Ars Technica:

Yesterday, Judge John Sprizzo of Manhattan approved a lawsuit settlement between Google and book authors and publishers. In what can only be seen as a huge win for both Google and publishers, Google will pay out $125 million into a fund for copyright holders and be granted the right to put millions of out-of-print texts online. The settlement provides a glimpse into the financial terms of a deal that may see the search giant become a significant retailer of out-of-print books.

The lawsuit dates to the launch of Google Print back in 2005, when Google entered the scan-and-publish arena. At the time, its digitizing efforts were described as massive copyright infringement, since the results were made freely available online. The suit attracted the Author’s Guild as well as five major publishers: McGraw-Hill, Pearson Education, Penguin, John Wiley & Sons, and Simon & Schuster. It eventually reached class action status.

The settlement approved today remains preliminary. A June hearing will determine whether the agreement is fair, reasonable, and adequate. Should it pass that hurdle and become a settled class action suit, Google will be able to operate Google Print without fear of future legal action.

The Authors’ Guild calls the deal “the writers’ equivalent of ASCAP.” They have gathered documents together in a Settlement Resources Page. When the deal was announced last month,  Larry Lessig spent some time studying it before posting his reaction to it: Read the rest of this entry »

Today’s escape from losing his chairmanship of the Senate Homeland Security Committee caps Joe Lieberman’s career of having it both ways in two decades of sanctimonious posturing and backroom politicking.

With a novelist’s eye for the absurd, Joan Didion nailed him in her reporting of the 2000 election campaign:

“Senator Lieberman, who had come to the nation’s attention as the hedge player who had previously seized center stage by managing both to denounce the president [Bill Clinton] for “disgraceful” and “immoral” behavior and to vote against his conviction (similarly, he had in 1991 both voiced support for and voted against the confirmation of Clarence Thomas) was not, except to the press, an immediately engaging personality…

“His speech patterns, grounded in the burdens he bore for the rest of us and the personal rewards he had received from God for bearing it, tended to self-congratulation.”

Lieberman called today’s verdict “fair and forward-looking” and one of “reconciliation and not retribution” but…

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If you see a parade over the next month, it may not be the Thanksgiving Day parade. It could be likely to be book publishers lining up to put in a bid to publish defeated GOP Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s reported book deal…which could fetch $7 million. A roundup is HERE.

Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success is now out and Gladwell himself has been out and about chatting it up…

The Guardian notes his timing is good:

He is publishing his book at the moment when the destructive disjunction between effort and reward that has dominated the last decade or so - the criminal nonsense of the city bonus economy - is for the first time showing signs of diminishing. Gladwell has been predicting the downturn for a while…

His book also comes at a time when there is a President-elect who just about embodies all he argues: Obama never misses a chance to tell stories about how he has been blessed with a network of support, how he was given opportunity and was lucky enough to take it.

Gladwell sees Obama as an almost inevitable product of an education system that for an enlightened period has favoured African-Americans who show dedication and ability. ‘I don’t believe in character,’ he says. ‘I believe in the effect of the immediate impact of environment and situation on people’s behaviour.’

On Gladwell’s genius:

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Tech types are giddy with anticipation (well not all of them). Outliers: The Story of Success is out next week; Why Malcolm Gladwell Thinks We Have Little Control Over Our Own Success by Jason Zengerle is in New York Magazine this week.

Andrew Sullivan quotes a Zengerlian observation about the Gladwellian image; David Pescovitz a synopsis of Gladwell’s explanation of the relative-age effect. Me, this:

What’s a put-upon guru to do? Gladwell isn’t about to give back his advances or stop speaking at business conferences, but he is trying to take his writing in a more meaningful direction. Where he once focused on cool-hunting and T-shirts in his New Yorker articles, now it’s IQ tests and pension systems. “There is a kind of underlying social vision in a lot of his pieces,” says Henry Finder, his editor at the magazine. “The basic vision says how we fare in life isn’t just determined by ourselves and our character, it’s determined by a lot of other things that are beyond our control.” Gladwell has expanded that social vision into a book that he describes as “more political” and “a little angrier” than his previous efforts. “The interesting part of this now is trying to figure out what you do with the idea,” he says, explaining the new approach he took with Outliers, “as opposed to before, where the interesting part was just explaining the idea.” Bruce Headlam, a childhood friend of Gladwell’s who’s now an editor at the New York Times, calls Outliers “the book that’s closest to Malcolm’s heart.”

