Plain words, uncommon sense
Although tomorrow is Canadian Remembrance Day, I have a story about 2 Americans who faced seemingly insurmountable odds and who chose to sacrifice themselves. The loose connection to Remembrance Day is that one is a wartime story.
Have fun on a Monday:
Read the story of Easy Eddie and Butch O’Hare …
Thanks to @ehrenc on Twitter, here’s the link to Victoria Barnsley’s (HarperCollins UK) speech on change in publishing. Read it! She is living and breathing the Web 2.0 world from the position of someone who’s been in the business long enough to remember receiving handwritten manuscripts. (Ok, I’m that old too, but those were really old writers.) http://snurl.com/57cm0
index // mb has a great article: New Digital Initiative: Indigo Takes Wheel, Tries to Reinvent?
Indigo’s online strategy re: ebooks and digital content and what would be better.
Totally agree and wish I had time to reflect more on this topic.
Madness of the day awaits …
This is Halloween
This is Halloween
Pumpkins growl in the dead of night …
Thank you daylight savings time for giving me an extra hour to find fluff on the internet. (Thanks for the link Sio!)
Kate Trgovac‘s wise words are now part of the Age of Conversation, a book written by an international team of 237 bloggers from 16 different countries.
Way to go Kate!
Wow, the new Whitecap Books website is awesome. I am bias because I’ve worked with Paschal on Trading in Memories. But this is a really cool redesign. I think his specialty is Drupal sites that don’t look like Drupal sites. Love it. Looks very yummy and friendly. I want to spend time looking around.
http://whitecap.ca/
Latest News
April 29, 2009: Justice Dept. Opens Antitrust Inquiry Into Google Books Deal
Quote: The inquiry does not necessarily mean that the department will oppose the settlement, which is subject to a court review. But it suggests that some of the concerns raised by critics, who say the settlement would unfairly give Google an exclusive license to profit from millions of books, have resonated with the Justice Department.
October 29, 2008: Google Settles Suit Over Book-Scanning by MIGUEL HELFT, New York Times
Quote: Google said Tuesday that it had agreed to pay $125 million to settle two copyright lawsuits brought by book authors and publishers over the company’s plan to digitize and show snippets of in-copyright books and to share digital copies with libraries without the explicit permission.
Well that has taken a long time! The lawsuits were originally launched in September and October 2005.
According to the NYT article, the money will be used for a book registry and to resolve existing claims. The settlement still has to be approved but if it goes ahead then, I think, it means all those books will be available online and the money just goes to settling claims.
The lawsuits were brought about because Google worked with libraries to scan millions of copyright and non-copyright books. The scanning became an issue for the copyright-protected material, in particular material that the publishers or authors did not want digitized and made available.
Background as per the NYT article:
The settlement agreement resolves a class-action suit filed on Sept. 20, 2005, by the Authors Guild and certain authors, and a suit filed on Oct. 19, 2005, by five major publisher-members of the Association of American Publishers: the McGraw-Hill Companies, Pearson Education, Penguin Group, John Wiley & Sons and Simon & Schuster. It is subject to approval by the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York.
In the long run $125 million is probably worth it. Steep and dear now, but to have digitized and to have available for in perpetuity all that content … woah!
While I was away, award season started.
The BC Achievement Foundation’s 2008 Award for Early Literacy went to author Bill Richardson and illustrator Cynthia Nugent for The Aunts Come Marching (Raincoast Books), a singalong story about a procession of musical aunts who drop in on a family for an unexpected visit. This is a very fun book and I even had the pleasure of listening to Bill read/sing it.
The Time to Read Award is a national book award honouring the author and the illustrator of a children’s book suitable for kindergarten students. The winning book is distributed to all kindergarten children in British Columbia by the Ministry of Education.
Way to go Aunts!
The Thirteenth Tale is one of those wildly popular books that I failed to read when it was first published. I wanted to but I also wanted to wait until I had only the vaguest recollections of what reviewers said. And what I recall is only that the book was considered a success in North America but not so in Britain. It was too British for the British, or some such rubbish.
It is a fine novel. Margaret Lea, book shop clerk and amateur biographer, is commissioned by Vida Winter, famous British novelist, to write her biography. Why? It’s all unclear until the end so I won’t spoil it for you.
I was pulled into the plot twists of the biography Winter was detailing for Lea, who insisted on only writing the truth. The truth is always fascinating, especially when given in autobiography.
The setting is Angelfield, a small town where twins are born to Isabelle, who’s not quite right. It’s a story of abandonment: the abandonment of children by parents who are unable to care for them, it is the abandonment of children by carefree parents who don’t understand children, and it’s the separation and reunification of the twins and their caregivers.
Lots of interesting loops and very much like a fairy tale.
As Vida Winter says, “my gripe is not with lovers of the truth but with truth herself. What succour, what consolation is there in truth, compared to a story? What good is truth, at midnight, in the dark, when the wind is roaring like a bear in the chimney? What you need are the plump comforts of a story. The soothing, rocking safety of a lie.”
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