Sorry, folks, but while legal action is necessary to stop the lawsuit campaign, Tenenbaum is about as far from the poster boy needed to stop the RIAA as you can get.
Regardless of whether the question should have been asked, the fact is that he admitted liability on the stand, and admitted that he had been perjuring himself to the court for the last eight months, right up to jury selection. The man is lucky he's not facing jail for perjury, which carries up to five years imprisonment - he certainly did everything in his power to make the court hostile to him at the last minute.
A test case to challenge statutory damages when it comes to individuals requires a sympathetic defendant - Tenenbaum seems to have done everything he can to appear to be a lying sociopath, up to and including giving a reason for lying under oath that amounts to "it seemed like a good idea at the time."
Slightly strange and loopy counsel aside, Tenenbaum wasted eight months of the court's time, committed a felony outside of what he was being sued for, and there is no way in hell that anybody should be paying his costs and his penalty for him. He stopped being able to play the "I'm being persecuted by a large organization" card the minute he lied under oath.
Do NOT send any money to this man and his family. Please.
I'd add to that one other thing - the defendant also admitted to having perjured himself for the entire trial.
I'd hate to be his lawyer - I can't imagine any way Tenenbaum could have appeared as a sympathetic defendant after admitting that he had been wasting the time of everybody in the court for months by lying to them. The minute he made that admission, he turned the entire court against him.
How the hell do you defend a client who insists on blowing his own foot off with a cannon during the trial?
It seems odd that everybody is screaming unfairness because of the amount of the settlement, but almost nobody is taking a cold, hard look at the defendant's actions during the trial.
Frankly, he got off EASY. For what he did, he's lucky he isn't in jail.
On the stand, Tenenbaum admitted that up until that part of the questioning, he had willfully lied under oath, with little excuse other than "It's what seemed the best response to give." That's perjury, and under American law, it is a felony offense that carries with it a jail sentence of up to five years. And there's a reason for that.
A trial is supposed to be the administration of justice, which in ideal circumstances is fair and balanced. But for justice to be administered, it must be based on truth. By lying throughout most of the trial, Tenenbaum made a mockery of the trial, and prevented the court from being fair and just. At least he admitted it before the trial was over, but he still ensured that for months the jury's consideration was based on false information.
Judges and juries don't like being lied to. So, yes, the defendant has been ordered to pay $675,000 USD in damages. But, he doesn't have a felony on his record, and he's not going to be spending up to five years behind bars. He'll be able to declare bankruptcy and get on with his life.
Considering the alternatives for willful perjury, that's getting off really damn easy. And frankly, after his conduct, I have no sympathy for him whatsoever.
"But the boomers, and their outdated notions of privacy and freedom, will die before us. This is why I'm glad people don't live forever... new ideas would never have a chance if we did."
Wow...Comrade Stalin, anybody?
Funny thing - I notice you don't seem to be talking about the freedom to have a private life. I also notice that those "baby boomers" you dismiss so callously are the same people who fought for civil rights in the '60s, fought both in and against Vietnam in the late '60s and early '70s, and brought about the sexual revolution. They fought for freedom and equality, and changed the face of America for the better. What have you done lately? I mean, besides putting your personal information online and pissing on their accomplishments.
A lot of people fought and died so that you can have those freedoms. A lot of people are fighting right now to let you keep your privacy. Freedom does mean the freedom to make your life public if you choose, but it also means the freedom to decline the opportunity if you choose. And transparency does not mean that nobody has privacy, but that when an important decision is made affecting you, you are allowed to know why it was made.
The baby boomers understand this, and knew to fight for it. It's a pity you don't.
I'm afraid I found this article quite shallow when it comes down to it, although a lot of that is because last year I wrote a piece on this subject that was published in The Escapist as "The Anatomy of Violence." It covered why some people call first person shooter games "murder simulators," what the psychological underpinnings are behind the theory, and what impact it can have in the real world.
Not to put down the author of this article, but I think mine is really worth looking at here, and adds a lot that is missing (the SLA Marshall link is what makes the "murder simulator" theory make sense, among other things).
Two things before I move on to more important matters than this conversation:
1. The Mythology of the Public Domain is an examination of the issues of the CTEA published in a peer-reviewed law journal, and from page 63-68 discusses the reasons behind the CTEA directly, as well as the urban legend that it was all Disney's fault. If you are going to dismiss it based on title alone, then that only reveals your own prejudices on this matter, rather than any informed discussion.
2. If you really have inside information and first hand experience, then perhaps you'd like to share what that was.
You're right - Disney probably lobbied for it to go through - but did you ever think to consider that the REASON they lobbied was because Europe had just declared that they would not respect American copyrights past the terms set by American copyright law, while holding European films to the longer European copyright terms, causing a trade issue with older films, among other things, rather than a need to keep Steamboat Willie in copyright? You see, they actually don't care about Steamboat Willie - Mickey Mouse is protected under trademark law, which doesn't have the same limits, so Disney has very little to lose if it goes into the public domain.
You may not be blaming the creative artists for working towards that copyright span - instead you're blaming media companies - but your implication is still quite plain - that the reason copyrights last that long is because greedy corporations wanted to deepen their pockets.
Well, guess what - that's wrong. Greedy corporations will always want to deepen their pockets, but this one was a foreign policy and trade matter more than anything else.
(And, by the way, the "Disney lobbying is the cause of the CTEA" happens to be a major part of the Lessig argument regarding this, and his writings are one of the major sources - so yes, he is relevant.)
How about we go with direct evidence instead of innuendo. Here is the actual Supreme Court judgement of Eldred vs. Ashcroft. See for yourself why Lessig lost:
It is very clear that he didn't make his case. It is also very clear that the driving force of the CTEA is nothing in the United States, but instead what happened in 1993 in Europe when they extended their copyrights first.
One thing you really have to start understanding is that intellectual property law does not exist in a vacuum - there is a foreign relations component. If you want to see what American copyright law is going to do next in broad strokes, forget staring at Disney - look at the European Union.
But Lessig lost his case in the Supreme Court on the merits, mainly for bringing a bunch of conspiracy theories about Disney into a court of law, and got it torn apart by lawyers who actually had evidence.
So, no, the CTEA (Copyright Term Extension Act) was not about keeping Steamboat Willie in copyright. It was a foreign policy move to harmonize with Europe, which had moved to life + 70 years and had declared that it would only respect the term in the country of origin. There was a concern that this would cause difficulties with American artists trying to work in Europe.
But, I guess a conspiracy by Disney is more exciting than foreign policy.
(Source: http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1/martin-original1.pdf - pay close attention to the section on Lessig's case - he really did come in making statements that were easily disproved, such as claiming that insufficient time was given for consultation and that librarian concerns weren't even looked at...only to have the several days of consultation brought up in evidence as well as sections addressing the concerns of librarians and giving them special privileges.)
I hate to tell you this, but copyright already works that way when it comes to derivative works. You can copyright an implementation of an idea, but not an idea itself. It's been that way for a very long time.
Sorry, but as a business owner myself, I have to wonder - how did you know what their terms were without contacting them?
