(1) COMIC-CON STREAM IS LEGAL, GETS BLOCKED ANYWAY. “Cartoon Network and Star Trek Panels at San Diego Comic-Con Were Blocked by Youtube’s ContentID” – which reminded The Digital Reader of what happened to the Hugo Awards livestream in 2012.
Alas, no one was paying attention to Youtube’s ContentID copyright bot yesterday until after it shut down a couple officially sponsored livestreams from San Diego Comic-con. The first to get the boot was a Star Trek panel, and then a couple hours later Cartoon Network’s panel was also cut off.
Here’s why this is newsworthy: Both of these panels were blocked by Youtube the networks were streaming content that belonged to the networks.
Ars Technica reported “CBS’ overzealous copyright bots hit Star Trek virtual Comic-Con panel”
ViacomCBS kicked things off today with an hour-long panel showing off its slew of current and upcoming Star Trek projects: Discovery, Picard, Lower Decks, and Strange New Worlds.
The panel included the cast and producers of Discovery doing a read-through of the first act of the season 2 finale, “Such Sweet Sorrow, Part 2.” The “enhanced” read-through included sound effects, effects shots, and storyboard images meant to bolster the actors as they delivered lines from their living rooms and home offices.
Even if the presentation didn’t look like a real episode of Discovery to the home viewer, it apparently sounded close enough: after the Star Trek Universe virtual panel began viewers began to lose access to the stream. In place of the video, YouTube displayed a content ID warning reading: “Video unavailable: This video contains content from CBS CID, who has blocked it on copyright grounds.”
After being blacked out for about 20 minutes, the panel was restored, and the recording of the virtual panel has no gaps in playback.
The Digital Reader reminded everyone:
This is not the first time that livestreams have been blocked when they were legally using content; I am reminded of the Worldcon awards dinner livestream that was shut down because someone played a Doctor Who clip. The video had been provided by the BBC (the show had won an award that year) but apparently no one told Ustream’s bot.
(2) TIME IS DRAGON ALONG. The Dragon Award nominations closed July 17, so what better day for their site to make its first post in over a year? Er, wait, it’s July 24! Makes a good reason to call it “A Blast from the Past (Winners) – Part 1”:
…Now in its sixth year, the Dragon Con hosted Dragon Awards has proven to be the defining “must” list for the greatest in genre novels, media, comics, and games. While the world is locked inside, members and fans have turned to past award winners to build their reading lists.
We reached out to eight winners and asked them to talk about their award-winning novels, their other works, the Dragon Awards ceremony, and what they have coming up that they would like to share….
… This is your chance say as much as you want right now to tell all the fans what they should know about you as a person and author, your work, and your career.
…Harry Turtledove: It’s all L. Sprague de Camp’s fault. I found his Lest Darkness Fall in a secondhand bookstore when I was about 15, and started trying to find out how much he was making up (very little) and how much was real (most). And so, after flunking out of Caltech the end of my freshman year (calculus was much tougher than I was), I wound up studying Byzantine history at UCLA. I got my PhD in 1977. If I hadn’t found that book then, I wouldn’t have written most of what I’ve written. I would have written something–I already had the bug–but it wouldn’t be alternate history. I wouldn’t be married to my wife; I met her when I was teaching at UCLA while my professor had a guest appointment in Greece. I wouldn’t have the kids and grandkids I have. I wouldn’t be living where I’m living. Other than that, it didn’t change my life a bit. Imagining me without reading Lest Darkness Fall is alternate history on the micro-historical level.
(3) FAN RESOURCES. Congratulations to Fanac.org for reaching new milestones in preserving fanhistory.
FANAC by the Numbers. Numbers can be misleading, but they do give us some idea of the progress we are making in documenting our fan history. As of today, we have 11,526 fanzine issues consisting of more than 179,423 pages. This is up from the 10,000 fanzine issues and 150,000 pages reported in our April update. Our YouTube channel is now at 621 subscribers, and 90,356 views, up from last time’s 500 and 75,000. Fancyclopedia 3 has exceeded 32,000 items.
(4) TIED UP AT THE DOCK. Next year’s JoCo Cruise, technically a Jonathan Coulton fan cruise but really a week-long ocean cruise of all sorts of nerdery, science fiction fandom, and boardgaming, has been postponed a year to March 5-12, 2022. John Scalzi, a regular participant, also wrote a post about the announcement.
(5) COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT SUIT UPDATE. Publishers Weekly reports on the defendants’ appeal in the media: “Internet Archive to Publishers: Drop ‘Needless’ Copyright Lawsuit and Work with Us”
During a 30-minute Zoom press conference on July 22, Internet Archive founder Brewster Kahle urged the four major publishers suing over the organization’s book scanning efforts to consider settling the dispute in the boardroom rather than the courtroom.
“Librarians, publishers, authors, all of us should be working together during this pandemic to help teachers, parents, and especially students,” Kahle implored. “I call on the executives of Hachette, HarperCollins, Wiley, and Penguin Random House to come together with us to help solve the challenging problems of access to knowledge during this pandemic, and to please drop this needless lawsuit.”
Kahle’s remarks came as part of a panel, which featured a range of speakers explaining and defending the practice of Controlled Digital Lending (CDL), the legal theory under which the Internet Archive has scanned and is making available for borrowing a library of some 1.4 million mostly 20th century books….
But the practice of CDL has long rankled author and publisher groups—and those tensions came to a head in late March when the IA unilaterally announced its now closed National Emergency Library initiative, which temporarily removed access restrictions for its scans of books, making the books available for multiple users to borrow during the Covid-19 outbreak. On June 1, Hachette, HarperCollins, John Wiley & Sons, and Penguin Random House filed a copyright infringement lawsuit in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York.
In a press release announcing the suit, executives at the Association of American Publishers said the Internet Archive’s scanning program was not a public service, but an attempt “to bludgeon the legal framework that governs copyright investments and transactions in the modern world,” and compared it to the “largest known book pirate sites in the world.”..
(6) GEEK PARTNERSHIP SOCIETY FUNDRAISER. At least four Minneapolis-St. Paul conventions call the Geek Partnership Society’s office space home, and a host of other groups use it, too (listed below). The facility may not be able to afford to stay open, and after three weeks the GPS GoFundMe has raised only $13,010 of its $40,000 goal.
Geek Partnership Society may not be able to honor the terms of its lease and could face permanent closure if funds cannot be raised by end of July, 2020.
Please act now to support our facility, our community programs, and the resources we strive to provide to all geeks in the Twin Cities.
So, what happened?