“When I wrote Tipping Point, my expectation was it would be read by my mom and that was it,” Gladwell says. “I had no notion I was creating a kind of public document. Now I realize I have a bit of a podium, so it seems silly to put the podium to waste.” Which raises the question: With his new book that purports to tell “the story of success,” has Gladwell finally found an idea substantial enough to justify his own?

RELATED: Video of Gladwell at Pop!Tech 2008.

I don’t know how many children’s books, if any, have been reviewed on The Moderate Voice.

Additionally, I don’t know how many children, if any, read The Moderate Voice. But I do know that thousands of intelligent, dedicated, loving parents and grandparents, who deeply care about what their youngsters read, do religiously read these “pages.”

Now that I have stroked your ego, let me tell you about a terrific new children’s book that I have gotten my hands on.

“A Few Good Greek Myths” is a beautifully illustrated (more about that in a moment) book that will fascinate and entertain the reader—both young and not so young—with more than just “a few good Greek myths.”

The author, Michael O’Brien, first explains the roots, the origins and the history of myths. What I would call the myths about myths, but what O’Brien more elegantly describes as follows:

Myths are more than ripping yarns…[they] deal with the dual contradictions of the human condition: why do bad things happen to good people; why is there so much confusion, war and unfairness? They also address man’s most curious concerns: where did we come from, why are we here and who are the great powers?

You ask, “is this a children’s book?” Relax, this is about as “deep” as it gets. After a great overview of myths in other cultures (Egypt, India, China, etc.,) and an introduction to the “Olympians” and the “Big Five Heroes” of Greek mythology, it is on to a delightful journey through all your favorite Greek myths, narrated in a refreshing way, with a touch of humor.

The reader (re-)learns in detail about such favorites as Zeus, Odysseus, Prometheus, Icarus, Atlas, the Trojan Horse, Orpheus and Eurydice, etc. And, if the young and not so young reader still hasn’t had enough, there are two final chapters with “Some Other Pretty Good Myths,” and “Myths Up For Honorable Mention.”

My brief mention earlier about how beautifully this book is illustrated, is probably an understatement. The book contains a “baker’s dozen” gorgeous, color woodcut prints that are truly works of art. They are done by Peter Scacco.

For the sake of full disclosure: Both (Dr) Michael O’Brien, the author, and Peter Scacco, the illustrator, are good friends in Austin, Texas. Both are also tennis partners, but they have never let me win a match in exchange for a favorable review of their book. Such a courtesy on their part just wasn’t necessary…

Please click here to check out the book at Amazon.com

Who’s the hottest property now being sought by talent agents who can almost taste making a bundle for a book deal….or a high-profile TV show? Is it MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow? Is it Fox News’ new star Mike Huckabee? John McCain after his smash Letterman and SNL gigs? Joe the Plumber?

No, it’s Sarah Palin. There may be a debate raging on both sides about whether her future is bright or not, and whether if she runs for President she has a chance or not, but there is one certainty today: she’s The One agents want to sign, according to The New York Post’s Page Six:

SARAH Palin won’t be vice president, but she won the hearts of talent scouts and literary agents who are scrambling to sign her to multimillion-dollar contracts.

CAA, ICM, William Morris, Paradigm and other agencies “smell books, talk shows and commentary for Fox and CNN” as possibilities for the Alaska governor, West Coast PR man Hal Lifson told us.

“There are several of our imprints who are eager to talk to Governor Palin,” Random House spokesman Stuart Applebaum said. “She clearly has a constituency and we know books by conservatively-centered politicos usually sell very, very well.”

Public-relations powerhouse Howard Rubenstein added, “She’s poised to make a ton of money.” But he warned, “She ought to keep an eye on what her goals are for 2012. If she plays a game and looks foolish, if she sounds like she doesn’t know what she’s talking about - like saying Africa is a country - she may talk herself out of a political job.”

And why not? She’s telegenic. Has a journalism background. Worked on a local TV station. She certainly has strong opinions. And she’d appeal to the same big audience as Sean and Rush.

Sure, she may have some demands on the budget she’d require for wardrobe, but it’d be a small price to pay given the books she could sell and the ratings she could attract:

Linda Mann, president of Mann Media, which books celebrities and fashionistas for TV, noted, “Her buzz is incredible. She has car-wreck appeal. You’re compelled to watch, hoping she’ll say the dumbest things possible. I’d propose a show combining her love of fashion and lack of brainpower - ‘Project Dumbway.’ ”

What kind of money can Palin expect? “That’s an interesting question because everybody will compare what she gets to the book deal Tina Fey reportedly made - $6 million,” said one high-ranking publishing source. “No matter what it is, the betting is she’ll sign a deal by the end of the month.