Aside from which, I think your argument here regarding your business does come out as a cop-out. Just because you couldn't afford to pay the license fee to produce the shirts yourself, it doesn't mean that you had to resort to piracy. Surely there are wholesalers out there who sell those licensed shirts to vendors like yourself, without you having to produce them, or pay a license fee.
"OK, so there's no market for eBooks. That means nobody wants them."
If you need a damn straw man to flog whatever horse you're flogging, count me out. I've already said that there is a demand, and even given you the market share, as well as the link to see it. Now you're putting words in my mouth, and as far as I'm concerned, that ends this conversation.
It may seem wasteful to you, but I can tell from what you wrote that you're neither a writer, editor, or publisher.
First of all, there are lots of people who can write, and lots of people who can edit. Being able to do both, though, is rare. And, even if you can do both, any author is too close to their own work to edit effectively. An editor's job is to find the problems, both big and small, that the author missed - and the author will miss them.
Step 1 - Writing a book is not done in little to no time - it's a process that takes months, and sometimes even years.
Step 4 - Typesetting a book is not something that can be done nice and easily by the author. First of all, the author doesn't necessarily know how to make a typeset book look good (my first attempt when I started my publishing company is downright embarrassing). Furthermore, considering the variations in files that can occur between programs, just because an author had it look good on his computer, it doesn't mean that a strange glitch won't show up when the publisher gets it onto theirs. One of the reasons it's done on the publisher side is specifically to cut down on wasted time fixing glitches moving from one program to another.
Step 5 - The author is involved in the last stages of the copyedit, in fact - galleys (aka page proofs) are sent to the author for approval before the book is locked down. However, copyediting is a different skill, and it's not necessarily one that an author has. A good copyeditor doesn't actually read the book - they go through line by line skimming it, looking for stuff that jumps out at them. It's not something that everybody can do, and a good copyeditor can make a serious difference to the finished product.
Book covers - What the hell do you think they're for? People DO judge a book by its cover when they pass it in a bookstore.
Marketing - I am perfectly serious. What makes you think the marketing is aimed at YOU? There's a lot of marketing going on, aimed at the decision makers in bookstores, libraries, and distributors. This is part of the process that makes sure that the book actually ends up on the bookshelf of the bookstore. In my own business, I pay $50 per book for an ad that appears in Ingram Advance - you will never see it in your life. But tens of thousands of bookstores and libraries will. Back when EverQuest Companion was in the final stages, the marketing department at McGraw-Hill was trying to cut a deal that would get a copy of the book into every copy of EverQuest II that was sold - those negotiations were with Sony.
You can't just assume that just because you don't see something happening, it isn't there. Take the contract negotiations, for example - do you really think that every author just signs the boiler plate contract? No, the contract is negotiated, terms are changed, and the lawyers do have to check some of that. If you ever try to actually run a publishing company, you'll find that most of your preconceptions about this process don't tend to survive contact with reality.
Well, you've got some misinformation there, as well as some seriously faulty logic...
First of all, there isn't no demand for e-books, there is a minuscule demand. And that demand is based on customer consumption. Most people don't consume novels as e-books, but a technical manual, for example, is more likely to be useful as an e-book, or a file that one can use a search function on, and so the demand for a print version on those is decreasing while the demand for an e-copy is steadily increasing.
And I'm really not sure how your logic works. A pirate e-book is damned disrespectful, if nothing else. And it undermines the contract the author has signed with their publisher. We're not talking about some software that costs hundreds of dollars, or an organization that's been suing college students for extortion's sake, we're talking about a reader being around $10 out of pocket. The sense of entitlement that leads to this sort of piracy is just sickening.
You're also wrong about the economics of publishing, but then again, you have no way of knowing the actual numbers, as you're not in the industry. So, I'll fill you in on this.
The actual production of the book is one of the smallest costs involved when it comes to big publishers. Smaller publishers like myself, that use Print on Demand technology, do actually have a higher production cost. But big publishers only use PoD for their back list as a rule. So, how much does this actually cost?
(These are rough figures, by the way - I deal with PoD for the most part, and I haven't had a chance to do an offset print run yet.)
The big publishers use what is called "offset printing." This means that they're printing the books in blocks of at least 1,500 copies at a time. The actual cost per book, however, is probably somewhere between $.25 to $1.00 (for a very long book), and could be as low as $.10 per book. So, let's say that you buy a print book with a $10.00 cover price - how does that actually break down as far as who gets what?
Well, the wholesaler who sold the book to the bookstore usually takes a 55% discount off the cover. They sell it to the bookstore at around a 40% discount off the cover (that's why, for example, Amazon can have a 30% discount and still make a profit). So, of our $10 book, $4.00 of the cover price has gone to the bookstore, and $1.50 has gone to the wholesaler. This leaves $4.50 to the publisher. And, of that $4.50 that's going to the publisher, somewhere around $.25 was the likely cost of production. If the only thing you do is knock the cost of production off the e-book version, your $10.00 book now costs $9.75 as an e-book.
(Please note, this is not the same with a small press like mine using PoD technology - there the production price of the book you'd buy off Amazon, for example, is $.013 per page, plus $.90 for the cover. So, the calculation is very different there - but that's an aside.)
So, if production isn't the major cost here, then what is? Well, it comes down to man hours. So, here's a layout of how a manuscript gets turned into a book:
1. The author writes the book. We're going to assume that the book wasn't commissioned here (if it was, step 2 happens before step 1).
2. The publisher accepts the book, and a contract is negotiated. This involves the legal department, and their man-hours, although that happens very far behind the scenes. With a major publisher, the author is paid an advance. In SF and fantasy, the opening contract for a new writer is called a "3 at 3" or a "4 at 4," meaning a $3,000 advance on 3% royalties, or a $4,000 advance on 4% royalties. This gets larger as an author gets more established.
3. The book now undergoes an editing pass, with the editor going line by line through the book and sending suggestions to the author. This becomes a back-and-forth process, and depending on how much work needs to be done, can be quite short, or quite long. So, here we have man-hours from the editor.
Okay - first thing I need to do here is give you a quick lesson in how book sales work, because otherwise some of this isn't going to make much sense. Most book sales - including a number of e-book sales - go through a wholesaler, who frequently takes a discount of around 55% of the cover. So, if you're buying an e-book off of a publisher's website directly, the publisher is getting all the profit, but if you're buying off Amazon, the publisher is probably getting less than half of the cover price.
Now, the production cost of a book is quite small for a publisher like Pocket Books, because they use what is called "offset printing." So, they'll print around 2,000 copies of the book, but that will cost them perhaps $.25-$1.00 or so per book. Production is a much larger cost if a Print on Demand process is used - a 300 page book that cost around $.25 to produce now costs around $4.75. But for the most part, we're not talking about that process.
(Disclosure time - my publishing company uses the Print on Demand process, not offset printing, so my numbers on the offset printing process are very rough - it could be as little as $.10 per book.)
So, for Pocket Books, most of the actual cost of the book isn't production at all, but the preparation for it - the author gets an advance, which is typically at least 4 digits (mine was $3,000 for Demonsbane). You have the time spent editing it, and then it goes to typesetting. Once it's out of typesetting, it is fully locked down and goes into production. The only difference between an e-book and a print book is that in the former case, a file is just generated, and in the latter case, it goes to a print shop. So, most of the cost on either is in terms of man-hours.