-Clubs and individuals canceled their rentals of GPS’s venue spaces as people complied with sheltering orders and tried to maintain social distance.
-GPS Charity Auction events that we rely on for income were canceled as local conventions were canceled or postponed.
-Some of our large annual contributors are also having financial difficulties. because their conventions were postponed/cancelled for 2020.
What needs to happen now?
We need your help to keep GPS running through the end of the year. This will provide the time needed to plan a more flexible revenue model going into 2021. Our goal is to raise $40,000.
The GPS blog has more information: “GoFundme Launched – Save Your Geek Partnership Society”.
Here are some groups and programs who rely on GPS’ support.
- Crafty Geek / Make It Sew
- Creative Night, the Group!
- Echo Base Lightsaber Building Club
- Geek Physique
- Geeks Read Book Club
- GPS Photography Club
- GPS Movie Appreciation Posse
- Tsuinshi Anime Club
- United Geeks of Gaming
- Annual Volunteer Appreciation Party (community wide)
- Geek presence at Art-A-Whirl
- Holiday Emporium
- Scavenger Hunt
(7) THE REDISCOVERED COUNTRY. “1000 Women in Horror author says book could have been ten times longer”: Entertainment Weekly interviews author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas.
The history of the horror genre is routinely told via the careers of male directors such as James Whale, Alfred Hitchcock, George Romero, John Carpenter, and Wes Craven. Author Alexandra Heller-Nicholas‘ just-published book 1000 Women in Horror: 1895-2018, takes a very different approach, showcasing the contributions of women directors and actors as well as those who have toiled, often unsung, in other capacities. “When we think of women in horror, we default to Janet Leigh or Texas Chain Saw Massacre, those really iconic images from horror films,” says Heller-Nicholas, who has previously written books on Dario Argento’s Suspiria and Abel Ferrara’s Ms. 45. “We think of terror as being embodied through women’s bodies — screaming and running. I really wanted to explode that a little bit and say the person at the editing deck might be a woman, the person in the director’s chair might be a woman, the cinematographer might be a woman. If we move outside of the ‘single male genius’ who else is working on this stuff? And it turns out there’s actually some pretty amazing people, and some of them are women. There’s a lot more going on that women embody in horror than screaming. Not that there’s anything wrong with screaming. It’s hard work!”
Heller-Nicholas was inspired to have 1895 be the chronological starting point for her collection of mini-biographies after seeing a film from that year titled The Execution of Mary Stuart. “It’s a very very early example of special effects,” says the writer. “It’s Mary going up to the guillotine and having her head chopped off and her head being picked up, that’s the end of the film. I was first drawn to this because Mary is played by ‘Mrs Robert Thomas.’ I was fascinated by ‘Mrs Robert Thomas.’ Seemingly it’s a woman, but she’s defined through her relationship to a man. But I did some digging around and apparently it was actually played by a man. There was something about it, a little it of playfulness and the idea that gender and identity is slippery even in 1895.”
(8) MEDIA BIRTHDAY.
- July 24, 1952 — Blackhawk: Fearless Champion of Freedom serial premiered. This was a fifteen-chapter black-and-white movie serial from Columbia Pictures, based on the Blackhawk comic book, first published by Quality Comics, but later owned by DC Comics. The latter company would re-use the name in several versions of the group. It was directed by Spencer Gordon Bennet (as Spencer Bennet) Fred F. Sears and produced by Sam Katzman. It was written by George H. Plympton, Royal K. Cole and Sherman L. Lowe. It starred Kirk Alyn, Carol Forman and John Crawford. Despite being very well received, the Blackhawk serial was the last film serial shown on air flights.
(9) TODAY’S BIRTHDAYS.
[Compiled by Cat Eldridge and John Hertz.]
- Born July 24, 1802 – Alexandre Dumas. Published work amounts to over 100,000 pages, translated into a hundred languages, inspiring two hundred motion pictures. Born on Haiti (as it now is); father, a general and the son of a marquis; grandmother, a black slave; Dumas, the name he used, was hers. His Nutcracker, a version of Hoffmann’s, is the basis of Tchaikovsky’s. The Wolf-Leader, an early werewolf novel; The Marriages of Father Olifus, just (2017) re-translated as The Man Who Married a Mermaid; The Count of Monte Cristo, a root of The Stars My Destination. (Died 1870) [JH]
- Born July 24, 1878 – Edward Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany. Chess and pistol-shooting champion of Ireland. Fifty Tales of Pegana with its own history, geography, gods. Ten dozen unlikely tales told by Joseph Jorkins to anyone buying him a whiskey at their club. Clute and Langford say D’s prose has muscular delicacy. In Fitzgerald’s This Side of Paradise Blaine and D’Invilliers recite D’s poetry. Translated into Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish. (Died 1957) [JH]
- Born July 24, 1895 — Robert Graves. Poet, mythologist, historical novelist, critic. Author of, among other works, The White Goddess (a very strange book which Yolen quotes from in The Wild Hunt), two volumes called The Greek Myths, Seven Days in New Crete which Pringle has on his Best Hundred Fantasy Novels list, and more short fiction than really bears thinking about. (Died 1985.) (CE)
- Born July 24, 1916 – John D. MacDonald. While the score of books (I warned you about these puns) featuring salvage consultant Travis McGee and his friend Meyer are favorites of many, JDM is here for three SF novels, five dozen shorter stories, he wrote until the end. Wine of the Dreamers has been translated into Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish, Swedish; its title if not already meaning something else might name fan activity or SF – or if not unfair to nondrinkers. (Died 1986) [JH]
- Born July 24, 1936 — Phyllis Douglas. She also appeared in two episodes of the Trek series in “The Galileo Seven” and “The Way to Eden” and in a two-parter of Batman (“The Joker’s Last Laugh“ and “The Joker’s Epitaph”) where she was Josie. She was in an uncredited role in Atlantis: The Lost Continent, and her very first role was at age two in Gone with The Wind. (Died 2010.) (CE)
- Born July 24, 1936 — Mark Goddard, 84. Major Don West, the adversary of Dr. Zachary Smith, on Lost in Space. Other genre appearances were scant. He played an unnamed Detective in the early Eighties Strange Invaders and he showed up on an episode of The Next Step Beyond which investigated supposed hauntings as Larry Hollis in “Sins of Omission”. Oh, and he was an unnamed General in the Lost in Space film. (CE)
