booktwo.org

Book piracy is no laughing matter, particularly in India, where it is estimated that US$36.5 million a year are lost by publishers (Source). With the advent of YouTube-like services such as Scribd, the problem is only going to grow.

However, I fear that these ads from an Indian bookseller are unlikely to have much effect, even with their very Indian appeal to respect the authors involved.

Ta, Mike.

There’s been a bit of media attention in the UK lately around some children’s books which have been appearing as part of a new initiative to increase tolerance and reduce homophobic bullying in schools. Books such as And Tango Makes Three, the story of two male penguins in a committed relationship in Central Park zoo, and King & King, a new twist on the old Prince-and-Princess fairytale, introduce the concepts of same-sex love and relationships to young children.

There has been the predictable response from religious groups who view such books as ‘forcing’ alternative sexualities on children, or somehow tempting them into homosexuality themselves (see this Guardian article). The alternative case is so frequently mis-represented that it bears stating here: homosexuality, not being a choice, is a reality in the lives of many children and young adults, either by being the offspring or ward of same-sex couples, or, later, being their own experience. Homophobic bullying is so widespread that increased tolerance not only helps kids who are actually gay, but those whose lives are made miserable by homophobic taunts even if they themselves are not gay.

As Elizabeth Atkinson, director of the No Outsiders project which is promoting the books, puts it so well: “What books do not say is as important as what they do.” To deliberately leave images of gay relationships out of children’s books is to censor social reality.

This controversy - over the same books - cropped up a while back in the States, and I wrote about it then for STML, my literary blog (link contains images some consider NSFW). Look there to see the historical background to this debate.

What’s the booktwo angle on this post? Well, there’s not much of one, except to say that technology, it is hoped, can help educators and students circumvent the strictures of religious or state-sanctioned intolerance to free up debate around controversial issues. Organisations such as the ALA use the internet to raise awareness with projects such as Banned Book Week, to keep records of most challenged books, and to advise librarians on how to deal with such challenges. Libraries such as that at UPenn create online repositories of censored works, accessible to all (worth noting that that the current Swotter text, James Joyce’s Ulysses, is on that list). Think Tanks such as the Free Expression Policy Project place book censorship alongside restrictive DRM and aggressive internet filtering on their issue list. The debates will continue, but the new can stand alongside the old in our continuing quest for personal and intellectual freedom and tolerance.

This week saw the first meeting of the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on Publishing at the UK Houses of Parliament. The APPG was set up last month, largely on the instigation of Sonny Leong, who is chairman of the IPG, a body which does an excellent job of representing independent publishers in the UK (full disclosure: my employer is a member, but that’s a personal opinion). It’s great that indie publishers will have such a voice in the house, although the APPG was set up to communicate with the industry as a whole.

The chairman of the APPG is Gordon Banks MP, a staunch Labourite whose record speaks for itself, although his background in the building trade doesn’t imply he has much experience in the area. He does however “like reading a wide range of books.” The Secretary is Gisela Stuart MP, another Labour MP with a similarly loyal record. She was a former Bookseller apprentice and Deputy Director of the London Book Fair, so should have a good understanding of the trade.

This is all important because the great changes coming to publishing are undoubtedly going to be accompanied by a fair amount of legislation - there’s already plenty of lobbying going on with things like copyright term extension, which was rejected by the Gowers Review back in December, but is bound to raise its ugly head again soon.

It’s depressing then, that one of the main items on the agenda - as reported by Publishing News, the only source I have for this - was territorial copyright (there were also some worrying turns of phrase about India’s ’sclerotic’ courts and the need for ’show trials’ - but even I am not going to come out on the side of the pirates). Territorial copyright refers to the practice of selling book rights in different territories, so that, for example, an author is published by Penguin in the UK, Simon & Schuster in the US, Gallimard in France and so on…

This practice means that publishers are protected in their own market, and can make pots of additional revenue selling rights to titles they own outright to other territories. This is a major moneyspinner, and it’s increasingly threatened by globalisation. A case in point is Amazon UK, which is regularly a focus of publisher’s ire for selling US editions, either directly or via third parties, to the UK market. The is, essentially, illegal - and it makes a mockery of publishers’ attempts to lock down their home markets.

Something clearly needs to be done - but parliamentary involvement just makes me nervous. There will still be separate foreign language editions of books for obvious reasons, and they’ll probably be done by diferent publishers, with contracts all round - but who thinks they can enforce territorial rights for ebooks? The internet has already made common-language borders irrelevant in most spheres; it’s going to happen here. Ill-conceived legislation could be a disaster. The bald statement that “without copyright, publishers would have nothing to sell at London or Frankfurt” is deeply misleading, but sounds like just the thing to get MPs geed up and making speeches.

Still, there was some mention of digitisation, and proof that the UK book industry is in rude health, having grown from £4,984m to £9,057m in its contribution to the UK economy in the last fifteen years according to a written answer from the Chancellor, so I’ll stop complaining now. But I will keep an eye out for the next meeting in June. Anyone know how to find written records of parliamentary group meetings?