Back in 2000, Demonsbane was offered for $5.00 USD - in comparison, the cover price of the first Diablo print novel was $6.50 USD (I just checked). So, it was at a reduced price - it was also calculated, down to the length, to be something that people would want to read on their computer or an e-book reader. Now, I know $1.50 doesn't seem like that much of a discount, but keep in mind how little of a book price is actually covering production here, and how much goes towards man-hours - it was actually a fair price for what was offered.
The price was also, granted, a bit of a shot in the dark. There was a lot of talk at the time about how e-books were going to revolutionize the book industry, and publishers knew that most readers don't understand how much of the book cost goes towards man-hours, and how little goes towards production. So, it was this brand-new format with a lot of promise - a format that if it took off, would be able to get thousands of books into the hands of readers without having to worry about print runs running out and shipping issues - but nobody really knew what the right price point was for these things. The practical experience of seeing e-books in action just wasn't there yet. So, the prices ended up being a more or less educated guess, but a guess based on solid figures on the publisher end regarding production costs.
As far as doctrine of first sale goes, that was a really tricky one, and I remember the publishers agonizing over that. The problem is that while doctrine of first sale works wonderfully for a printed book, where you have a physical object to pass on without making a copy and breaking copyright, the only way to pass on an e-book involves making a copy. And, you also have to prevent somebody from taking your hard work and selling it at a lower price, essentially undercutting you with your own product. At the same time, the consumer has certain rights, and nobody would be happy with a book that they couldn't move from their own computer to their own e-reader.
I wish I could remember what solution was used for Demonsbane, but I can't. Sorry about that. I don't think the technological issues have really been solved on this one yet anyway. I know that there was at least one publisher that used a solution where the file would allow itself to be copied three times, or something like that, but I don't remember if it was Pocket Books that used it.
Well, seeing as I am one of the publishers who uses Lightning Source as their printer, and I thus know a fair bit about this end, you have a couple of your facts wrong here.
First of all, Lightning Source doesn't set the cover price - the publishing company does (they also set the wholesaler discount, although anything over 55% gets the book listed as a low-discount book, and that can adversely impact sales). Lightning Source takes care of production and order fulfillment. Are PoD books more expensive, though? As a rule, yes. But that's because it's a more expensive process on the production end. To give you an idea of how the actual pricing here works, I'll use one of my more recent public domain reprints, The Art of War: Restored Edition:
The cover price is $24.95 USD. The actual costs break down as follows:
Wholesaler discount - 55% - we now are left with $11.23 of the original cover (the wholesaler sells it to the bookseller for 40% off cover, which is how a place like Amazon can offer it for 30% off and still make a profit).
Printing cost - $5.74
Profit - $5.49
This doesn't stop people from occasionally putting in stupid pricing. I'm about to publish an edition of The Great War as I Saw It - the added value is a new introduction and a nicely formatted edition - at the same price as Art of War. There is another PoD paperback edition of the book out there on Amazon that has a cover price of $74.99. Whoever thought that price was a good idea was hopped up on something when they set it...
(Lulu, by the way, is not a good example - they're more a vanity press than a printer, and they are known for screwing around with cover prices every now and then.)
Second, as far as revolutionary goes, Print on Demand was INCREDIBLY revolutionary. Not only did it allow major publishers to continue to offer their back list in a practical way - so that they weren't having to print and warehouse over a thousand copies to satisfy a demand of 10 books per year - but it also allowed small publishers like my own to exist. You can now start a publishing company in your basement with worldwide distribution and a startup cost of not much more than your business license.
It was an across-the-board revolution, make no mistake. Titles have a longer lifespan, and the entire industry is now more accessible to whoever wants to get into it.
Pal, I've heard this "being slow to release legitimate downloadable versions of their product while bemoaning the demand for a product they refuse to produce" before, and it's bullshit. There was a massive push to make e-books work between 2000 and 2002. I know - I was there. In fact, I even was the author of one of the front runners. I had the Diablo game franchise behind me, advertisement on Battle.net, and a tech-savvy audience that should have generated thousands of sales. Everything was going for me except the fact that I'm not Stephen King.
Guess what - the e-book tanked. For that matter, so did every single e-book that was released across the board. The major publishing companies did everything they could short of shoving the e-books down the readers' throats for two years to get these things to work, and the only thing that happened was that a lot of money was spent for a result of very few sales. Almost ten years later, e-books are being regularly tracked by the Association of American Publishers. The latest figures they have are for the month of February 2009...and in the last ten years, with at least one major push behind them, do you know how much of the book market the e-book currently occupies? In February it peaked...at 1.5%. And it only got that high because e-book sales dropped less respectively than regular books sales from the month before.
The simple fact is that people do not consume books in such a way that an e-book is anything more than a niche market. Books are not like newspapers, and while newspapers are becoming close to an endangered species - having to maintain a web presence for survival - books haven't even been touched by e-books. They're just consumed in a different way. The demand is minuscule, and that's not unfounded perception - that's up-to-date market figures, and a failed push that lasted at least two years.
The publishing industry is not a world of behind-the-times publishers ignoring technology. Publishers jumped on Amazon.com, and it revolutionized the industry. Something called an Expresso Book Machine is coming down the line, and it's going to cause a revolution too. Print on Demand caused a revolution as well. Things like editing and manuscript drafts are now been done by email rather than by regular post. But with the exception of the EBM, these were mainly revolutions taking place behind the scenes. Whether you like it or not, the publishing industry is an industry of early adapters...but they also aren't stupid. If something proves to be nothing more than a money sink, like the e-book, it gets treated like the niche it is.
Well, I'm both an author and a publisher here, so I do have the perspective of both sides. A lot of people here seem to think that publishing is more or less equal to the recording industry - it's not. Frankly, it's a lot more fair to the creative artists, far more technologically savvy (anybody who thinks publishers haven't made a concerted effort to make e-books work hasn't been paying attention - I was part of the first big push back in 2000). The book industry today has been revolutionized several times, and it's about to be revolutionized again by the Expresso Book Machine, which is essentially an ATM for books. It's very exciting, and I hope it does well.
And around here, frankly, a lot of people love to hold out a sense of entitlement. They are quite clear that no author has any right to their own work, and they should be thankful that they get the handout they do, but god help you if you challenge the idea that they have a natural right to copy whatever they want (and I challenge you to find the words "natural right" and "copy" in the same sentence anywhere in the U.S. Constitution or Declaration of Independence). Hopefully reality will be self-correcting when it comes to them; it's hard to hold onto a sense of entitlement when you have to fight to keep what you have, and this recession/depression will have a lot of people doing that.
E-book piracy is a fact of life - there are people with scanners who will upload books. There's not a lot one can really do about it. Particularly when you're a small publisher like I am, the cost of trying to fight it is much higher than it's worth. The good news is that most people don't actually consume books that way, so the potential damage in lost sales is pretty minimal.
