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Maksim Moshkow and lib.ru: On copyright and how e-books are helping the Russian publishing scene
December 27, 2005 | 9:10 am
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By Quinn Anya Carey
Recap: lib.ru is a massive Russian-language digital library, with both public-domain and copyrighted books, that is largely the work of Muscovite Maksim Eugenievich Moshkow. He recently answered some questions for the TeleRead blog.
Last time I posted about how the project began.
Today: copyright, e-books vs. p-books, and how Maksim Moshkow’s library is helping the dismal Russian publishing scene.
Copyright
What about copyright? Do Russian writers mind that their books are on your site?
Book circulation in Russia is steadily declining every year, and only two or three hundred authors are making money off publications. For a lot of other authors, the Internet is becoming the only way to reach readers and, for that matter, to advertise their books and attract the interest of publishers. So the majority of Russian authors have neutral or positive feelings about Internet publishing, and many of them put their books on-line themselves.
With the growth of Internet usage, more and more authors have started to send their books to me for the library, and I had to organize a special service that would automatically put up those books. Now I have servers for the library where authors register, create their section of the library, put up their work, and communicate with readers.
There’s already about 300 of these self-directed sections in the library. I had to make a separate server for beginning, still-unpublished authors — there’s about 19,000 of those sections and around 200,000 works.
Has an author ever asked you to remove their books? What did you do?
It’s happened. Since the library was created, around 20 people have gotten in touch, telling me to delete their books from the library. I deleted them, naturally. After all, this is something the author should decide — whether or not he wants to be read on the Internet or not.
Do you have an opinion about strict copyright laws like we have in America?
I’ve read in newspapers, that on the grounds of copyright laws 13-year-old children and 70-year-old grannies are sued for hundreds of thousands of dollars in compensation. What sort of opinion could you have!
E-books vs. p-books
What role do e-books play for you? When do you read an e-book as opposed to a p-book?
Two years ago I became the owner of a Rocket e-Book REB-1100. It really suits me, and now I read only on it. During these three years I’ve read about 250 books. In p-book form, I only read textbooks at work (I’m a teacher).
If you find an e-book that you really like, do you buy the p-book form too?
The main audience of the site reads print-outs or from the monitor– so readers often write me and say that’s exactly what they do: they find a file, get familiar with it, then buy a paper copy.
I haven’t bought p-books in ten years. Pretty often, authors give me their books themselves. My bookshelves are full of them, but even when I have a paper copy in hand, I prefer to ask the author for an electronic version so I can read it in e-book form.
In the last few years, I’ve had a big problem: finding books I can read. The books that clutter up bookstore shelves are unreadable– meaningless action books, idiotic women’s mysteries, and badly-written sci-fi.
Among a thousand volumes of paper trash which benefits from popular demand, finding normal literature isn’t easy. So for me, just a book I can find and enjoy is already a big deal. There are so few books like that, they’re often not in stores, and there are some that haven’t been printed yet.
So “buying a paper copy” in these conditions is ridiculous. You can’t buy one.
Also, I’m an owner of an e-book reader, which is more comfortable for reading than paper. But I’m not a good person to use as an example– e-books are only read by fans of the format, and they’re not even sold anywhere. And for five or ten more years more, in our country, these devices will still exist only in miserable quantities and won’t be able to impact the market for p-books.
Stay tuned to TeleRead for more about Maksim Moshkow and lib.ru.
Quinn Anya Carey is a BA/MA student in Slavic Linguistics at the University of Chicago. The time stamp has been changed to make this item more visible today.
More Technorati Tags: Russia, books, authors, formersovietunion,schools, educationaltechnology, rocketebook, literature, literature
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Comments:
That was an education, not just an interview–thanks, Quinn. I know much more about Russian e-publishing than before. Nice work.
Needless to say, I suspect that Cory Doctorow would be highly enthusiastic about the use of e-books to whet people’s appetite for p-books. At the same time I’d hope he would concerned about the declining revenue opportunties for writers. Without or without the Net, this problem would still exist in Russia and elsewhere.
David
Great interview. On another note, when teaching/visiting Ukraine between 1999 and 2001, I was surprised to see the large number of translated works from US publishing companies (and yes, Oreilly books & Dummies books are really big there!). Yes, Stephen King and romance writers are big there also.
I’m sure it has gotten better since that time, but Western publishers have have an advantage in promoting their titles. Contrast that with the US, where foreign publishers don’t do a particularly adequate job of promoting translated works.
David, few writers have understood the technological issues better than Cory, but I think a large number of writers under 40 nonetheless understand that DIY publishing will eclipse mainstream publishing and have modified expectations accordingly.
“David, few writers have understood the technological issues better than Cory, but I think a large number of writers under 40 nonetheless understand that DIY publishing will eclipse mainstream publishing and have modified expectations accordingly.”
Robert, I just hope they can make a living at it! A TeleRead-style approach, by the way, could work with both DIY and mainstream publishing–since librarians would be evaluating quality as opposed to the amount of the PR.
To address the issue of translation, I’d love to see English-language e-books to introduce us to Russian novelists of today, not just the greats of yore.
David
Quinn, great series, I’d love to see more.
As for DIY publishing: DIY publishing? The entire reason there is a publishing industry is because publishing is a skill that authors tend to be bad at. Middlemen will never go away in a world that has traded generic skills for specialized ones.
Branko: If ebooks become more focused on multimedia rather than text, you may be right, but I suspect that text-only ebooks won’t require a lot of technical expertise or expensive equipment.
marketing is another issue of course. But royalties & advances in the USA aren’t substantial enough to convince writers to sell future rights.
As for compensation, I don’t know what qualifies as “making a living,” but I’m not sure the status quo has done any better.
Robert, on the issue of translated vs. native works, I find it interesting how lib.ru has made translations of English-language books available before they officially come out in bookstores, and/or keep them available when they’re no longer in print. This summer, all of a sudden a lot of Terry Pratchett books were released in Russia. I don’t know if it was for the first time, or a re-release, or a release by a different publisher, but the point remains that since 1997, translations of some of the Discworld novels have been available on lib.ru