Fear Factor: Terror Incognito

Picador India have just published Fear Factor: Terror Incognito (ISBN 978-0-330-46233-4) edited by Meenakshi Bharat and Sharon Rundle, with an introduction by Yasmine Gooneratne, which includes my story "The Liberation Centre". The book will be published By Picador Australia in March at $24.99.
Also included in the books are works by Devika Brendon, David Malouf, Kiran Nagarkar, Salman Rushdie, Thomas Keneally, Andrew Y.M. Kwong, Temsula Ro, Susanne Gervay, Janhavi Acharekar, Meera Kant, Sujata Sankranti, Jaspreet Singh, Rosie Scott, Neelum Saram Gour, Denise leith, Gulzar, Guy Scotton and Tabisha Khair.
The book is an attempt by Indian and Australian writers to react to the impact of terrorism and tyranny on the world. The works are strikingly diverse and, as Meenakshi notes in the editors' foreword, an "assertion of a shared humanity".

A little garden in spring

Our garden in spring is a special oasis for us. It might have planes flying overhead and be within coo-ee of the Sydney CBD, but it also has cool, green corners, nesting birds and sleeping lizards.

Amended Google Book Settlement the Way to Go

Revised terms for the Google Book Settlement were announced in New York on 13 November.

The revised terms follow on from October 2008 when a broad class of authors and publishers, the Authors Guild, the Association of American Publishers, and Google announced a settlement agreement that proposed to unlock access to millions of out-of-print books in the U.S. and give authors and publishers new ways to distribute and control access to their works online. If
approved by the Court, the settlement will:
• Generate greater exposure for millions of in-copyright, out-of-print books, by enabling students, scholars, and readers to search, preview, and purchase online access to these works;
• Open new opportunities for authors and publishers to sell their copyrighted works and to maintain ongoing control over the ways those books can be displayed;
• Create an independent, not-for-profit Book Rights Registry that will locate and represent rightsholders, making it easier for everyone, including Google's competitors, to license works;
• Offer a means for U.S. colleges, universities, and other organisations to obtain subscriptions for online access to collections from some of the world’s most renowned libraries;
• Provide free, full-text, online viewing of millions of out-of-print books at designated computers in U.S. public and university libraries; and
• Enable unprecedented access to the written literary record for people who are visually impaired.
On November 13, 2009, the parties to the settlement filed an amended agreement, having carefully reviewed the submissions filed with the Court, including that of the U.S. Department of Justice. The changes made to the settlement were developed to address many of these concerns, while preserving the core benefits of the agreement.
Areas of change are summarized below, and a broader list of changes can be found
in the supplemental notice.

International Scope
As revised, the settlement will only include books that were either registered with the U.S. Copyright Office or published in the U.K., Australia, or Canada. After hearing feedback from foreign rightsholders, the plaintiffs decided to narrow the class to include only these countries, which share a common legal heritage and similar book industry practices. British, Australian, and Canadian rightsholders are joining the case as named plaintiffs and will also be represented on the Board of the Book Rights Registry.
In addition, clarified the wording in the agreement has been clarified to make it clear that works that are for sale as new internationally are considered commercially available and thus Google will not display any of their content by default.
Google remains interested in working directly with international rightsholders and organisations that represent them, including those in countries excluded from the settlement, to reach similar agreements to make their works available worldwide. Authors and publishers from around the world can also enter into promotional and revenue-generating programs through Google's Partner Program.

Unclaimed Works
The amended settlement agreement requires the Book Rights Registry to search for rightsholders who have not yet come forward and to hold revenue on their behalf. The settlement now also specifies that a portion of the revenue generated from unclaimed works may, after five years, be used to locate rightsholders, but will no longer be used for the Registry's general operations or redistributed to other rightsholders. The Registry may ask the court after 10 years to distribute these funds to nonprofits benefiting rightsholders and the reading public, and may provide abandoned funds to the appropriate government authority in compliance with state property laws. The Registry will now also include a Court-approved fiduciary who will represent rightsholders of unclaimed books, act to protect their interests, and licence their works to third parties, to the extent permitted by law.
As with the original agreement, nothing in the amended settlement limits anyone's ability to use unclaimed works.
As Google first announced in September 2009, any book retailer will be able to sell consumers online access to the out-of-print books covered by the settlement, including unclaimed books. Rightsholders will still receive 63% of the revenue, while retailers will keep the majority of the remaining 37%. This provision has been explicitly written into the revised agreement as a Google obligation.