That being said, people will also download just about anything that's free, regardless of if they actually need or want it. So, that being the case, free electronic copies of books or excerpts of books can be a good low-budget means of advertising product, and that is how I use it. The public domain reprints are produced as full.pdf e-books, and the new books are produced as online samples - then they're all put on filesharing websites and torrents the minute I have the Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble websites for them.
Is piracy a big problem when it comes to books? Not really. With an e-book market that's only managed to peak at 1.5% of the total book market for one month over the last ten years, there's not a lot to suggest it's anything more than a niche that's best used for marketing anyway. People just don't usually consume books that way - they may test them out that way, but if they really want to read them, most of the market is going to buy a printed copy. Should that change, online piracy will be a bigger issue, but until then, it's a side-note.
I own a small company myself which is just getting up on its feet - publishing rather than software, though (it's about to release its fourth book). You're reading a lot of information here that can probably guide you quite well, so I won't repeat it.
But, I will ask this: does it feel right?
That's the thing - you have instincts for a reason. If it doesn't feel right, then there is probably some subtle clue that your subconscious has picked up on that things aren't as advertised, and you should be listening to it. So, look at yourself in a mirror and ask "Does this feel right?" If the answer is "yes," go ahead with it, but if the answer is "no," I'd suggest turning the money down, or at least digging a lot deeper before you make a decision.
Also, do your research on this megacorp. Find out who they are, and how they've treated their acquisitions in the past. In all honesty, I have to wonder why they're contacting you at this point in time. From your summary, you haven't released a product yet, so essentially you have no track record - they have no idea of if you're going to be profitable or not. To me, interest like theirs this early would be a warning sign...your mileage may vary.
But, at any rate, find out if it feels right, and trust your instincts. As I said, you have them for a reason.
Not quite right, I'm afraid, and for reasons that are downright embarrassing, speaking as a publisher of a textbook...
It's not the IP of the author that's the expensive bit. In fact, it would be lovely and wonderful if it was. Unfortunately, that's not what is happening.
Most of the time, when a textbook is put into print, all the copyrights are bought by the textbook company. The author(s) get a royalty, but they've lost the rights. The textbook is then marketed to universities, where a captive market is put together. So, once you have the students forced to buy the book because it's the course textbook, the publisher can price it however it pleases. And it does. The students get ass-raped, and the authors may very well be exploited alongside them.
And that's how a book that shouldn't cost the end reader more than $50 on a bad day becomes a $120 book. No prima donna authors about it. And don't think for one minute the book being offered as an e-book will change that.
(And no, I won't touch those practices with a 10-foot pole. That sort of thing is absolutely disgraceful. The textbook I published, a book on ancient humour, prices out at $32.95 USD to the reader, and the only reason it is at that price is that at the time it was put to the printer the Canadian dollar looked like it was going to stabilize at around $1.10 USD. And, I might add, the copyrights on all of the books I publish belong to the authors.)
Speaking as a publisher, and one of the authors who was part of the push to make the e-book mainstream back in 2000 (a push by, I might add, the major publishers), I can tell you from experience that publishers aren't trying to push any genie back into any bottle.
They do, however, tend to go with what is good business. As of February, e-books managed to get up to representing around 1.5% of the entire U.S. book market for that month - it's the highest they've ever been, and it took them over 10 years to get there...and that includes a massive push from 2000-2002 to make the things work. Yet, with the ability to read e-books on everything up to and including mobile phones, the e-book is still a niche market - therefore, it doesn't get a lot of support from publishers. They tried, and right now it's just a niche that can work as good marketing for the printed books, so it is treated that way. Newspapers, on the other hand, are close to becoming an endangered species, and have been on an increasing downwards slide for years. For them, it's go at least half-electronic, or die.
So why newspapers and not books? The simple fact is that people don't consume books the way that they consume the news, or music, or movies. It's not the DRM that would have to change in order for e-books to be anything other than a niche market - it's the way people consume books. Right now, the printed book is the perfect fit for the way books are consumed by the majority of the market. The day that changes, the way books are produced and marketed will change too.
Back last summer, I took a grad school course in Signals Intelligence, and one of the things I had to read was a paper by Matthew Aid titled "All Glory is Fleeting," which was about the use of Sigint prior to 9/11. It was quite a surprising paper, because the one word I would never have thought to use for Al-Qaeda was "incompetent."
But, in fact, in their early years, they were. Up until about 1997 or 1999, their signals discipline was nonexistent. They gave bin Laden a satellite phone (because, frankly, Afghanistan is the worst possible place in the world to try to run an international terrorist "organization" from - I say "organization" because Al-Qaeda doesn't strictly exist as an organization...it is instead a network of networks with very loose ties from one cell to another), and the NSA listened in to every phone call. And, by the way, in these phone calls, the various terrorists talked openly about their operations. So, the NSA passed the information on to the appropriate police force, and terrorist ops went bad, one after the other.
At some point, though, Al-Qaeda clued in to the fact that the satellite phone was being listened to. One story goes that the Washington Post leaked it, and terrorists read the newspapers too. So, the phone went silent, other means of communication were used, and Al-Qaeda ops actually began to work.
Sigint isn't easy to sort through at the best of times, though. You have to first pick out the signal (relevant material) from the noise (irrelevant material and deception), and then figure what the signal actually means. So, if a Saudi under suspicion talks on the phone about going to the United States for a "business meeting," it could mean that he's meeting members of a terrorist cell...or going to an actual business meeting...or he could be cover for somebody else going to the terrorist meeting. Incompetent Al-Qaeda was easy when it came to sorting the signals from the noise - current Al-Qaeda isn't.
Um...that certainly may be true, but American copyright law ends at the American border. From the looks of this, it is a British production on British soil. So, in fact, I'd say it is cut and dried - it is in copyright.
On the contrary, as I recall, CDs didn't linger for a decade while the market made up its mind. DVDs wiped out the video tape within about five years of their introduction. The market is not wishy-washy, nor is it sentimental. People just don't as rule consume books in a way that makes the e-book serious competition.
Let me put it this way - for the last five years, you could read e-books on computers, PDAs, and cell phones, not to mention e-book readers. The technology has been ready for years. It wasn't adapted in any real way for books. Newspapers, on the other hand, are now close to an endangered species because electronic consumption WAS adapted there.
In order for the e-book to "become the future," the way the market consumes books would have to change. Print on demand technology revolutionized the book market. Amazon selling books online revolutionized the book market. Email and FTP servers revolutionized the book market, allowing authors to get their books to publishers quickly and without wasting paper. This Expresso Book Machine will revolutionize the book market - and probably give Amazon some extra competition while it does it. E-books has their shot, and failed.
They are a compliment to the printed book, and a worthy one. But they're not a replacement by any means.
"No, I mean the problem with perfect binding, which is individual sheets glued into a cover. What you describe as 'real perfect binding' doesn't even appear to have a name."
Slashdot Mirror
Sorry, folks, but while legal action is necessary to stop the lawsuit campaign, Tenenbaum is about as far from the poster boy needed to stop the RIAA as you can get.
Regardless of whether the question should have been asked, the fact is that he admitted liability on the stand, and admitted that he had been perjuring himself to the court for the last eight months, right up to jury selection. The man is lucky he's not facing jail for perjury, which carries up to five years imprisonment - he certainly did everything in his power to make the court hostile to him at the last minute.
