I’ve only just stopped drooling. The latest edition of Geist magazine has landed on the doorstep and I love it. Check out the Geist website. Geist is my favourite literary magazine of ideas and culture. Every issue spends a long time in my hands. And recently, the mag has been arriving with a short note from the editor. This is no regular note. This issue it starts “Welcome (again) to the other side of this piece of paper …”

A couple of issues ago the note went on to explain and apologize for the lateness of the issue. The personal note is very much like a blog post and the humanity of the Geist team is plainly evident.

The note this issue continues with an invitation for readers to think of Geist during the gift-giving season. The Geist Gift Pack included with the issue also includes an opportunity for the gift-giver to receive an archival print from the mag. Here’s the pitch:

“The idea of giving you a gift in exchange for you giving a gift came about after our accountant, whose name is Mindy, demonstrated on a spreadsheet what we had long suspected: that the cost of gaining a new reader for Geist by the conventional methods of direct mail had reached the astronomical proportion of two and even three times the price of a subscription. At the same time, the cost of acquiring gift subscriptions had remained at the level of only a few bucks each.”

Every subscription also draws three times its value in advertising and subsidy revenue. This whole pitch is effective for me because I like when companies explain the cost of their products, the business model; it makes me a better-informed consumer. One of the things I find frustrating is people who think $30-40 hardcover books are too expensive. Someone in publishing should explain the economic factors that contribute to that cost. Maybe I will … but not today.

So do you love new ideas and new writing made in Canada? Do you enjoy a quirky look at the world? Do you live in Canada? Have you always wanted a Geist subscription?

I want to support Geist, and I want to give you a subscription to the magazine.

I’m offering 2 subscriptions. If you would like to be Geisted, send me an email, monique@somisguided.com with the subject line “Geist Me”.

Vancouver Public Library has a series this week called Speak Up: Who Owns Knowledge. I attended the session last night on copyright.

Andreas Schroeder was a speaker on the panel representing the Writers’ Union of Canada and, in particular, writers who make their living from writing. Some of those writers are concerned about the seeming conflict between their right to earn a living from their creations and users’ ideas about the right to pay little or nothing for works available online.

There was a certain amount of heated debate, which I’ll refrain from at the moment. But writers and publishers pay attention. It is no longer just Google trying to “get your horse out of the gate.” [I’m quoting a speaker from the session.]

EdinburghNews.Scotsman.com reported today that an alliance has formed between Microsoft and Yahoo! to challenge Google’s project to digitize the world’s books.

Quote: The group – the Open Content Alliance (OCA) …, unveiled earlier this month by a group of digital archivists and also backed by Hewlett-Packard and Adobe, says it has signed up more than a dozen major libraries in North America, the UK and mainland Europe.

Danielle Tiedt, general manager of Microsoft’s MSN Search, said the world’s largest software maker would fund the digital duplication of 150,000 old books over the next year.

The Association of American Publishers and the US Authors Guild have filed two separate law suits against Google, saying that the Google Print Library Project infringes on their copyrights.

My understanding of the Library Project is that the information displayed about the book is the bibliographic data only. The exact information that publishers spend all sorts of time and energy trying to get out to Amazon, Bowker, BookNet (in Canada) and other data aggregators.

A user searches for book information, maybe using “Battle of Britain” as a keyword, and the Library Print Project screen–for books protected by copyright–will show that search term within a sentence or two to give the user context. The bibliographic information for the book is also shown: title, author, publisher, publication date, number of pages, etc. The full page of the book is never shown.

So why are publishers and authors upset?

In my opinion Google is not doing a good enough job expressing to publishers, authors and the general public that full pages are not shown on books protected by copyright. They are showing less information than what is available on most Amazon listings.

(Google is doing a good job of providing publishers with links to their blogs and newsletters. What I think they need to do in addition is get the traditional media talking about the exact amount of content shown on the Library Project listings. The conversation is drifting into a general debate about copyright and digital copyright and those are confusing issues. Look at the debate about Bill C-60 and the amendments to the Copyright Act in Canada. These topics are less clear than the root issues of the Library Project, which is a user is looking for book on X, Google shows Y.)

On the opposite side of the fence, publishers and authors are not clearly expressing their concerns. I don’t think the issue has anything to do with Google providing users bibliographic information. I think publishers and authors are concerned that a giant corporation will have access to the full text of millions of books. When those books do fall into the public domain, Google will be able to easily profit from having those materials. So the “free” service Google is providing publishers definitely has a labour cost associated with it for Google, who I assume is treating the scanning process as an investment in future knowledge acquisition.

Now why is that wrong? A work in the public domain can be exploited by anyone who wants to repackage it and sell it. In the case of Google they are doing the repackaging (scanning the text) years in advance of when the book falls into the public domain. But, they are not selling it and they are not distributing the contents in any way that infringes on copyright.

In regards to the Google Library Project, you have a company who is providing a service to book readers and researchers. Google is making books easier to find and buy. The nature of the internet expands the audience so the number of users who might be looking for a book on “Battle of Britain” increases substantially from just the folks in your local library to folks around the world. That’s a good thing. Any sales of the book, while it is protected by copyright, benefit the content creator (the author, publisher). Authors and publishers benefit for the entire lifespan of the book, the entire time the book is protected by copyright, 50-75 years after the death of the copyright holder.

Publishers and authors should really reflect on the root of their fears and clearly express those concerns to Google, then Google will have an opportunity to respond. But saying it is the act of scanning the text and equating it to photocopying an entire book is not the same, and I don’t think any court will think differently.

And authors who want to be included in the Library Project, don’t worry about it. It is better to submit your work to Google Print, which offers a similar service but displays the content of the book differently.

Quill and Quire is reporting that Holly and Paul McNally of McNally Robinson Booksellers have won the Ernst and Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award for the Prairies region.

McNally Robinson is one of my favourite bookstores. Their flagship store is in Winnipeg and there is a great spiral staircase up to the children’s section. The store is a bit like a garden. There’s a cobblestone-style path through the store, rich greens, great little seats, a fantastic cafe, and the staff are phenomenal.

If you are ever in Winnipeg, McNally’s is worth a visit.

My romance with James even started in the bookstore, we were on a field trip to the newly opened store. I bought Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and James lent me Ernest Buckler’s The Mountain and the Valley. It was a big day.

Last night James and I saw an ad for the ABC drama Boston Legal. I don’t keep up with the TV news but this morning in Quill and Quire I read that a Canadian book by Harbour Publishing–fine folks–will be featured. A bit out of date considering the show aired on Oct 11 (yesterday), but pretty exciting nonetheless.

The show was set in a BC town that is engaged in a real-life dispute between environmentalists and fish farmers, in particular about the negative effects of farmed fish on the wild salmon stock.

The book is A Stain Upon the Sea: West Coast Salmon Farming, which is a collection of essays.

Go Harbour!