Why all the buzz over Palin? Some Americans voted for Barack Obama for President because they didn’t like her, but she’s idolized on some GOP circles and has become the darling of social conservatives.

And lest you think that publishers and agents can’t just wait to publish any book by any politician, think again. President George Bush has reportedly gotten a bit of friendly advice from some book industry bigwigs interviewed by the AP: don’t rush in writing YOUR book:

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At his press conference Friday, the President-Elect said he was rereading Lincoln for “inspiration,” but he may also want to take another look at David Halberstam’s “The Best and the Brightest.”

Like JFK, Barack Obama values brains, but Halberstam’s book might inspire him to be wary of the hubris that can blindside academic brilliance without accompanying insight into the realities of human behavior, as it did with Kennedy’s overachievers who went on to bring down LBJ with their tunnel vision of the Vietnam war.

Obama has shown the self-awareness and empathy–some call it “emotional intelligence”–needed for leadership but, in overturning all the clichés about “Anti-Intellectualism in American Life,” the real test will come in creating and managing a government with all those qualities.

“The second most remarkable thing about his election,” Nicholas Kristof writes, “is that American voters have just picked a president who is an open, out-of-the-closet, practicing intellectual…

“Smart and educated leadership is no panacea, but we’ve seen recently that the converse—a White House that scorns expertise and shrugs at nuance—doesn’t get very far either.”

But, Kristof adds, “It doesn’t help that intellectuals are often as full of themselves as of ideas.”

Read the rest of this entry.

A Jewish Colony In 17th Century America?

Thirteen English colonies on the East Coast of North America, most settled by groups seeking religious freedom, came together to form the United States. In his new alternative history, The 14th Colony, author Michael Silverstein describes a fictional additional colony, New Israelia, founded by Jews in northern Florida in the 1650s—300 years before the actual founding of the State of Israel in 1948.

“Before beginning serious research for this project,” said Silverstein, “I viewed a book about such a colony as a tongue-in-cheek way to explore one of history’s most vibrant and quirky eras, the mid-17th century. The more I researched, however, the more obvious it became to me that this wasn’t just an alternative history with a far-fetched premise, but something that could easily have happened.

“In a number of ways,” Silverstein continued, “this period also bore some chilling resemblances to our own times. There were international conflicts over markets and resources. There were heinous deeds committed by religious fanatics. Millions of people in different parts of the world were being brutally exploited and enslaved. False messiahs were garnering huge followings. There were even examples of irrational exuberance—the entire economy of Holland was almost taken down by a tulip buying bubble.”

The story of The 14th Colony plays out in both the New and Old Worlds—in an England governed as a republic under Oliver Cromwell; in the Spanish-controlled Americas; in the ghettos of Southern Italy and the surprisingly tolerant Lithuanian-Polish Commonwealth in Eastern Europe; and in the Holland of Rembrandt, and its Jewish-friendly colony in northeastern Brazil.

A fuller description of The 14th Colony, and the era in which the book is set, along with notes about its author and book ordering information, can be found on the book’s Web site.

The people who populate Thrumpton Hall: A Memoir of Life in My Father’s House are eccentric English folk, but not in that lovable way so familiar to Americans from British television sitcoms. In fact, they are for the most part so pathetically dysfunctional that I initially couldn’t bring myself to review this offering by the prolific author Miranda Seymour.

But because I was once in love with a house myself and the requited love that Seymour’s father had for the eponymous manor and its park in Nottinghamshire is central to Thrumpton Hall, I decided it was worth a go.

You can be the judge.

My love house was as simple as Thrumpton Hall is sumptuous.

A cabin made of chestnut logs dating to the 1690s, making it the oldest house in the area, was razed to build the earliest part of my house in 1715, a mere 84 years after Thrumpton Hall. This section is made of gorgeous Belgian bond brick, in fact the brick used as ballast on the ship commissioned by the owner to bring his Welsh Baptist family to the British colony of Pennsylvania.

Two additions were built of beautiful local black granite later in the 18th century and the last was a clapboard addition off of the kitchen that I date to the mid 19th century judging from the type of nails in the joists. While my description of the house may make it seem large, it probably was no more than a relatively cozy 1,500 square feet or so.