- Born July 24, 1945 – Gordon Eklund, 75. Some are fans, some are pros, some are both; GE won a Nebula co-authoring with Greg Benford, another: they have written two novels (including If the Stars Are Gods, expanded from the novelette), half a dozen shorter stories, together. Three decades after Stars GE won a FAAn (Fan Activity Achievement) Award as Best Fanwriter. Twenty novels, six dozen shorter stories, translated into Croatian, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian, including two early Star Trek novels, of which one has a Dyson sphere. Recent collection, Stalking the Sun. [JH]
- Born July 24, 1946 – Tom Barber, 74. Three dozen covers for books and magazines, a dozen interiors. Here is the May 79 Galileo. Here is The Men in the Jungle (in German as The Brotherhood of Pain). Here is the Mar 76 Amazing; here is the Mar 19; the magazine itself is well-named. [JH]
- Born July 24, 1950 – Bob Fowke, 70. Two dozen covers, a dozen interiors. Here is The Golden Apples of the Sun. Here is Connoisseur’s SF. Here is King Creature, Come. Here is La flamme des cités perdues; not all who wander are lost, but here is The Lost Star. [JH]
- Born July 24, 1951 — Lynda Carter, 69. Wonder Woman of course. But also Principal Powers, the headmistress of a school for superheroes in Sky High; Colonel Jessica Weaver in the vampire film Slayer; Moira Sullivan, Chloe Sullivan’s Kryptonite-empowered mother in the “Prodigy” episode of Smallville; and President Olivia Marsdin In Supergirl. (CE)
- Born July 24, 1959 – Zdrvaka Evtimova, 61. Author and translator. Nine short stories for us in or translated into English, much more outside our field. Besides Bulgaria and Anglophonia, published in France, Germany, Iran, Japan, Poland, Russia, Spain, Vietnam – two dozen countries. Six Bulgarian awards. Member of the Bulgarian Writers’ Union and the UK Writers’ League. See her here (Contemporary Bulgarian Writers; in English, with a photo, book covers and excerpts, links to online stories in English). [JH]
- Born July 24, 1964 — Colleen Doran, 56. Comics artist and writer. She’s done includes Warren Ellis’ Orbiter graphic novel, Wonder Woman, Legion of Superheroes, Teen Titans, “Troll Bridge”:by Neil Gaiman and her space opera series, A Distant Soil. She also did portions of The Sandman, in the “Dream Country” and “A Game of You”. She’s tuckerized Into Sandman as the character Thessaly is based on Doran. (CE)
- Born July 24, 1981 — Summer Glau, 39. An impressive run in genre roles as she was River Tam in the Firefly series and of course the Serenity film, followed by these performances: Tess Doerner in The 4400, as Cameron in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, Bennett Halverson in Dollhouse (is this worth seeing seeing?), Skylar Adams in Alphas and lastly Isabel Rochev who is The Ravager in Arrow. (CE)
(10) COMICS SECTION.
- The Far Side shows that somebody needs a manual for first contact. (Fist contact?)
- And ever is heard a discouraging word — Dilbert shows it’s tough to be a beginning writer.
(11) PILING ON. James Davis Nicoll finds “Five More Massive Works of SFF to Add to Your Must-Read Pile”.
Are we having fun with the lockdown yet? Some of you may live, like me, in a region where our pal COVID-19 seems to be under control—or you may be trapped in some dire realm where it is not. Yet, for even those of us who are momentarily spared, respite may prove temporary—it’s always best to stay safe and plan for the possibility of continued isolation. That suggests that it would be prudent to add to your personal Mount Tsundoku, preferably with tomes weighty enough to keep one occupied through weeks of isolation and tedium. Omnibuses could be the very thing! Below are five examples…
(12) READ SANDERSON CHAPTERS. As they’ve done with previous books in the Stormlight Archive, Tor.com will be releasing one chapter from Brandon Sanderson’s upcoming novel Rhythm of War each week from now through its release in November. “Read Rhythm of War by Brandon Sanderson: Prologue and Chapter One”.
(13) REAL PERSEVERANCE. In The Guardian, Alison Flood interviews Brandon Sanderson, who discusses the long struggle he had to become a successful fantasy novelist. “Brandon Sanderson: ‘After a dozen rejected novels, you think maybe this isn’t for you'”.
Watching the numbers tick up on Brandon Sanderson’s Kickstarter is a remarkable way to pass the time. The fantasy author initially set out to raise $250,000 (£198,500) to release a 10th anniversary, leather-bound edition of his doorstopper novel, The Way of Kings. In less than 10 minutes, it became the most-funded publishing project of all time when it topped $1m. With 15 days still to go, he’s raised more than $5.6m. All this for a book that was just one of 13 Sanderson wrote before he’d even landed a publishing deal.
Most writers have novels that never see the light of day. But 13? That’s serious dedication. The books were written over a decade while Sanderson was working as a night clerk at a hotel – a job chosen specifically because as long as he stayed awake, his bosses didn’t mind if he wrote between midnight and 5am. But publishers kept telling him that his epic fantasies were too long, that he should try being darker or “more like George RR Martin” (it was the late 90s, and A Song of Ice and Fire was topping bestseller charts). His attempts to write grittier books were terrible, he says, so he became “kind of depressed”….
(14) PRESSED OWN AND OVERFLOWING. Alasdair Stuart’s The Full Lid 24th July 2020opens with a tour of duty with Matt Wallace’s Savage Legion. TheSin Du Jour author has turned in his first epic fantasy novel and it’s fiercely intelligent, uniquely perceptive and exactly what the genre needs.
After that, I take a look at the March trilogy of graphic novels. Covering the life of Rep. John Lewis, they’re engrossing, pragmatic, inspiring and horrific. They’re also by some distance some of the best graphic storytelling I’ve ever read.
Our interstitials this week feature the men of The Witcher doing things. Well, attempting things. Well, in the case of baking, being present while it notionally occurs…
This week’s playout is a unique and wonderful version of The Cure’s The Lovecats by the Ukulele Orchestra of Great Britain. Enjoy! I did.
The Full Lid is published every Friday at 5pm BST. It’s free, and you can find both sign up links and an archive of the last six months at the link above.
(15) KING REVIEWS BEUKES. [Item by Rob Thornton] In the upcoming issue of the New York Times Book Review, Stephen King has great things to say about Lauren Beukes’ post-apocalyptic novel “Afterland,” which is described by King as “science fiction” at one point and a “neo-noir” at another. Everybody gets into the naming game: “Stephen King on Lauren Beukes’s ‘Splendid’ New Thriller”.
…The flap copy on my advance edition declares that “Afterland” is a “high-concept feminist thriller that Lauren Beukes fans have been waiting for.” It is a thriller, I grant you that, and feminist in the sense that most of the men have been erased by a flu virus that develops into prostate cancer, but Beukes is too wise and story-oriented to wham away at ideas that have been thoroughly explored, sometimes at tedious length, on cable news and social media. She lets her tale do the talking, and the results are quite splendid.
