Joe Konrath published a thoughtful piece yesterday on fair use and copyright. I thought he was spot on and made some excellent points. He started by talking about copyright as it applied to authors, not to the industry. Not surprisingly, the publishing industry (print, video and music) all focus on copyright as it applies to them and their needs and wants. Konrath points out that copyright doesn't belong to an industry. It belongs to the creator of the work, and that industries often exist to exploit the artists that the work creates. [caption id="attachment_83294" align="alignright" width="180"] Joe Konrath[/caption] You can agree or disagree...

"Read Later" apps have become more popular as people use their smartphones and tablets on-the-go. I’ve used Pocket for years, and I recently decided to pay for Instapaper because it offered features Pocket does not. I use both, but for different purposes. Pocket is great for short articles, especially ones with images. I’ve set Flipboard up to share with Pocket, and I’ll often scan headlines during breakfast and then send articles to Pocket for reading throughout the day. Pocket is also my repository for articles I want to reference for later posts. I only use Pocket for short articles because I find the app’s page-flipping option to be...

Ever since reworked Twilight fanfic Fifty Shades of Grey hit bookstore shelves and immediately burned a path up the charts, many publishers have been giving more serious consideration to fanfic. Might it make a decent source of publishable stories, a sort of Internet slushpile they could mine for nuggets at their leisure? But it seems that history shows yet again that you can always count on someone to learn the wrong lesson: If one Twilight fanfic is able to strike it big, why not try again with another one? A Simon & Schuster imprint has just made a “substantial” book deal...

Fanfic and other original Internet fiction were some of the very first “e-books”, but ever since copyright owners have started paying more attention to the Internet the relationship with fans has sometimes been a thorny one. Reason TV has a 7.5-minute interview with Rebecca Tushnet, Georgetown University law professor and long-time legal advocate for fanfiction. (She wrote an article for a law journal back in the ‘90s that I believe is one of the first places fanfic was mentioned positively in a legal context.) At the moment, Professor Tushnet is a member of the Organization for Transformative Works, a...

Publishing Perspectives has an interesting piece by Jan Bozarth, an author who has created a series of children’s books, “The Fairy Godmother Academy,” that are intended to be a “transmedia experience” from the very beginning. The article isn’t really too clear about what “transmedia” aspects are incorporated into the series, though the project’s website hosts do-it-yourself projects and activities and a recently-completed contest in which readers submitted their own dance videos. The article does have some interesting insights into how girls feel about technology in general as opposed to what that technology can do for them. For me,...

The popularity of Fifty Shades of Grey continues, and people keep trying to make sense of it. The Bookseller’s blog had a couple of interesting posts lately on the phenomenon. Scott Pack writes of how the book came from right out of nowhere, completely overturning established expectations, and now publishers and bookstores are scrambling to capitalize on the momentum. Expect a bunch of copycat covers to appear over the next few months. Pack believes that this is a great thing, regardless of the quality or lack thereof of Fifty Shades itself, not because it will get people to read...

Some friends called my attention to an interesting-looking book: Fan Fiction and Copyright: Outsider Works and Intellectual Property Protection by Aaron Schwabach—a legal textbook examining the copyright issues surrounding fanfic. At $81 for the paper form or $70 for a Google e-book, it’s obviously meant for the edification of college or law students, not the enjoyment of one such as you or I. That being said, I found an interesting review of it by Stacey M. Lantagne in the peer-reviewed journal Transformative Works and Cultures. Lantagne’s review gives a pretty good idea of what the book is about, and...

Doctor Science, the blogger who wrote a couple of installments on the Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon last month that I blogged about at the time, actually wrote a third piece, which I only just noticed when I went back to check references for the fanfic article I posted earlier. The first two parts talked about “the decline of the publishing industry,” indicating that (at least in some cases) fans were providing a lot better value when it came to editing fanfics than publishers were to editing submitted manuscripts. (Not surprising, in light of a study showing that...

Fifty Shades of Grey certainly seems to be taking the publishing world by storm, catching imagination not so much for the content but for what it represents. On the Bookseller’s FutureBook blog, Agent Orange turns up his (or her?) nose at the reading public’s taste (or lack thereof) in making such a work popular, but adds: What is far more worrying for the business is how completely the Fifty Shades story encapsulates the perilous position the traditional elements of the business are in. This is a book that no agent would have thought to represent had...

On The Bookseller, Neill Denny reflects on how Fifty Shades of Grey is burning up the sales charts. He looks at it in terms of the overall spiciness of the erotic content, which goes somewhat beyond the boundary of what is normally considered “romance” and wonders if it will start a trend toward publishing more explicit books. Certainly British society has been “pornified”—by strip clubs, the web, lads’ mags, you name it—on a level that would have been inconceivable a generation ago. Perhaps publishing has lagged behind the curve while a new mainstream market, more comfortable...

Related to the Kristine Kathryn Rusch post of earlier today comes an interesting series of posts on the blog Obsidian Wings about the Twilight-fanfic-turned-pro novel Fifty Shades of Grey. In the first part, blogger “Doctor Science” summarizes a long post and follow-up elsewhere by Tom Simon on the overall decline of the publishing industry. The overall point is that publishers (though I suspect he’s talking mainly about the Big Six publishers here, not smaller or independent publishers) are providing a whole lot less value than they used to in return for what they take. But Science also links to that “publishing...

You may have heard the T.S. Eliot quote that says mediocre writers borrow, but good writers steal. Sometimes this can be astonishingly literal: PaidContent reports on a New York Times bestselling erotic novel that started out as alternate-universe Twilight fanfic, originally posted in its entirety to (though later deleted from) fanfiction hosting site FF.net. The novel, Fifty Shades of Grey by British author E.L. James, reimagined Twilight set in contemporary Seattle, apparently without the supernatural elements found in the original vampire novels: instead of a werewolf, Edward is a “masterful billionaire with secret sexual predilections.” Presumably the published...