A test case to challenge statutory damages when it comes to individuals requires a sympathetic defendant - Tenenbaum seems to have done everything he can to appear to be a lying sociopath, up to and including giving a reason for lying under oath that amounts to "it seemed like a good idea at the time."
Slightly strange and loopy counsel aside, Tenenbaum wasted eight months of the court's time, committed a felony outside of what he was being sued for, and there is no way in hell that anybody should be paying his costs and his penalty for him. He stopped being able to play the "I'm being persecuted by a large organization" card the minute he lied under oath.
Do NOT send any money to this man and his family. Please.
I'd add to that one other thing - the defendant also admitted to having perjured himself for the entire trial.
I'd hate to be his lawyer - I can't imagine any way Tenenbaum could have appeared as a sympathetic defendant after admitting that he had been wasting the time of everybody in the court for months by lying to them. The minute he made that admission, he turned the entire court against him.
How the hell do you defend a client who insists on blowing his own foot off with a cannon during the trial?
It seems odd that everybody is screaming unfairness because of the amount of the settlement, but almost nobody is taking a cold, hard look at the defendant's actions during the trial.
Frankly, he got off EASY. For what he did, he's lucky he isn't in jail.
On the stand, Tenenbaum admitted that up until that part of the questioning, he had willfully lied under oath, with little excuse other than "It's what seemed the best response to give." That's perjury, and under American law, it is a felony offense that carries with it a jail sentence of up to five years. And there's a reason for that.
A trial is supposed to be the administration of justice, which in ideal circumstances is fair and balanced. But for justice to be administered, it must be based on truth. By lying throughout most of the trial, Tenenbaum made a mockery of the trial, and prevented the court from being fair and just. At least he admitted it before the trial was over, but he still ensured that for months the jury's consideration was based on false information.
Judges and juries don't like being lied to. So, yes, the defendant has been ordered to pay $675,000 USD in damages. But, he doesn't have a felony on his record, and he's not going to be spending up to five years behind bars. He'll be able to declare bankruptcy and get on with his life.
Considering the alternatives for willful perjury, that's getting off really damn easy. And frankly, after his conduct, I have no sympathy for him whatsoever.
"But the boomers, and their outdated notions of privacy and freedom, will die before us. This is why I'm glad people don't live forever... new ideas would never have a chance if we did."
Wow...Comrade Stalin, anybody?
Funny thing - I notice you don't seem to be talking about the freedom to have a private life. I also notice that those "baby boomers" you dismiss so callously are the same people who fought for civil rights in the '60s, fought both in and against Vietnam in the late '60s and early '70s, and brought about the sexual revolution. They fought for freedom and equality, and changed the face of America for the better. What have you done lately? I mean, besides putting your personal information online and pissing on their accomplishments.
A lot of people fought and died so that you can have those freedoms. A lot of people are fighting right now to let you keep your privacy. Freedom does mean the freedom to make your life public if you choose, but it also means the freedom to decline the opportunity if you choose. And transparency does not mean that nobody has privacy, but that when an important decision is made affecting you, you are allowed to know why it was made.
The baby boomers understand this, and knew to fight for it. It's a pity you don't.
I'm afraid I found this article quite shallow when it comes down to it, although a lot of that is because last year I wrote a piece on this subject that was published in The Escapist as "The Anatomy of Violence." It covered why some people call first person shooter games "murder simulators," what the psychological underpinnings are behind the theory, and what impact it can have in the real world.
There are two versions - the one The Escapist published was edited down a fair bit, and can be found here: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/issues/issue_153/4960-The-Anatomy-of-Violence
The "extended" version - the one The Escapist didn't edit down - can be found here: http://garwulf.livejournal.com/38455.html
Not to put down the author of this article, but I think mine is really worth looking at here, and adds a lot that is missing (the SLA Marshall link is what makes the "murder simulator" theory make sense, among other things).
Well, THAT got you riled up...
Two things before I move on to more important matters than this conversation:
1. The Mythology of the Public Domain is an examination of the issues of the CTEA published in a peer-reviewed law journal, and from page 63-68 discusses the reasons behind the CTEA directly, as well as the urban legend that it was all Disney's fault. If you are going to dismiss it based on title alone, then that only reveals your own prejudices on this matter, rather than any informed discussion.
2. If you really have inside information and first hand experience, then perhaps you'd like to share what that was.
WHY?
You're right - Disney probably lobbied for it to go through - but did you ever think to consider that the REASON they lobbied was because Europe had just declared that they would not respect American copyrights past the terms set by American copyright law, while holding European films to the longer European copyright terms, causing a trade issue with older films, among other things, rather than a need to keep Steamboat Willie in copyright? You see, they actually don't care about Steamboat Willie - Mickey Mouse is protected under trademark law, which doesn't have the same limits, so Disney has very little to lose if it goes into the public domain.
(Source: http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1/martin-original1.pdf )
You may not be blaming the creative artists for working towards that copyright span - instead you're blaming media companies - but your implication is still quite plain - that the reason copyrights last that long is because greedy corporations wanted to deepen their pockets.
Well, guess what - that's wrong. Greedy corporations will always want to deepen their pockets, but this one was a foreign policy and trade matter more than anything else.
(And, by the way, the "Disney lobbying is the cause of the CTEA" happens to be a major part of the Lessig argument regarding this, and his writings are one of the major sources - so yes, he is relevant.)
How about we go with direct evidence instead of innuendo. Here is the actual Supreme Court judgement of Eldred vs. Ashcroft. See for yourself why Lessig lost:
http://supct.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/01-618.ZS.html
It is very clear that he didn't make his case. It is also very clear that the driving force of the CTEA is nothing in the United States, but instead what happened in 1993 in Europe when they extended their copyrights first.
One thing you really have to start understanding is that intellectual property law does not exist in a vacuum - there is a foreign relations component. If you want to see what American copyright law is going to do next in broad strokes, forget staring at Disney - look at the European Union.
Accord to Lawrence Lessig, no doubt...
But Lessig lost his case in the Supreme Court on the merits, mainly for bringing a bunch of conspiracy theories about Disney into a court of law, and got it torn apart by lawyers who actually had evidence.
So, no, the CTEA (Copyright Term Extension Act) was not about keeping Steamboat Willie in copyright. It was a foreign policy move to harmonize with Europe, which had moved to life + 70 years and had declared that it would only respect the term in the country of origin. There was a concern that this would cause difficulties with American artists trying to work in Europe.
But, I guess a conspiracy by Disney is more exciting than foreign policy.
(Source: http://llr.lls.edu/volumes/v36-issue1/martin-original1.pdf - pay close attention to the section on Lessig's case - he really did come in making statements that were easily disproved, such as claiming that insufficient time was given for consultation and that librarian concerns weren't even looked at...only to have the several days of consultation brought up in evidence as well as sections addressing the concerns of librarians and giving them special privileges.)
I hate to tell you this, but copyright already works that way when it comes to derivative works. You can copyright an implementation of an idea, but not an idea itself. It's been that way for a very long time.