This is your basic neo-noir, coast-to-coast chase novel, and Beukes, who is from South Africa, sees America with the fresh eyes of an outsider. …
(16) UNHAPPY HOLIDAYS. “Blocked Busters: Disney Pushes 17 Movie Release Dates” – NPR assesses the damage.
When Warner Brothers pulled Christopher Nolan’s $200-million thriller, Tenet, from its release schedule earlier this week, industry analysts expected a domino effect, and Disney announced this afternoon that the first 17 dominos have fallen.
The Mouse House’s live-action remake of Mulan, the last big-budget Hollywood blockbuster scheduled for August, is now “unset,” on the company’s release schedule.
And the studio has pushed back or cancelled the release of another 16 Disney and Fox films, in a ripple-effect that will affect movie releases for years.
One Searchlight film, The Personal History of David Copperfield, is still scheduled for summer, though pushed back two weeks to August 28. But such other Fox films as Kenneth Branagh’s Agatha Christie remake Death on the Nile, and the supernatural thriller film The Empty Man have been delayed to later in the fall, while Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch, which was to have opened in October, has been postponed indefinitely.
Other films, including Ridley Scott’s historical thriller The Last Duel, and the supernatural horror film Antlers have been moved to 2021.
And in perhaps the most telling shift, three Star Wars pictures and four Avatar sequels, originally scheduled to alternate as Christmas releases starting next year, have all been moved back a full year, meaning the pandemic will affect film releases through Christmas of 2028.
(17) GOOSEBUMPS. Not the series, the Harvard study: “Getting to the bottom of goosebumps”
Harvard scientists find that the same cell types that cause goosebumps are responsible for controlling hair growth
If you’ve ever wondered why we get goosebumps, you’re in good company — so did Charles Darwin, who mused about them in his writings on evolution. Goosebumps might protect animals with thick fur from the cold, but we humans don’t seem to benefit from the reaction much — so why has it been preserved during evolution all this time?
In a new study, Harvard University scientists have discovered the reason: the cell types that cause goosebumps are also important for regulating the stem cells that regenerate the hair follicle and hair. Underneath the skin, the muscle that contracts to create goosebumps is necessary to bridge the sympathetic nerve’s connection to hair follicle stem cells. The sympathetic nerve reacts to cold by contracting the muscle and causing goosebumps in the short term, and by driving hair follicle stem cell activation and new hair growth over the long term.
Published in the journal Cell, these findings in mice give researchers a better understanding of how different cell types interact to link stem cell activity with changes in the outside environment.
(18) FIAT LUX. CNN delivers “11 billion years of history in one map: Astrophysicists reveal largest 3D model of the universe ever created”.
A global consortium of astrophysicists have created the world’s largest three-dimensional map of the universe, a project 20 years in the making that researchers say helps better explain the history of the cosmos.
The Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), a project involving hundreds of scientists at dozens of institutions worldwide, collected decades of data and mapped the universe with telescopes. With these measurements, spanning more than 2 million galaxies and quasars formed over 11 billion years, scientists can now better understand how the universe developed.
“We know both the ancient history of the Universe and its recent expansion history fairly well, but there’s a troublesome gap in the middle 11 billion years,” cosmologist Kyle Dawson of the University of Utah, who led the team that announced the SDSS findings on Sunday.
“For five years, we have worked to fill in that gap, and we are using that information to provide some of the most substantial advances in cosmology in the last decade,” Dawson said in a statement.
[Thanks to Nina Shepardson, Errolwi, JJ, John King Tarpinian, Lise Andreasen, Mike Kennedy, Andrew Porter, Martin Morse Wooster, Josh Hesse, Michael Toman, John Hertz, Cat Eldridge, Cally Soukup, James Davis Nicoll, and Andrew Porter for some of these stories. Title credit belongs to File 770 contributing editor of the day Andrew.]
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Thank you for the title credit
(9) I loved Graves’ I, Claudius and Claudius, the God (yes, I read them after seeing the BBC series with Sir Patrick Stewart (not that I knew who that was then).
Lynda Carter and Summer Glau share a birthday. Cool!
11) Of course Malazan gets mentioned in the comments. Of course.
9) And Graves is a Retro Hugo finalist this year with his retelling of the Argonauts story, The Golden Fleece.
(11) There’s another trilogy by M.A. Foster, starting with “The Morphodite”. There’s a certain amount of “be careful what you ask for – you may get it”.
5) They brought it on themselves with that National Emergency Library business and they really should have known better. There was a sort of detente about CDL and they just had to take more than that. (And as a librarian… they don’t follow the ethical guidelines or do the work with publishers that governs any legitimate library’s work, and the end result of that is that the splashback from this will hit us even though we’ve made every effort to work with publishers.)
13) I find this comforting, as someone just starting out in my writing career.
Wiped out today.
But I did “meet” Soon Lee!
9) Dunsany remains one of my all-time favorites. I haven’t read as much Dumas as I should (so far just the Three Musketeers and its sequels); someday.
Note that Sanderson is a hybrid writer. Some of his books are published through traditional publishers, but he also publishes through his own imprint Dragonsteel. He says this is because some of his works are more commercially acceptable than others, and he retains the option to publish them and take the risks himself.
2) I for one can’t wait for part 2 when I find out how it feels to transform from human to book!
“Next up in the series, these authors explore their reactions to becoming a Dragon Award winning novel. Stay tuned for part two of our three-part author interview series!:
15) Lauren Beukes’ Afterland’ is definitely added to Mt TBR.
Back to practicing Zoom and Discord for next week. In an alternate timeline we are in Malacca, enjoying Nyonya cuisine before flying to Wellington. Such is life…
5) Were I one of the authors whose work was expropriated, this would mollify me. And shoggoths can fly.
9)
It is chock full of the typical features – good and bad – of a Joss Whedon show, and it adds a raft of ultra-creepy violation of personal integrity issues. I liked it but it’s not on my rewatch list.
Nice surprise waiting for me when I struggled home from the shops this morning – p CoNZealand conbook had dropped through my letterbox. Haven’t had time for more than a quick flip through so far, but it looks nice enough – I’m only sorry I can’t not be there.
9) Dollhouse (is this worth seeing?)
I would say there’s some excellent bits about personal identity that I love, making it perhaps my favorite Whedon show.
However, it really isn’t until the 6th episode that it gets good–a few of the early episodes are among the worst TV I’ve seen (“The Target” is a “Most Dangerous Game” rip-off, something I’m tired of, though it does feature the great Matt Kesslar from The Middleman).
