Laila Lalami

As much as $2 Billion, says a new report.

“I think consumers are increasingly starting to notice that they can get used books in good condition, in a timely manner,” says Jeff Hayes, a director at InfoTrends, a market research firm that served as the principal analyst for the BISG study.

More than 111 million used books were purchased last year, representing about one out of every 12 overall book purchases. By the end of the decade, the percentage is expected to rise to one out of 11, a troubling trend when sales for new works are essentially flat; authors and publishers receive no royalties from used buys.

It was rather amusing (and a bit distressing) to see used copies of Hope and Other Dangerous Pursuits appear on Amazon on the same day the book became available for sale. In the beginning, they had 5 or 6 advance review copies (softcover versions that didn’t even have correct page numbers.) But now the hardcovers have shown up, some of them signed. (I’ve only had one signing so far, at a trade show, so I know exactly where those came from!) Powell’s, thankfully, is only showing one used copy of Hope so far.

I’m still getting email notes about this post regarding the lawsuit that the Authors’ Guild has initiated against Google. This one comes from writer Richard Hellinga, who says:

What Richard Nash and and Anne Fernald forget to take into account is the sole reason Google is doing this. It is not an issue of increasing people’s access to information. That’s incidental. It has to do with the money Google will make selling advertising placed next to the book excerpts they will show when someone does a search. If they didn’t believe this would be a profitable venture, they wouldn’t do it. They’re not interested in selling books. They’re interested in selling ads.

When you go to a library, you are not subjected to ads when you flip through a book, or when you walk through the stacks. Libraries, be they public or university, don’t make money. They provide access to information for the sake of doing so.

If Google wants to scan an author’s works that’s fine, as long as the author and publisher get a percentage of the advertising revenue that Google is going to receive by allowing others to freely search and view excerpts. Fair use keeps culture alive, but profits keep Google, Writers, and Publishers alive. (Though writers have the occasional grant, fellowship, or residency to keep them alive, too, which they often need because profits almost always aren’t enough.)

See also this previous batch of emails for different arguments. If you’d like to share your own thoughts, feel free to email me.

Peter Terzian takes a closer look at The Complete New Yorker, which I’m dying to have. It’s an eight-DVD set.

Such bounty can breed obsession. Minutes after popping one of the eight discs into my iMac, the outline of my future became clear. I began making calculations. If I read one complete issue a day for the next 11 1/2 years, I would be finished in the spring of 2017. Of course, so much reading would occupy a few hours of each day. Surely I could shunt some social engagements, make peanut-butter sandwiches for dinner instead of all that time-consuming cooking.

It would be cool to be able to go through the entire fiction archives.

Link via Maud.

Local author Marc Acito will be in appearing here in Portland to promote the paperback release of How I Paid For College. Except this is no ordinary reading. It’s a one-man show, with Broadway songs and bits of stories:

Marc Acito presents Confessions of a Square Peg
Friday, September 30
7:30 PM
Multnomah Arts Center

Further details.

Novelist Leora Skolkin-Smith (Edges: O Israel, O Palestine) chats with Grace Paley on WBAI. Stream it here.

The International Herald Tribunes has an interview with Karim Tazi about Morocco’s textile industry, which was nearly destroyed by the removal of textile quotas on China. The industry, of which Tazi is an active member, has had to learn to cope with this giant competitor.

The indefatigable Dan Wickett has another e-panel, this time with editors of literary journals.

“Rarely do we get to peek into the pornography of great writers,” Castellani writes. “Not so with E. M. Forster. In fact, many readers and admirers are not aware that Forster wrote his own porn — a dozen or so short stories collected in the bawdy little volume The Life To Come.

Forster wrote these stories ‘not to express myself but to excite myself’ and knew they (like Maurice) dealt too candidly with (homo)sexuality to be published in his lifetime. Unlike Maurice, though, the stories are far from romantic or sentimental. They are brutal, eerie, ironic, damning of a hypocritical society, and more than a little twisted, even by today

I received several responses to the post reporting on the lawsuit that the Authors’ Guild filed against Google Print. Anne Fernald, Assistant Professor of English at Fordham University, writes:

I’m with Google on this one: In my opinion, current copyright law fails to take account of the crucial issue of access for scholars and students. Google seems to be working in favor of access and to be working with the habits of students, who, whatever we professors or librarians may counsel, tend to begin their research by googling. By limiting access to texts, authors do themselves a disservice. More access to snippets helps all of us, students, scholars, and passionate readers, figure out and find the books we want to read–and, more to the author’s guild’s point, I guess–buy.

Richard Nash, publisher of Soft Skull Books, takes an even stronger position:

Google, from a cultural standpoint, SHOULD win. Fair use is what keeps our culture alive. And, as merchants of culture, publishers need to balance their need to own the culture they sell, with their need to have culture worth selling! The farther publishers go down the incredibly near-sighted route of extending copyright terms (…) and pushing to narrow the Fair Use defense, the harder it makes the lives of individual content creators whose creativity is dependent on access to the trove of existing culture.

Anyone else care to chime in? Send us a note.

Drop whatever it is you’re doing, and head on over to Rockslinga to read Randa Jarrar’s poem, “Dear relatives who have contacted me, or are thinking of contacting me, to make sure I haven’t perished because of Rita.”