Sorry, but as a business owner myself, I have to wonder - how did you know what their terms were without contacting them?
Aside from which, I think your argument here regarding your business does come out as a cop-out. Just because you couldn't afford to pay the license fee to produce the shirts yourself, it doesn't mean that you had to resort to piracy. Surely there are wholesalers out there who sell those licensed shirts to vendors like yourself, without you having to produce them, or pay a license fee.
"OK, so there's no market for eBooks. That means nobody wants them."
If you need a damn straw man to flog whatever horse you're flogging, count me out. I've already said that there is a demand, and even given you the market share, as well as the link to see it. Now you're putting words in my mouth, and as far as I'm concerned, that ends this conversation.
It may seem wasteful to you, but I can tell from what you wrote that you're neither a writer, editor, or publisher.
First of all, there are lots of people who can write, and lots of people who can edit. Being able to do both, though, is rare. And, even if you can do both, any author is too close to their own work to edit effectively. An editor's job is to find the problems, both big and small, that the author missed - and the author will miss them.
Step 1 - Writing a book is not done in little to no time - it's a process that takes months, and sometimes even years.
Step 4 - Typesetting a book is not something that can be done nice and easily by the author. First of all, the author doesn't necessarily know how to make a typeset book look good (my first attempt when I started my publishing company is downright embarrassing). Furthermore, considering the variations in files that can occur between programs, just because an author had it look good on his computer, it doesn't mean that a strange glitch won't show up when the publisher gets it onto theirs. One of the reasons it's done on the publisher side is specifically to cut down on wasted time fixing glitches moving from one program to another.
Step 5 - The author is involved in the last stages of the copyedit, in fact - galleys (aka page proofs) are sent to the author for approval before the book is locked down. However, copyediting is a different skill, and it's not necessarily one that an author has. A good copyeditor doesn't actually read the book - they go through line by line skimming it, looking for stuff that jumps out at them. It's not something that everybody can do, and a good copyeditor can make a serious difference to the finished product.
Book covers - What the hell do you think they're for? People DO judge a book by its cover when they pass it in a bookstore.
Marketing - I am perfectly serious. What makes you think the marketing is aimed at YOU? There's a lot of marketing going on, aimed at the decision makers in bookstores, libraries, and distributors. This is part of the process that makes sure that the book actually ends up on the bookshelf of the bookstore. In my own business, I pay $50 per book for an ad that appears in Ingram Advance - you will never see it in your life. But tens of thousands of bookstores and libraries will. Back when EverQuest Companion was in the final stages, the marketing department at McGraw-Hill was trying to cut a deal that would get a copy of the book into every copy of EverQuest II that was sold - those negotiations were with Sony.
You can't just assume that just because you don't see something happening, it isn't there. Take the contract negotiations, for example - do you really think that every author just signs the boiler plate contract? No, the contract is negotiated, terms are changed, and the lawyers do have to check some of that. If you ever try to actually run a publishing company, you'll find that most of your preconceptions about this process don't tend to survive contact with reality.
Well, you've got some misinformation there, as well as some seriously faulty logic...
First of all, there isn't no demand for e-books, there is a minuscule demand. And that demand is based on customer consumption. Most people don't consume novels as e-books, but a technical manual, for example, is more likely to be useful as an e-book, or a file that one can use a search function on, and so the demand for a print version on those is decreasing while the demand for an e-copy is steadily increasing.
And I'm really not sure how your logic works. A pirate e-book is damned disrespectful, if nothing else. And it undermines the contract the author has signed with their publisher. We're not talking about some software that costs hundreds of dollars, or an organization that's been suing college students for extortion's sake, we're talking about a reader being around $10 out of pocket. The sense of entitlement that leads to this sort of piracy is just sickening.
You're also wrong about the economics of publishing, but then again, you have no way of knowing the actual numbers, as you're not in the industry. So, I'll fill you in on this.
The actual production of the book is one of the smallest costs involved when it comes to big publishers. Smaller publishers like myself, that use Print on Demand technology, do actually have a higher production cost. But big publishers only use PoD for their back list as a rule. So, how much does this actually cost?
(These are rough figures, by the way - I deal with PoD for the most part, and I haven't had a chance to do an offset print run yet.)
The big publishers use what is called "offset printing." This means that they're printing the books in blocks of at least 1,500 copies at a time. The actual cost per book, however, is probably somewhere between $.25 to $1.00 (for a very long book), and could be as low as $.10 per book. So, let's say that you buy a print book with a $10.00 cover price - how does that actually break down as far as who gets what?
Well, the wholesaler who sold the book to the bookstore usually takes a 55% discount off the cover. They sell it to the bookstore at around a 40% discount off the cover (that's why, for example, Amazon can have a 30% discount and still make a profit). So, of our $10 book, $4.00 of the cover price has gone to the bookstore, and $1.50 has gone to the wholesaler. This leaves $4.50 to the publisher. And, of that $4.50 that's going to the publisher, somewhere around $.25 was the likely cost of production. If the only thing you do is knock the cost of production off the e-book version, your $10.00 book now costs $9.75 as an e-book.
(Please note, this is not the same with a small press like mine using PoD technology - there the production price of the book you'd buy off Amazon, for example, is $.013 per page, plus $.90 for the cover. So, the calculation is very different there - but that's an aside.)
So, if production isn't the major cost here, then what is? Well, it comes down to man hours. So, here's a layout of how a manuscript gets turned into a book:
1. The author writes the book. We're going to assume that the book wasn't commissioned here (if it was, step 2 happens before step 1).
2. The publisher accepts the book, and a contract is negotiated. This involves the legal department, and their man-hours, although that happens very far behind the scenes. With a major publisher, the author is paid an advance. In SF and fantasy, the opening contract for a new writer is called a "3 at 3" or a "4 at 4," meaning a $3,000 advance on 3% royalties, or a $4,000 advance on 4% royalties. This gets larger as an author gets more established.
3. The book now undergoes an editing pass, with the editor going line by line through the book and sending suggestions to the author. This becomes a back-and-forth process, and depending on how much work needs to be done, can be quite short, or quite long. So, here we have man-hours from the editor.
4. The book is now typese
They tried both, actually.
Okay - first thing I need to do here is give you a quick lesson in how book sales work, because otherwise some of this isn't going to make much sense. Most book sales - including a number of e-book sales - go through a wholesaler, who frequently takes a discount of around 55% of the cover. So, if you're buying an e-book off of a publisher's website directly, the publisher is getting all the profit, but if you're buying off Amazon, the publisher is probably getting less than half of the cover price.
Now, the production cost of a book is quite small for a publisher like Pocket Books, because they use what is called "offset printing." So, they'll print around 2,000 copies of the book, but that will cost them perhaps $.25-$1.00 or so per book. Production is a much larger cost if a Print on Demand process is used - a 300 page book that cost around $.25 to produce now costs around $4.75. But for the most part, we're not talking about that process.
(Disclosure time - my publishing company uses the Print on Demand process, not offset printing, so my numbers on the offset printing process are very rough - it could be as little as $.10 per book.)