Also, it’s much better at raising questions about personal identity. When it gets to answers, it’s sadly conventional and the end of the series is more about neat action (and it is neat!) than ideas.
But as Patrick said, it is quite creepy–and not in a good way–so I can’t unabashedly recommend it.
9) I read The Count of Monte Christo for the first time fairly recently and I enjoyed it a lot – much more than I expected. No one told me there was a lesbian character who manages (effectively) to escape the text along with her girlfriend.
And I’ve been fond of Dunsany for a very long time, of course. It used to be hard to find his stuff – I first read a lot of his books by calling them from the stacks of the Bodleian Library – but the internet and Project Gutenberg fixed that. My recommendation for new readers would be to avoid the novels and try The Sword of Welleran or Time and the Gods.
…and I was able to read Dumas and Dunsany for free because no one owns their works, of course. But it might have been different if the newspapers Dumas wrote for had invented rights holding and work-for-hire.
You and me travel to the beat of a pixel scroll
@Kit Harding
I’m not a writer, or a librarian, or a publisher. I come at this from the perspective of a reader. If a library has a copy of a legally owned (paper bound) book, they can loan it to me. This has been established for hundreds of years. But if a library has a legally owned digital copy of a book, they can’t let me read it? Or they have to pay the publisher a royalty to do so? Something’s not right about that. I don’t know if what the Internet Archive is doing is the right answer, but someone needs to push back against licensing of books instead of owning them, and I’m glad they are doing it.
@OGH (formo): I can’t testify to the accuracy of Dern’s Dublin collation (previous item), but I can see it’s missing the Previous/Next buttons. Posting here because it also has no comment block; are those linked?
@5: sounds like Kahle knows he’s on the losing side and is attempting to plea-bargain.
@7: I wonder how broadly the author is drawing the lines for “horror”; Millicent Patrick, who designed the Creature from the Black Lagoon and recently got her own book for it (Lady from the Black Lagoon, by Mallory O’Meara) seems an obvious entry, but I don’t know where creature movies are classified.
@9 (Dumas): wasn’t there also a Pixel fiat that The Three Musketeers is genre? Note that (like Count) it’s also the root of a genre work, The Phoenix Guards, followed by 3 (about to be 4) other Brust works. (I giggled insanely when I saw that the first sequel was 500 Years After because I’d actually read the referenced work.) There’s also Rosenberg’s Not Exactly the Three Musketeers, which is tolerable popcorn reading.
@9 (Barber) typo: the first and last links point to the same image.
@9 (Doran): Tuckerizing is tacking somebody’s name onto a random character, not putting a personality into a story under a different name. There really ought to be a compact name for the latter, but I don’t remember hearing one that has stuck. And once that’s settled, somebody can come up with a name for the compound form, e.g. Princess DeeDee, Ilen the Magian, and others in How Much for Just the Planet?.)
@13: His attempts to write grittier books were terrible, he says, so he became “kind of depressed”…. That’s interesting — I would have said the Mistborn trilogy was quite adequately gritty, even if it doesn’t have quite as much outright gore as Martin. Maybe what the editors wanted was more story and less mechanics (how many pages of appendix did it take to lay out the magic system?); I got through that set but haven’t read any of his long work after choking on the first chapter of the centuries-after direct sequel.
@16 typo: the link and clip are NPR, not BBC.
@10
I am proof positive that a boring person cannot, in fact, write an interesting book. I couldn’t even manage an interesting short story.
@13
Sanderson provides an inspiring story for aspiring others.
In his case, it helped that he clearly has what some people really, really want.
bill asks I’m not a writer, or a librarian, or a publisher. I come at this from the perspective of a reader. If a library has a copy of a legally owned (paper bound) book, they can loan it to me. This has been established for hundreds of years. But if a library has a legally owned digital copy of a book, they can’t let me read it? Or they have to pay the publisher a royalty to do so? Something’s not right about that. I don’t know if what the Internet Archive is doing is the right answer, but someone needs to push back against licensing of books instead of owning them, and I’m glad they are doing it.
Of course they can loan it to you. If they owned which they don’t.
So you need to understand that digital books are different than a physical copy of a book. Libraries don’t actually buy digital books, they subscribe to jobbers who have negotiated with publishers to make digital books available to libraries. Depending on the jobber and the popularity of a given work, a given book may cost next to nothing to lend out or may be fairly costly.
Obviously new books will be more expensive as the publisher, say Tor, want to make as much as possible off each copy lent, and an author has a vested interested in this being so.
Some libraries use jobbers that lease books that have a limited number of copies that can be lent. These tend to be cheaper per lent copy. Downside is you may have to wait longer to read it.
So bill, a library doesn’t actually have any copies of digital books that it can loan you. But any reasonably financed library will subscribe to several jobbers so as to get the most books possible.
bill: I’m not a writer, or a librarian, or a publisher. I come at this from the perspective of a reader. If a library has a copy of a legally owned (paper bound) book, they can loan it to me. This has been established for hundreds of years. But if a library has a legally owned digital copy of a book, they can’t let me read it? Or they have to pay the publisher a royalty to do so? Something’s not right about that.
The cost of multiple reads is built into the price of paper library books compared to what bookstores pay, just as it is built into the price of e-books. Libraries pay close to retail for books, whereas bookstores pay only 50-60% of retail. And libraries usually buy multiple copies of books; my library owns dozens of copies of the most popular new releases (many of which get sold off in book sale fundraisers in a year or two after the demand dies down).
I don’t think this is unfair; a private owner may lend their physical book out once or twice, but a library lends it out many times, and writers and publishers deserve to be compensated for that. (Whether writers receive a fair percentage of that cost is a separate question, and whether current e-book pricing is fair to libraries — or to individuals buying from bookstores — is a separate question.)
JJ notes I don’t think this is unfair; a private owner may lend their physical book out once or twice, but a library lends it out many times, and writers and publishers deserve to be compensated for that. (Whether writers receive a fair percentage of that cost is a separate question, and whether current e-book pricing is fair to libraries — or to individuals buying from bookstores — is a separate question.)
Digital book pricing is, I suspect, largely set by the publishers. The price across the usual digital suspects strongly suggests this is so, and of course a Meredith Moment largely confirms this as the same price gets offered across multiple ebook jobbers. I tend to think prices run high but then I still buy them.
@bill —
Others have already covered some of this, but I’ll add my thoughts anyway.
You seem to be ignoring a couple of important points.