Access Models
The amended settlement does not change the primary access models outlined in the original agreement, including enabling readers to preview and purchase books, selling institutional subscriptions to the whole database, and giving libraries free access at designated terminals. Under the revised agreement, possible additional access models to which Google and the Registry might agree in the future have been reduced and are now limited to: print-on-demand, file download, and consumer subscription.
The amended agreement also enables the Registry to increase the number of terminals at a public library building, and it clarifies that rightsholders can choose to make their books available for free or allow re-use under Creative Commons or other licenses. Rightsholders can also choose to modify or remove restrictions placed on Google's display of their books, such as limits on the number of pages that users can print.

Pricing and the Non-Discrimination Clause
The amended settlement clarifies how Google's algorithm will work to price books competitively. The algorithm used to establish consumer purchase prices will simulate the prices in a competitive market, and prices for books will be established independently of each other. The agreement also stipulates that the Registry cannot share pricing information with anyone but the book’s rightsholder.
In addition, the amended settlement removes the non-discrimination clause (commonly called the "Most Favored Nation" clause) that pertained to the Registry licensing of unclaimed works. The Registry is free to license to other parties without ever extending the same terms to Google.

A change for me: Goodbye and Hello

Shortly I will be moving on from my position at the Australian Society of Authors. After five and a half frantic, busy but rewarding years, I have accepted the position of Senior Lecturer in Writing at the University of New England in Armidale, NSW.
This will mean some personal and physical change, but I am looking forward to this new stage in my career.
I look forward to working with my students and my colleagues in the academic writing community. I'll be continuing with this blog.

A Win for Australian Territorial Copyright

On 11 November, the Competition Minister, Dr Craig Emerson, announced that the Australian Government was leaving the parallel importation restrictions on books into Australia unchanged. In doing so, the government confirmed Australian territorial copyright, and Australian authors breathed a sigh of relief, their 16.5 month battle to preserve a national marketplace for their works finally won.
This victory was won through the quiet, unheralded actions of individual authors, who wrote to and telephoned their elected representatives to make sure their point of view was heard above the noisy din emanating from the so-called Coalition for Cheaper Books (really a coalition for greater profits for Woolworths, Wesfarmers and Dymocks) and the free-market troglodytes of the Productivity Commission and their hangers-on.
Congratulations to all.