So, for Pocket Books, most of the actual cost of the book isn't production at all, but the preparation for it - the author gets an advance, which is typically at least 4 digits (mine was $3,000 for Demonsbane). You have the time spent editing it, and then it goes to typesetting. Once it's out of typesetting, it is fully locked down and goes into production. The only difference between an e-book and a print book is that in the former case, a file is just generated, and in the latter case, it goes to a print shop. So, most of the cost on either is in terms of man-hours.
Back in 2000, Demonsbane was offered for $5.00 USD - in comparison, the cover price of the first Diablo print novel was $6.50 USD (I just checked). So, it was at a reduced price - it was also calculated, down to the length, to be something that people would want to read on their computer or an e-book reader. Now, I know $1.50 doesn't seem like that much of a discount, but keep in mind how little of a book price is actually covering production here, and how much goes towards man-hours - it was actually a fair price for what was offered.
The price was also, granted, a bit of a shot in the dark. There was a lot of talk at the time about how e-books were going to revolutionize the book industry, and publishers knew that most readers don't understand how much of the book cost goes towards man-hours, and how little goes towards production. So, it was this brand-new format with a lot of promise - a format that if it took off, would be able to get thousands of books into the hands of readers without having to worry about print runs running out and shipping issues - but nobody really knew what the right price point was for these things. The practical experience of seeing e-books in action just wasn't there yet. So, the prices ended up being a more or less educated guess, but a guess based on solid figures on the publisher end regarding production costs.
As far as doctrine of first sale goes, that was a really tricky one, and I remember the publishers agonizing over that. The problem is that while doctrine of first sale works wonderfully for a printed book, where you have a physical object to pass on without making a copy and breaking copyright, the only way to pass on an e-book involves making a copy. And, you also have to prevent somebody from taking your hard work and selling it at a lower price, essentially undercutting you with your own product. At the same time, the consumer has certain rights, and nobody would be happy with a book that they couldn't move from their own computer to their own e-reader.
I wish I could remember what solution was used for Demonsbane, but I can't. Sorry about that. I don't think the technological issues have really been solved on this one yet anyway. I know that there was at least one publisher that used a solution where the file would allow itself to be copied three times, or something like that, but I don't remember if it was Pocket Books that used it.
Well, seeing as I am one of the publishers who uses Lightning Source as their printer, and I thus know a fair bit about this end, you have a couple of your facts wrong here.
First of all, Lightning Source doesn't set the cover price - the publishing company does (they also set the wholesaler discount, although anything over 55% gets the book listed as a low-discount book, and that can adversely impact sales). Lightning Source takes care of production and order fulfillment. Are PoD books more expensive, though? As a rule, yes. But that's because it's a more expensive process on the production end. To give you an idea of how the actual pricing here works, I'll use one of my more recent public domain reprints, The Art of War: Restored Edition:
The cover price is $24.95 USD. The actual costs break down as follows:
Wholesaler discount - 55% - we now are left with $11.23 of the original cover (the wholesaler sells it to the bookseller for 40% off cover, which is how a place like Amazon can offer it for 30% off and still make a profit).
Printing cost - $5.74
Profit - $5.49
This doesn't stop people from occasionally putting in stupid pricing. I'm about to publish an edition of The Great War as I Saw It - the added value is a new introduction and a nicely formatted edition - at the same price as Art of War. There is another PoD paperback edition of the book out there on Amazon that has a cover price of $74.99. Whoever thought that price was a good idea was hopped up on something when they set it...
(Lulu, by the way, is not a good example - they're more a vanity press than a printer, and they are known for screwing around with cover prices every now and then.)
Second, as far as revolutionary goes, Print on Demand was INCREDIBLY revolutionary. Not only did it allow major publishers to continue to offer their back list in a practical way - so that they weren't having to print and warehouse over a thousand copies to satisfy a demand of 10 books per year - but it also allowed small publishers like my own to exist. You can now start a publishing company in your basement with worldwide distribution and a startup cost of not much more than your business license.
It was an across-the-board revolution, make no mistake. Titles have a longer lifespan, and the entire industry is now more accessible to whoever wants to get into it.
Pal, I've heard this "being slow to release legitimate downloadable versions of their product while bemoaning the demand for a product they refuse to produce" before, and it's bullshit. There was a massive push to make e-books work between 2000 and 2002. I know - I was there. In fact, I even was the author of one of the front runners. I had the Diablo game franchise behind me, advertisement on Battle.net, and a tech-savvy audience that should have generated thousands of sales. Everything was going for me except the fact that I'm not Stephen King.
Guess what - the e-book tanked. For that matter, so did every single e-book that was released across the board. The major publishing companies did everything they could short of shoving the e-books down the readers' throats for two years to get these things to work, and the only thing that happened was that a lot of money was spent for a result of very few sales. Almost ten years later, e-books are being regularly tracked by the Association of American Publishers. The latest figures they have are for the month of February 2009...and in the last ten years, with at least one major push behind them, do you know how much of the book market the e-book currently occupies? In February it peaked...at 1.5%. And it only got that high because e-book sales dropped less respectively than regular books sales from the month before.
Don't take my word for it...do the math yourself - the link is here: http://www.publishers.org/main/PressCenter/Archicves/2009_April/Feb09stats.htm
The simple fact is that people do not consume books in such a way that an e-book is anything more than a niche market. Books are not like newspapers, and while newspapers are becoming close to an endangered species - having to maintain a web presence for survival - books haven't even been touched by e-books. They're just consumed in a different way. The demand is minuscule, and that's not unfounded perception - that's up-to-date market figures, and a failed push that lasted at least two years.
The publishing industry is not a world of behind-the-times publishers ignoring technology. Publishers jumped on Amazon.com, and it revolutionized the industry. Something called an Expresso Book Machine is coming down the line, and it's going to cause a revolution too. Print on Demand caused a revolution as well. Things like editing and manuscript drafts are now been done by email rather than by regular post. But with the exception of the EBM, these were mainly revolutions taking place behind the scenes. Whether you like it or not, the publishing industry is an industry of early adapters...but they also aren't stupid. If something proves to be nothing more than a money sink, like the e-book, it gets treated like the niche it is.
Well, I'm both an author and a publisher here, so I do have the perspective of both sides. A lot of people here seem to think that publishing is more or less equal to the recording industry - it's not. Frankly, it's a lot more fair to the creative artists, far more technologically savvy (anybody who thinks publishers haven't made a concerted effort to make e-books work hasn't been paying attention - I was part of the first big push back in 2000). The book industry today has been revolutionized several times, and it's about to be revolutionized again by the Expresso Book Machine, which is essentially an ATM for books. It's very exciting, and I hope it does well.
And around here, frankly, a lot of people love to hold out a sense of entitlement. They are quite clear that no author has any right to their own work, and they should be thankful that they get the handout they do, but god help you if you challenge the idea that they have a natural right to copy whatever they want (and I challenge you to find the words "natural right" and "copy" in the same sentence anywhere in the U.S. Constitution or Declaration of Independence). Hopefully reality will be self-correcting when it comes to them; it's hard to hold onto a sense of entitlement when you have to fight to keep what you have, and this recession/depression will have a lot of people doing that.