First, physical books and ebooks are very different things. A library or a personal owner might loan out a physical book a few times, or maybe even a hundred times, but an ebook might be loaned out thousands of times. So there’s a huge difference in scale.
Second, libraries have signed specific contracts with publishers about ebook loans: the library will pay the publisher this much money, and the publisher will allow this many readers to borrow the ebook. But the Internet Archive has done no such thing.
During the recent Covid shutdown, it became clear that libraries, even in fairly large cities, were not prepared to expand automated online loans. They apparently invest mostly in those multiple hardback copies of new releases and skimp on the digital offerings. We can guess this has to do with high costs and budget issues, and is exacerbated by the necessity of libraries making individual contracts with jobbers and restricting library card usage to the area of residence. There are a few cooperative ventures out there, likely grant funded, that work through Overdrive, but the offerings don’t generally include the latest hot releases. This results in a situation where demand outpaces supply, and likely pushes up the price of e-books.
Lele E Buis says During the recent Covid shutdown, it became clear that libraries, even in fairly large cities, were not prepared to expand automated online loans. They apparently invest mostly in those multiple hardback copies of new releases and skimp on the digital offerings. We can guess this has to do with high costs and budget issues, and is exacerbated by the necessity of libraries making individual contracts with jobbers and restricting library card usage to the area of residence. There are a few cooperative ventures out there, likely grant funded, that work through Overdrive, but the offerings don’t generally include the latest hot releases. This results in a situation where demand outpaces supply, and likely pushes up the price of e-books.
Most Library systems are founded by a municipality, a regional authority or combination of both. They can’t stray out their geographical boundaries. The jobbers don’t set these boundaries, the libraries do. And demand can’t outstrip supply as these are digital books, the contract simply says how many that the library can lend.
Finally again you can’t really push up the price of ebooks as the very nature of them means there’s always enough of them. Me buyIng the ePub of Artificial Condition yesterday doesn’t diminish the supply at all. I’m just being given a copy of the master.
John Hertz replies by carrier pigeon:
@CHip, Musketeers
There’s also the Dave Hicks cover for Chunga 18: https://efanzines.com/Chunga/pdfs/chunga-18-lores.pdf [L to R, Byers, juarez, Hooper]. When I asked Byers “How can you draw left-handed from a scabbard at your left?” he said “Is this some kind of joke? – Oh.”
But that contract limitation sets the supply, and the demand is indicated by the 30 people who have the ebook on hold, waiting their turn to check it out at two weeks a pop. Presumably the library would contract for more lending copies and more hot new releases if their budget allowed. That they don’t suggests high prices in the ebook market and lower costs for hardback books. I guess this normally works for them, but when they had to close down, there weren’t enough ebooks to go around.
Without reading back to see what the Internet Archive is up to, I gather they stepped into fill some of the unmet demand during the shutdown. This is definitely theft of intellectual property and they should have looked for some way to make the material available legally. I also seem to recall that Project Gutenberg and Google Books initially had similar problems with copyrighted works, but have somehow worked it out.
@Cat Eldridge: Digital book pricing is so very, very set by the publishers that in libraryland the fight to get them to price the digital books less unfairly and in a way that allows us to continue to function is an ongoing fight– they see our digital books as lost sales while ignoring the amount of promotion we do for the books we have in our collections and the readers they gain because of that promotion. Part of why I’m so annoyed with the Internet Archive is that this sort of thing is why publishers get huffy and try to refuse to let us have ebooks at all– see MacMillan’s current library ebook policy.
@Lela: The reason libraries buy so many physical copies and so few ebooks is that they charge us so much more for ebooks and the contracts are so complicated– and again, some publishers just flat-out won’t sell us ebooks at all, or will only sell us ebooks on a per-borrow payment model, or will sell one copy at a reasonable price and then every other copy at highly inflated price. Believe me, most libraries really want more digital offerings than they have, and it’s a question of getting publishers to allow it. This is especially true for the latest hot releases. Again, see MacMillan’s policy, which they only caved on this past March, which included an embargo on libraries having any new ebooks from them at all for the first few months after a release.
@Kit Hence the shortage of library ebooks during the physical shutdown.
@Kit
There are books that I want to read before I decide to spend money on them. That’s one reason I go to my local branch library. (It has a miserable SF collection, even best-sellers. Some of them, the entire system only gets two or three of, for 72 branches.) And right now, I can’t even do request online and pick-up.
I just found out today that I missed the Hugo Voting deadline 🙁
Is it just me, or was the time between the release of the voters’ packet and the close of voting unusually short this year? (I’m pretty sure that the time between the start and end of voting was very short).
Meredith Moment: Linda Nagata’s Inverted Frontier series is on sale. Edges is $1.99 and Silver is 25% off making it $5.99
@P J Evans–
Yes. Exactly.
Now explain that to the publishers of the 21st century, who have been culturally assimilated into the entertainment industry even when they haven’t been outright bought into it, and bitterly resent the fact that they can’t stop public libraries from existing, and lending print books. At a visceral level, they believe everything should be pay-per-view. They don’t believe your borrowing from the library leads to sales they wouldn’t otherwise have gotten.
They certainly don’t understand that kids growing up with easy access toid library books grow up to be readers who will buy books all their adult lives.
They view ebooks as a second chance, and one in which they’ve already lost one important battle. They want to win the rest.
What the Internet Archive did is strengthen both their motivation, and their hand.
As noted previously #NotAllPublishers. But the industry as a whole.
@microtherion: Here’s a chart of events from recent Worldcons https://file770.com/waiting-for-online-hugo-voting-and-the-2020-voter-packet/. You’re right that opening of voting was very late – CNZ extended the voting period by a week to make up (somewhat) for the delay in voting opening.
@Andrew, thanks for the link. I believe this year the packet was released May 30 or 31 (file770 carried the announcement on the latter date), and voting closed a week earlier than usual (but I had not realized that the con starts next week, so they were constrained that way)
So there was less time than usual, but not outrageously so; I’ll have to blame myself.
Lis Carey says As noted previously #NotAllPublishers. But the industry as a whole.
I’m not sure the industry is that monolithic in thought when it comes to digital books. What I will note is that independent bookstores, prior to the Pandemic, had two consecutive years of very good growth. The Pandemic unfold created a shift in how folks buy books. And I expect that a lot more digital books were sold during this Pandemic that anyone would be.
What’s a fair price for a digital book? Is replacing a hard copy edition? If so, I’d expect Tor, to use an example, to price it around that of a trade paper edition. I just checked the offerings for Catherynne Valente. Space Opera is eight bucks but Palimpsest is fourteen bucks and Radiance is ten dollars. So no rhyme or reason.
