Here is the full press release (blockquotes omitted).  Makes interesting reading: The U.K. Authors’ Licensing and Collecting Society, the Norwegian Nonfiction Writers and Translators Association, the Swedish Writers Union, The Writers’ Union of Canada, and four individual authors are among the new plaintiffs in an amended complaint filed today in Authors Guild v. HathiTrust.  Individual authors joining the lawsuit include University of Oslo professor Helge Rønning, Swedish novelist Erik Grundström, and American novelist J. R. Salamanca. The Authors League Fund, a 94-year-old organization supported by Authors Guild...

I’ve found a couple of more points of view on the HathiTrust lawsuit over the last couple of days, and given that they are diametrically opposed it seems like a good idea to present them together for contrast. 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)....

In a series of blog posts yesterday whose tone can only be described as “gleeful,” the Authors Guild has been showing that specific books aren’t orphans. So far, they’ve found copyright owners or literary agents for J.R. Salamanca’s The Lost Country, Albert Bandura’s Adolescent Aggression, and James Gould Cozzens’s Confusion. They didn’t track down Walter Lippmann’s The Communist World and Ours, but it appears that someone else did. The legwork involved wasn’t particularly intensive: some Google searches, some queries of standard copyright-related databases, and some phone calls. This would be a dog-bites-man story,...

From the Authors Guild blog: Yesterday, we began an effort to dig in more deeply to the HathiTrust list of “orphan works” candidates. These two jump out as a bit too easy. Wikipedia does the heavy lifting in re-uniting an “orphan” with the first author. According to the site, “Albert Bandura is widely described as the greatest living psychologist.”  He’s the David Starr Jordan Professor Emeritus of Social Science in Psychology at Stanford University. The Stanford Daily wrote about him in March.  The HathiTrust orphan work candidate is his 1959 book, co-authored with Richard H. Walters, “Adolescent...

From the Authors Guild blog.  This is important stuff: About two minutes of googling turned up a professor emeritus of one of the HathiTrust “orphan works” candidates.  He lives in suburban Maryland.  His second book sold a reported one million copies, and he’s listed in IMDb (two of his books were turned into movies: one starred Elvis Presley, the other Warren Beatty). He has a literary agent, and he signed an e-book contract earlier this month. No, we’re not making this up. Just before we filed our lawsuit, we did some cursory research into some of...

Lest we think that the lawsuit against Google that has been spinning its wheels for six years and gone precisely nowhere was the extent of the Authors Guilds efforts to fight the Google Books scanning projects, the Guild has struck again with a lawsuit against the universities that partnered with Google in the project, and the cooperative organization, HathiTrust, set up to manage those works. The Authors Guild, its counterparts from various Commonwealth countries, and a group of authors have filed suit to block the use of unauthorized scans of copyrighted works from the universities libraries as part...

Denny Chin, the judge in the Authors Guild versus Google Books case, seems to be getting more and more frustrated the longer this six-year-old case drags on. In the latest hearing on the matter today, he set a firm deadline of September 15th for all parties involved to come up with a new settlement. Judge Chin had rejected the much-vaunted $125 million previous settlement back in March, feeling that it gave too much power to Google. He expressed the opinion that an opt-in system, in which authors and publishers explicitly had to allow their books to be made available,...

I posted some earlier comments from Patricia Ryan (pictured at the left), who is part of a wave of emerging self-publishers who are releasing not new books, but rather, their own print backlists. Patricia was kind enough to answer some further questions on how she went from published category romance author to self-publishing indie e-author. Enjoy! THE EXPERIENCE OF PRINT PUBLISHING Patricia began writing category romances in the early 90's. As she explains: "I had read a bunch of category romances that didn't do much for me, a few that were really pretty good, and one--The Black Sheep, a Silhouette Desire...

I didn’t notice this David Pogue article from August 12th until Techdirt and Slashdot pointed it out just the other day. Though most of the article is about other cool features offered by iOS 4 (unified contacts, Facetime tricks), in the last section Pogue talks about the VoiceOver “spoken books” feature on the iPad and wonders why the Authors Guild and publishers hasn’t freaked out about it. I previously looked at the matter back in March; you’d think they would have had time to speak up by now. Yes, this is exactly the feature that...

From the Authors Guild site: We don't know the details of the Odyssey-Amazon agreement, but we can make some informed guesses. The agreement is most likely under the agency model, with Amazon paying Odyssey 70% of the retail price of the books. Wylie and Odyssey are together taking a typical agent's commission as compensation: 10 or 15% of the 70% received from Amazon. In round figures, this means that the author receives 60 to 63% of the retail price of the book. For comparison, a typical contract with a traditional publisher pays e-book royalties of 25% of net proceeds. If the e-book...

The Authors Guild sends warning letters to its members when it thinks publishers are trying to take advantage of them. We’ve mentioned recent Authors Guild warnings about Random House’s statement on e-book rights, and Random House and HarperCollins’ attempts to lock authors into 25% e-book royalty rates. Today, Galleycat reports that the Authors Guild sent out a warning over a letter from Wiley & Sons, the new owner of Bloomberg Press, to Bloomberg writers concerning changes to the accounting system. Notes the Guild: We've asked an independent royalty auditor to review the effects of...

I think this deserves to be reprinted in full.  It's from the Magellan Media blog: Dear Mr. Turow, Congratulations and best wishes on your election as president of the Authors Guild.  This is an interesting and in some ways challenging time for publishing, and the AG is positioned to serve as a well-reasoned and informed voice for authors. As it happens, the need for reason and data at a time of uncertainty prompts me to write.  Among other pursuits, I study digital book piracy: its instance (how often and where does it occur?), as well as its impact (what’s the effect on paid sales?). As a...