E-book piracy is a fact of life - there are people with scanners who will upload books. There's not a lot one can really do about it. Particularly when you're a small publisher like I am, the cost of trying to fight it is much higher than it's worth. The good news is that most people don't actually consume books that way, so the potential damage in lost sales is pretty minimal.
That being said, people will also download just about anything that's free, regardless of if they actually need or want it. So, that being the case, free electronic copies of books or excerpts of books can be a good low-budget means of advertising product, and that is how I use it. The public domain reprints are produced as full .pdf e-books, and the new books are produced as online samples - then they're all put on filesharing websites and torrents the minute I have the Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble websites for them.
Is piracy a big problem when it comes to books? Not really. With an e-book market that's only managed to peak at 1.5% of the total book market for one month over the last ten years, there's not a lot to suggest it's anything more than a niche that's best used for marketing anyway. People just don't usually consume books that way - they may test them out that way, but if they really want to read them, most of the market is going to buy a printed copy. Should that change, online piracy will be a bigger issue, but until then, it's a side-note.
I own a small company myself which is just getting up on its feet - publishing rather than software, though (it's about to release its fourth book). You're reading a lot of information here that can probably guide you quite well, so I won't repeat it.
But, I will ask this: does it feel right?
That's the thing - you have instincts for a reason. If it doesn't feel right, then there is probably some subtle clue that your subconscious has picked up on that things aren't as advertised, and you should be listening to it. So, look at yourself in a mirror and ask "Does this feel right?" If the answer is "yes," go ahead with it, but if the answer is "no," I'd suggest turning the money down, or at least digging a lot deeper before you make a decision.
Also, do your research on this megacorp. Find out who they are, and how they've treated their acquisitions in the past. In all honesty, I have to wonder why they're contacting you at this point in time. From your summary, you haven't released a product yet, so essentially you have no track record - they have no idea of if you're going to be profitable or not. To me, interest like theirs this early would be a warning sign...your mileage may vary.
But, at any rate, find out if it feels right, and trust your instincts. As I said, you have them for a reason.
Not quite right, I'm afraid, and for reasons that are downright embarrassing, speaking as a publisher of a textbook...
It's not the IP of the author that's the expensive bit. In fact, it would be lovely and wonderful if it was. Unfortunately, that's not what is happening.
Most of the time, when a textbook is put into print, all the copyrights are bought by the textbook company. The author(s) get a royalty, but they've lost the rights. The textbook is then marketed to universities, where a captive market is put together. So, once you have the students forced to buy the book because it's the course textbook, the publisher can price it however it pleases. And it does. The students get ass-raped, and the authors may very well be exploited alongside them.
And that's how a book that shouldn't cost the end reader more than $50 on a bad day becomes a $120 book. No prima donna authors about it. And don't think for one minute the book being offered as an e-book will change that.
(And no, I won't touch those practices with a 10-foot pole. That sort of thing is absolutely disgraceful. The textbook I published, a book on ancient humour, prices out at $32.95 USD to the reader, and the only reason it is at that price is that at the time it was put to the printer the Canadian dollar looked like it was going to stabilize at around $1.10 USD. And, I might add, the copyrights on all of the books I publish belong to the authors.)
Speaking as a publisher, and one of the authors who was part of the push to make the e-book mainstream back in 2000 (a push by, I might add, the major publishers), I can tell you from experience that publishers aren't trying to push any genie back into any bottle.
They do, however, tend to go with what is good business. As of February, e-books managed to get up to representing around 1.5% of the entire U.S. book market for that month - it's the highest they've ever been, and it took them over 10 years to get there...and that includes a massive push from 2000-2002 to make the things work. Yet, with the ability to read e-books on everything up to and including mobile phones, the e-book is still a niche market - therefore, it doesn't get a lot of support from publishers. They tried, and right now it's just a niche that can work as good marketing for the printed books, so it is treated that way. Newspapers, on the other hand, are close to becoming an endangered species, and have been on an increasing downwards slide for years. For them, it's go at least half-electronic, or die.
So why newspapers and not books? The simple fact is that people don't consume books the way that they consume the news, or music, or movies. It's not the DRM that would have to change in order for e-books to be anything other than a niche market - it's the way people consume books. Right now, the printed book is the perfect fit for the way books are consumed by the majority of the market. The day that changes, the way books are produced and marketed will change too.
Back last summer, I took a grad school course in Signals Intelligence, and one of the things I had to read was a paper by Matthew Aid titled "All Glory is Fleeting," which was about the use of Sigint prior to 9/11. It was quite a surprising paper, because the one word I would never have thought to use for Al-Qaeda was "incompetent."
But, in fact, in their early years, they were. Up until about 1997 or 1999, their signals discipline was nonexistent. They gave bin Laden a satellite phone (because, frankly, Afghanistan is the worst possible place in the world to try to run an international terrorist "organization" from - I say "organization" because Al-Qaeda doesn't strictly exist as an organization...it is instead a network of networks with very loose ties from one cell to another), and the NSA listened in to every phone call. And, by the way, in these phone calls, the various terrorists talked openly about their operations. So, the NSA passed the information on to the appropriate police force, and terrorist ops went bad, one after the other.
At some point, though, Al-Qaeda clued in to the fact that the satellite phone was being listened to. One story goes that the Washington Post leaked it, and terrorists read the newspapers too. So, the phone went silent, other means of communication were used, and Al-Qaeda ops actually began to work.
Sigint isn't easy to sort through at the best of times, though. You have to first pick out the signal (relevant material) from the noise (irrelevant material and deception), and then figure what the signal actually means. So, if a Saudi under suspicion talks on the phone about going to the United States for a "business meeting," it could mean that he's meeting members of a terrorist cell...or going to an actual business meeting...or he could be cover for somebody else going to the terrorist meeting. Incompetent Al-Qaeda was easy when it came to sorting the signals from the noise - current Al-Qaeda isn't.
Um...that certainly may be true, but American copyright law ends at the American border. From the looks of this, it is a British production on British soil. So, in fact, I'd say it is cut and dried - it is in copyright.
On the contrary, as I recall, CDs didn't linger for a decade while the market made up its mind. DVDs wiped out the video tape within about five years of their introduction. The market is not wishy-washy, nor is it sentimental. People just don't as rule consume books in a way that makes the e-book serious competition.
Let me put it this way - for the last five years, you could read e-books on computers, PDAs, and cell phones, not to mention e-book readers. The technology has been ready for years. It wasn't adapted in any real way for books. Newspapers, on the other hand, are now close to an endangered species because electronic consumption WAS adapted there.
In order for the e-book to "become the future," the way the market consumes books would have to change. Print on demand technology revolutionized the book market. Amazon selling books online revolutionized the book market. Email and FTP servers revolutionized the book market, allowing authors to get their books to publishers quickly and without wasting paper. This Expresso Book Machine will revolutionize the book market - and probably give Amazon some extra competition while it does it. E-books has their shot, and failed.
They are a compliment to the printed book, and a worthy one. But they're not a replacement by any means.
"No, I mean the problem with perfect binding, which is individual sheets glued into a cover. What you describe as 'real perfect binding' doesn't even appear to have a name."
Actually, it does - it's called a sewn binding.