@microtherion: Glad to help. Sorry you missed the deadline.
On Dollhouse: I watched it as it was being aired. I got partway into the second season, and when (as happens) several weeks went by without a new episode, I discovered that I had completely lost interest in it. I didn’t watch the rest.
@Chip Hitchcock: A novel in which all or at least most of the characters are based on real people is known as a roman à clef (novel with a key). You’re right that there’s no generally accepted name for just one or two minor characters, such as Ford’s Ilen the Magian.
There is a term for a character who is another fictional character with the serial numbers filed off: expy. E.g.: in Ahoy Comics’ The Wrong Earth, Dragonflyman is a Batman expy. I don’t see why this term couldn’t be extended to a thinly-disguised real person in fiction.
@Sophie Jane
When the book is published in abridged form (which it often is) that episode is often among those edited out. But I, too, was delighted when I discovered it, though it doesn’t entirely end happily.
@Heather Rose and @Sophie Jane —
I may need to read (listen to) this again. Mine claims to be unabridged — 46 hours long — but I don’t remember it. OTOH, it’s been several years since I read it. OTOOH, some recorded versions are as long as 52 hours, so maybe it’s lying to me about being unabridged!
Lots to respond to re: libraries and digital books.
“you don’t own digital books.” Well, I own some. I paid good money for them (in some cases, directly to the author), and the copy I own is mine. If I move it from my computer to my kindle, yes, I’ve created a new digital copy, but if doing so is illegal (I’m not sure it is) then the law is wrong and the law that makes it wrong is against the spirit of what the copyright laws are supposed to do — “To promote the progress of science and useful arts”. And if I take my kindle with a legally owned copy of a book on it, and let my friend read it, I see no ethical or moral or legal transgression. If I burn a new copy and give it to my friend, and keep my old copy, then yes, I can see the problem with copyright issues. But what the Internet Archive does is functionally equivalent to the former, and not the latter.
And I am a regular patron of a private library that owns digital books, and even sells them on occasion. The fact that most municipal libraries sign contracts to license ebooks a limited number of times instead of buying them is a bug in the system, part of what should be changed, and isn’t a good reason to justify current practices.
“The cost of multiple reads . . . ” Copyright laws are not there to enable rent-seeking by publishers, or to compensate authors on a per-use basis. There is no “cost” associated with reading a book. I recently re-read “The Moon is a Harsh Mistress” for about the 5th time, but I sent no money to the Heinlein estate, and there’s no reason I should. When I loan paper books to others to read, no money flows to the author, nor should it. He or she got paid when the book was printed. The fact that somehow the ebook model is one of limitations on use is a flaw in the system, and I’m glad that IA is pushing back. I recognize that they might lose, but I hope they gain legal recognition for Controlled Digital Lending or something like it.
“library lends it out many times, and writers and publishers deserve to be compensated for that.” No. That is not how paperbound copies work — they were read multiple times, with only one royalty payment back to the publisher and author, and the book ecosystem worked fine that way up until ebooks came about. The fact that ebooks get read multiple times is not justification for them being more expensive, especially when they are software-controlled such that only one reader at a time can read them; they are the functional equivalent of paper books in that respect.
“an ebook might be loaned out thousands of times.” I’ve read that HarperCollins’ meters their licenses to 26 checkouts; MacMillan uses a 52 checkouts/2 years (whichever comes first) license. There are perpetual licenses, but publishers are trying hard to move away from them; they limit how many they will sell to a library, they cost much more than a metered or time-limited license, and they may be embargoed for some length of time after publication before the publisher will sell one to a library.
“This is definitely theft of intellectual property and [the Internet Archive] should have looked for some way to make the material available legally.”
It is not “definitely”, by any stretch. Controlled Digital Lending is based on concepts and clauses in existing copyright law, and is at most a gray area.
Law should be an agreed-upon set of rules by everyone. The law as it currently is applied to ebooks isn’t that; the rules we all agreed to were based on a set of facts that no longer apply, and since Congress hasn’t made new rules to account for that, the publishers have taken advantage and shoved new practices down our (readers + libraries) throats. If the actual creators involved — the authors — were the beneficiaries of these new rules, they might be more palatable. But the beneficiaries are the publishers — it’s harder now for an author to make a living than ever.
bill: I am a regular patron of a
privatepirate library that owns digital books, and even sells them on occasion.There, Fixed That For You. 🙄
@bill —
I argued with my brother about this a few times. He was a lawyer who focused on intellectual property law.
As I understand what he told me, and IIRC, it is not illegal to do this IF you delete the copy on your computer once you move the file to your kindle. If you keep both copies, it’s illegal. Except that some licenses specifically allow for backup copies to be maintained. IANAL.
And yes, I agree with you that it’s dumb. As long as I don’t distribute my copies, I’m damn well gonna keep as many personal copies as I like — and in as many formats as I like, regardless of DRM. Calibre is my friend.
This is legal. You are distributing the Kindle, and the ebook happens to be on it. You haven’t created extra digital copies floating around in the universe.
Baloney. The Internet Archive is distributing bazillions of copies to one and all. They are not distributing bazillions of Kindles.
No.
Hard copies of books wear out over time and must be replaced. They can only be loaned a relatively small number of times before they wear out. Digital books, OTOH, are eternal — they never wear out. So if a library only paid once for any format of a book, they would end up paying much more for, say, 1000 reads of a physical book than for 1000 reads of a digital book.
They actually are, in a way. It’s built into the realities of physical books. See my comment about books wearing out with repeated reading.
Again: it’s a difference of scale. You can’t read your physical book 1000 times without it wearing out — but you can read a digital copy millions of times without replacing it.
And how many times does a typical library hard copy get read before it wears out? I don’t know the answer, so I don’t know if it’s comparable. Maybe one of our librarians does?
Laws are never agreed on by everyone. You could even find people to argue about murder laws.
This is absolutely true. Copyright laws in the digital age are trying to play catch-up with swiftly moving tech, and they are struggling at it. No argument there!
@bill:
Perhaps it should be, but I can’t think of a time and place when it actually has been, except maybe in the sense that “the sun rises in the east” is a fact agreed on by everyone. We don’t need laws to make that true, and no human agency enforces the laws of physics. In Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Shevek is surprised by, and disapproves of, the usage of the word “law” for human-made rules that describes the universal laws of physics.
There are more than seven and a half billion people on this planet, and hundreds of millions who can read English. You’re not going to get all of us to agree on anything, including whether/how copyright should apply to ebooks. That doesn’t mean we should default to “nobody owns them,” or “whatever I can get away with is legal.”
