t make any sense.

Me: Uh-huh. And certainly one of the big issues in publishing right now is the percentage of royalties.

Michael: Right.

Me: With a lot of publishers balking at giving any kind of high percentage royalties on backlist e-books, and then there’s Amazon and to a lesser extent Barnes & Noble offering 65 to 70% royalties.

Michael: Right.

Me: And so we’ve actually seen estates of major authors like Ian Fleming and Catherine Cookson and so forth taking their backlists directly to Amazon.

Michael: More important than that is you’ve got J.K. Rowling doing electronic books herself. There it’s not even an estate, it is an author who still retains those right who just says, hey, look, I can do more and I can do better than the publishers can.

Me: Uh-huh, and it’s also kind of impressive that she’s going to be doing it without restrictive digital rights management.

Michael: Right.

Me: Basically it’s kind of funny, because all the people—including me—who’ve been complaining about for the longest time expected that when she did eventually come out with them they’d be in the same digital rights management formats that everybody uses and everybody who knows how cracks.

Michael: That’s it, that’s always been my response—whenever another author says to me, “What do you do with DRM?” it’s like, why? You know [it’ll get broken] the second you put it on—I’m not smarter than people who can crack this stuff. I use a form of “moral DRM” which just says, hey look, if you enjoyed this, come on, shoot me a couple of bucks. It’s a fair exchange. My feeling is that if you’re going to use my product for entertainment, and I give you five hours of entertainment, it’s really not too much for me to ask you to give me five bucks.

Me: I remember back in the early 2000s you wrote sort of a treatise on piracy in which you challenged would-be pirates to scan some rare out-of-print public domain works rather than the works that were readily pirated.

Michael: Right, right. Because I think, look, if you’re going to run a scanner, if you’re going to do that sort of thing and you can look at Project Gutenberg as basically doing that, then gosh, just do something useful. Bring a lot of this stuff back in. There’s some fantastic early science fiction which is out there and I love getting this stuff and reading it all to find—oh, this is the guy that Edgar Rice Burroughs was reading before I got to reading my stuff.

Me: I’m a big fan of Maurice Leblanc myself, the Arsène Lupin novels.

Michael: Oh sure, yeah.

Me: And it really depresses me that so many of them were written after 1923, and they may never get into the public domain, Mickey Mouse being what he is.

Michael: Well, ’23 shouldn’t be a problem. It’s about ’63, ’64. If your book was printed after Walt Disney died, the copyright is never going to get broken. If Walt Disney predeceased the author, it’s never going to come out. Doesn’t mean authors can’t make available, but…

Me: I find myself hoping eventually the public wakes up to what a travesty this extension of copyright is and does something about it, but it’s probably a pipe dream.

Michael: To be quite honest, I think the better place to attack it is not with the public because the public doesn’t pay attention to those things. I think the better place to attack it is with the authors. Think about the fact that Bill Gates and Warren Buffet and a number of other billionaires have all gotten together and pledged [that] while they’ll set some money aside for their heirs, they will donate the vast majority of their money to charitable stuff.

You could probably start a movement among authors to say, “I’m going to give orders to my literary estate that after I’m dead I’m going to let my work put my kids or grandkids through college. But twenty-five years after I die it goes into the public domain. And I think working with authors to do that is a lot more reasonable—a smaller audience and target audience that is going to be susceptible and reasonable to that particular thing. The reason you’ll never get a change in legislation is because Senators and Representatives write books.

She touches on an issue of motivation, as well: it’s human nature that if something is hard to obtain, it is going to be more attractive—but if it suddenly becomes more readily available to us, we tend to assume that it’s always going to be there and we can get around to looking at it later.

The relationship between ease of access and motivation seems to be inversely proportional because, as the sheer volume of information that becomes available and accessible to us increases, we become increasingly paralyzed to actually access all but the most prominent of it — prominent by way of media coverage, prominent by way of peer recommendation, prominent by way of alignment with our existing interests. This is why information that isn’t rare in technical terms, in terms of being free and open to anyone willing to and knowledgeable about how to access it, may still remain rare in practical terms, accessed by only a handful of motivated scholars.

And she points out the dichotomy between rarity of certain esoteric information and the way Google indexes that information. Google’s algorithm ranks popular stuff at the top—so something not as popular, that few people are interested in, will be harder to find on Google for those people who have an interest. She points to human curators as a possible antidote to this problem. The article features a quote about editors, but it put me in mind of a Neil Gaiman quote I saw recently: “Google can bring back a hundred thousand answers. A librarian can bring you back the right one.”

The article is too long to summarize completely, but it is certainly interesting to read at full length. And it also might just help explain why, even though Project Gutenberg offers more access to esoteric classic material than most physical libraries ever could, so few people ever seem to take advantage of it.

The site looks like an interesting way to find out more about free e-books, music, art, and so forth that might otherwise languish in total obscurity. Since the site accepts submissions, I have half a mind to write a piece about the Arsène Lupin novels of which I am so fond.

Regardless, it’s an interesting reminder that the “Internet slushpile problem” is not restricted solely to self-published works. There are hundreds of years of public-domain novels and other art available on the Internet, and most people never even scratch the surface in what they read. This could be a way to remind people that “old” books can be good books.