"Worthwhile Culture?" -- sure, but tell me what it is first

The Coalition for Greater Profits, urr, sorry, Cheaper Books in the form of bookseller Dymocks has come up with a marvellous suggestion in the last stages of the debate regarding the restrictions on the parallel importation of books.
Dymocks has put forward the concept of a 1% levy on publishers' sales to raise $15 million to fund new Australian writing grants. Sounds great! Authors should be enthusiastic about this. But wait for it -- there's a rider.
Dymocks proposes these grants be for 'culturally worthwhile books'. There's a rub and a half! A Pom could argue that there won't be any books funded under such a scheme, since there's nothing worthwhile in Aussie culture. Myself, I'd argue that such a definition would cover books such as "Brutal British Governors of Australian States", "Knitting patterns my Nonna taught me", "Plaster and metal ceiling panels, bosses and straps for Federation houses", "Aboriginal languages of New South Wales with CD-ROM", "The history of Cornish immigrants to South Australia", "Netball for boys", "450 recipes for roo: How to eat and save our national emblem", "Up on a Hill: A history of St Patrick's, Goulburn", "Best Australian Bush Ballads", a manga series featuring my favourite villain Killer Koala, "The Banksias: Botanical illustrations of the complete species (in five volumes)", "Australian automobiles 1924-2000", "Tiwi football", "Diseases of Australian livestock and native animals (with online resources)", "My first writing book (with teaching materials)", "Alitji in the Dreamtime -- Alice in Wonderland in Pitjantjara and English", "Fishtails in the Dust: stories and poems by Central Australian writers", "Australia's corporate crooks" and "Jeff Thompson's favourite fast balls".
The trouble for Dymocks is that most of these titles (or similar versions) have in fact been published by the Australian publishing industry at one time or another. That's the great strength of the industry, that it can and does produce such culturally worthwhile and relevant titles -- and its a strength Dymocks ignores in its pursuit of greater profits.
You'll notice I haven't included many fiction titles in my list of culturally worthwhile books. Would fantasy, romance, crime, or science fiction cut it as 'culturally worthwhile'? Would The Book Thief and Tales from Outer Suburbia (just awarded major prizes in Germany) make the grade? The Book Thief isn't even about Australia.
The Literature Board of the Australia Council offers about $4 million in grants (including the ASA managed Emerging Writers and Illustrators initiative) to writers and publishers for work in development or of marginal viability for a publisher.
What does Dymocks propose in addition that would be culturally worthwhile? They give no clues except that phrase 'culturally worthwhile books' but I'd hazard a guess they mean books such as those some of our stuffier and more remote (at least from Australian culture) critics (mostly in Melbourne) consider "literature", whatever that is. These books may be supremely worthy in the confines of Carlton, but it is a truth universally acknowledged that such books are perpetually in search of an audience. Would providing further funds for their publication help them find such an audience? Surely, that is the problem that must be addressed.
But Dymocks is drumming here to obscure their own shortcomings. There is no shortage of books being published in Australia that can be considered 'culturally worthwhile'. They come not only from the largest of our publishers but also from the smallest. It is the smallest publishers though who have the greatest problem in putting their wares before potential readers and Dymocks and its practices are largely to blame.
If Dymocks was serious in its pursuit of 'worthwhile culture', the company would do better by guaranteeing that it will stock all the books of Australia's small publishers and make them available Australia-wide without charging them for shelf space (which happens for many titles from major publishers -- those books don't get up the front of the shop without a price being paid) and actually contributing some promotional funds to assist in bringing them to the attention of readers. In doing this Dymocks would actually be performing a service and a function that a customer expects of a bookshop.
In today's climate, one of the problems that small publishers such as those in the Small Publishers Underground Networking Community (SPUNC) face is marketing and distribution. Dymocks is well-placed to assist these publishers. But it does not do so. Why? Dymocks is only after the cream, the short tail, of the publishing market. It stocks best-sellers from the largest publishers and "special orders" those of our smaller publishers.
Try buying Fishtails in the Dust or Tiwi Football (both real books) in Dymocks George Street or one of the Melbourne stores. Yes, the special order desk will be able to find it in Books in Print, but there'll be a special order surcharge and it isn't in stock etc., etc. Same for Aboriginal Languages of NSW (another real book, though it doesn't come with a CD-ROM) and my own book Music from another Country, which is stocked by independent bookshops but special ordered by Dymocks, so I know Dymocks customers are asking for it, but, hey, let's not have Dymocks give their own customers what they want, eh -- after all, there's all those Stephanie Meyer books over by the door in piles ...

One thing we should read into Dymock's statement though is their valuation of the Australian publishing industry at $1.5 billion. The publishers value it at about $2 billion, which, if you add in the educational sector (mostly unknown to Dymocks) is about right. Dymocks wants to endanger that amount of value-added business in Australia to enhance its own profits. Doesn't sound right does it.
Certainly doesn't sound 'culturally worthwhile'.

Music from another Country wins praise

I'm blowing my own trumpet, but if I don't nobody will.
That's not quite true.
Gary Dunne has praised Music from another Country as follows: "Music from another country is a really good read. It's the story of young Alex uncovering various family secrets, with flashbacks to both his brother Kieran in Darlinghurst in the early 1990s, and their grandfather Neil, a Lancaster pilot in World War II. Jeremy deals with Kieran's HIV death in the same way he deals with the events that scored Neil his Victoria Cross. Vividly descriptive, his style leads you to an emotional response, rather than tells you what you should be feeling. The result is a surprisingly gentle tale, but with an emotional sting, about the universality of courage and love." You don't have to accept my word for this. Go to Gary's website to see for yourself.
In the entry below this one, I've noted what Kerryn Goldsworthy had to say about the book in the Sydney Morning Herald. I'm also receiving wonderful feedback from readers and this has been posted on the Fat Frog Books website.
The book is now available at The Bookshop Darlinghurst; Gleebooks in Glebe; Better Read than Dead in Newtown; Eltham Bookshop in Melbourne; and Charles Darwin University Bookshop in Darwin.