There are some real ambiguities and inconsistencies in copyright law–including that there are books that are in the public domain in Australia but under copyright in the United States. That doesn’t mean that copyright doesn’t apply to any book that exists in electronic form.
What the Internet Archive was doing isn’t the equivalent of me handing you my kindle. It’s not even the equivalent of me buying an ebook, downloading it to my computer, and then sending copies to all my friends–which you seem to agree is wrong. It’s the equivalent of borrowing an ebook, making copies, and giving them away to everyone you know. You don’t “promote useful arts” by arranging for lots of people to get ebooks without the author getting a penny.
@bill: your understanding of how physical books work is also dated; there have been movements (some successful) for at least half a century to get libraries to pay authors for each borrowing.
It’s also my impression that you don’t own anything readable by a Kindle; you just have a long-term loan on it that HSAR can call at any time (and IIRC has in some cases).
And what data do you have for
? The last clause is true by itself — but sales of individual books have been reported descending for some time before e-books were significant. (An obvious reason is the huge number of books being published; from what I’ve heard over decades, total sales are up even in proportion to the growing population, but there are hordes of niche-ish books being printed.) The rest is … unclear; do you know (with cite) how authors are compensated for e-book sales? If it’s anything like the per-copy-sold compensation for physical books, constraining e-lending such that more copies are sold would in fact benefit the authors, not just the entities further along the supply chain. It’s very easy to say that e-piracy is only hurting faceless corporations — unlike, e.g., sales of coverless paperbacks, which were exposed decades ago as hurting authors as well as publishers etc. — but I haven’t seen a clear demonstration of this.
As a possibly unrelated datapoint on the complexities of library ecopies…. my library has a selection of cheap e-readers which you can check out. Each come pre-loaded with books. Mystery e-readers, romance e-readers, best-seller e-readers…. 100 books per e-reader. (I want to say they’re Nooks, but I’m, obviously, not in a position to check this.) They have at least a dozen or two of these e-readers available for loan.
Of course, my library also has crock pots, electric drills, and board games available for check-out, so….
@Contrarius–
More than 26. More than 52.
Depends on the book and how “hard” the use it gets is, of course.
Back before computerized systems and concerns about privacy, library books had a little pocket in the back (or the front, but back was more common), with a card in it. When you signed out a book, it literally involved your name being written on that card and the due date stamped on it, and that card got filed. When you returned the book, the card went back into the pocket. A fun feature of this is that the next reader could see not just how often that book was getting checked out, but by who. In my local library, growing up, there were people whose names I knew because they checked out the same types of books. There were people whose names I could use as a shortcut in deciding whether I wanted to borrow a book.
Ah, privacy, we knew you not!
Here’s the thing. Those cards got filled up, and replaced, multiple times in any book that was at all popular. And books that were intended as just “popular reading,” rather than reference or research material, or classics likely to be assigned by the local school system, got pulled and went into the annual book sale if they weren’t circulating regularly.
Hardcover books last for years in this environment. The reason many libraries don’t carry popular paperbacks, or if they do, they do a lot less processing on them, is because they don’t survive more than a few months in this environment.
The common publishers’ limits on checkouts of ebooks, 24 or 52 or whatever, would make a certain amount of logical sense if the print books they most commonly sold to public libraries were mass market paperbacks. They’re not. They sell libraries mostly hardcovers, and a significant percentage of the time, though not a majority, they’re “library binding” hardcovers, i.e., reinforced to last longer.
Those numbers from HarperCollins and Macmillan describe what they wish were true, not the real world.
Yes, print books do wear out. But on average, it takes a long time–and, something all publishers used to know, but maybe they don’t now, having been subsumed into the “entertainment industry,” for whom pay-per-view is Sacred Doctrine, is that the other thing that Technical Services does in libraries is repair worn or damaged books.
Which is perfectly legal, and keeps hardcover books in circulation even longer.
Ebooks don’t wear out. It is at least somewhat reasonable that they should have a limit on total number of library lendings per licensed copy–but the current limit is ridiculous, and the publishers have to know that. Even if they’ve forced out all the old fogies who knew about library Tech Services.
The entertainment industry people, unlike the old publishing industry people, hate public libraries, and if they can’t kill them, want to cripple them as much as possible, because they cannot grasp that no, every lending of a book is not a lost sale.
In short, there are real issues between libraries and publishers on library lending of ebooks, but the publishers aren’t remotely trying to be reasonable.
Which doesn’t at all change the fact that the Internet Archive was just flat out thumbing its nose at copyright, and actually stealing sales from authors and publishers.
The whole situation is a mess, and the Internet Archive has made it even harder than it was to convince everyone it’s in their best interests to sit down and find a good faith solution.
@Cassy B–Loaning out physical objects of various kinds is a thing that libraries have been doing for at least a few decades, although not I think in sufficient numbers to take it decisively out of the ‘here’s this oddball thing my library lends” category.
If all lending of library ebooks took the form of lending out a preloaded ereader, the publishers would be ever so much happier, but would defeat the purpose for those who are mobility impaired.
The RocketeBook, fl. 1998-2000, was briefly popular in well-heeled private schools to provide assigned reading without making the kids carry tons of books. You checked out your Rocket eBook from the school library, with your assigned reading on it.
@Lis: I well remember those days, though at one library, one’s card number was written on the slip in the back not one’s name – which just meant I got to know old 2149 as someone who read the same books as me…
@Andrew–Your library was ahead of its time, protecting privacy before we were worried about it!
I remember that school-issued textbooks had the names of the previous years’ users in them. It made it interesting when the name belonged to someone you knew from elsewhere.
@Lis —
But does it take a long time because the books are durable (surviving many readings), or because the books are sitting around on the shelf not getting read?
Someone somewhere has got to have data on this.
Oh, for God’s sake.
I don’t have a handy set of statistics to link you to, no.
Speaking as a librarian, who worked in a variety of libraries over the course of thirty years, “popular reading” that doesn’t get checked out regularly, doesn’t stay on the shelves. It goes into the book sale.
Anyone in my age bracket who has used libraries over those decades, and anyone who has worked any substantial period of time in a library, knows that hardcover books do in fact stand up to steady use, meaning regular checkouts and checkins, for years. I checked out of my local library books that were twenty years old, and were clearly circulating regularly.
The codex book, the bound paper book we know and love, combines great durability with great convenience.
That’s why we’ve been using it for almost two millennia. It lasts without being too heavy, too awkward, or easily decayed if stored in even halfway decent conditions.
HarperCollins and Macmillan are pulling their numbers out of their asses.