My love affair began as a teenager when I pedaled my English bike into a verdant valley a few miles from my family’s home through which run the three branches of a creek. They converge behind the house, which I found quite by accident. I was immediately smitten by its broken down beauty and isolation.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House and here for an index with links to other culture-related posts.

A must read about the man who virtually invented the oral history from the always must-read Davd Schuler HERE.

Halloween may be my favorite holiday and Frankenstein one of my favorite books.

But there is a dirty little secret about the masterwork written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley in her late teens and first published anonymously in 1818 as Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus, and a colleague, Charlie Robinson, can now tell the tale after studying Shelley’s original notebooks at Oxford University’s venerable Bodleian Library:

Shelley’s husband, famed English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, deleted many words and added at least 4,000 to 5,000 words of his own to the 72,000-word novel, which is considered the first work of science fiction and remains the most popular book in that genre nearly 200 years on.

Robinson, an English professor at the University of Delaware, has atoned for Percy Shelley’s sins in The Original Frankenstein, published this month in England by the Bodleian but not yet available in the U.S.

The enduring popularity of Mary Shelley’s monster can be attributed to the quality of the book and the effects of Hollywood on the popular imagination.

“The novel subsumes the basic Western myths about the consequences of the pursuit of knowledge,” Robinson says. “It’s a short novel, and states the murder as fact, and with its simplicity and clarity, there is a fable-like quality to the narrative. It’s also about cautionary science, revolutionary theories, family dynamics and responsibility to one’s children.”

There is a spooky element to Robinson’s research: The Shelleys apparently visited the same Clarendon Building at the Bodleian in 1815 where he toiled on the new edition, as did Victor Frankenstein and Henry Clerval in the novel itself.

With the assistance of Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield, a senior assistant librarian at the Bodleian, Robinson inspected each leaf of the original manuscript and through a laborious examination of torn edges, glue residue, ink blots, pin holes, water marks and other minutiae, was able to determine the process through which Mary Shelley created Frankenstein.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.

The Chronicle’s Wired Campus Blog:

Google, the Authors Guild, and the Association of American Publishers announced today that they had settled their longstanding legal battle over Google’s mass scanning of books. Under the terms of the deal, Google will pay $125-million to establish a Book Rights Registry, to compensate authors and publishers whose copyrighted books have already been scanned, and to cover legal costs.

The settlement, which still needs court approval to go into effect, would resolve a class-action lawsuit brought in 2005 by the Authors Guild as well as a separate lawsuit filed on behalf of the publishers’ association. Publishers and authors argued that Google’s scanning of books for its Google Book Search program was a flagrant violation of copyright law’s provisions governing fair use.

“We had a major disagreement with Google about copyright law,” Paul Aiken, the guild’s executive director, said during a joint teleconference that Google and the publishers held with reporters today. “We still do, and probably always will.” But he said that the parties had been “able to set those issues aside” for what “may be the biggest book deal in U.S. publishing history.”

The deal goes far beyond money. Richard Sarnoff, chairman of the publishers’ association, described it to reporters as “breathtaking in scope, groundbreaking for publishers and authors, and trailblazing for intellectual property in general.”

BUT:

The settlement left unresolved the question of whether Google’s unauthorized scanning of copyrighted books was permissible under copyright law.

I’ll be eager to see what some of the key copyfighters have to say.

Twenty or so years ago, a small and comely twentysomething blond American stopped over in New Zealand on the way from her hometown of Boston to graduate school in Australia. She ended up spending an evening in a pub near Auckland where she met a group of Maoris and so liked what she saw — the country in general and a hulkingly handsome Maori by the name of Seven in particular — that it eventually would lead her to write one of the most unusual travelogue and history books of the many that I have read.

The blond was Christina Thompson and the book is the recently published Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All.

Thompson’s accomplishment is no small feat because she didn’t stay in New Zealand nor ever lived there. As it was, there were several instances where I found myself learning more than I wanted to know about she and Seven (so named because he was the seventh of 10 children), with whom she shacked up before marrying and having children.

But just when I would become frustrated I turned the page and Thompson gobsmacked me with a penetrating observation about the effects of colonization on the Maori, as well as how even the most well read of us pretty much consistently misunderstand these people best known in the popular American imagination for a single movie — Whale Rider — and the beautifully ornate facial tattoos of their ancestors.

Please click here to read more at Kiko’s House.