thegipples/books

From the page: "When the agreement was announced in October, all sides hailed it as a landmark settlement that permitted Google to proceed with its scanning project while protecting the rights and financial interests of authors and publishers. Both sides agreed to disagree on whether the book scanning itself violated authors' and publishers' copyrights.

...For readers who might want to buy digital access to an individual scanned book, Mr. Clancy said, Google was likely to sell at least half of the books for $5.99 or less. Students and faculty at universities who subscribe to the database will be able to get the full contents of all the books free.

For the average author, "this is not a game changer" in an economic sense..."They will get paid for the use of their book, but whether they will get paid so much that they can start living large -- I think that's just a fantasy," Mr. Sarnoff said. "I think there will be a few authors who do see significant dollars out of this, but there will be a vast number of authors who see insignificant dollars out of this.""

From the page: "Take ice hockey in Canada: look at any team and you will find that a disproportionate number of players will have been born in the first three months of the year. This, it turns out, is because the cut-off date for children eligible for the nine-year-old, 10-year-old, 11-year-old league and so on is January 1. Boys who are oldest and biggest at the beginning of the hockey season are inevitably the best. And so they get the most coaching and practice, and they get chosen for the all-star team, and so their advantage increases - on into the professional game. A similar pattern applies to other sports. What we think of as talent is actually a complicated combination of ability, opportunity and utterly arbitrary advantage."

From the page: "Dmitri�s decision to ignore his father�s final wish and publish the book has been controversial. �oeMy father told me what his important books were,” Dmitri told the BBC in defense of his decision. �oeHe named �Laura� as one of them. One doesn�t name a book one intends to destroy.”

British screenwriter and playwright Tom Stoppard isn�t buying it. �oeIt�s perfectly straightforward,” he told the BBC. �oeNabokov wanted it burnt, so burn it.”"

"Amazon.com has an interesting map of which states buy more "red" or "blue" books"

From the page: "This week HarperCollins launched Authonomy.com, a website where the wannabes can upload sample chapters. Anyone can read and rate them. Harper- Collins promises to read the 10 highest rated each month.

...The question is whether HarperCollins could benefit from the wisdom of crowds.

It is certainly an imaginative way of dealing with a market plagued by oversupply. Most people never read novels. ... First novels that do somehow get published often sell fewer than 1,000 copies. Of the hundreds of debuts each year, probably fewer than 10 make significant money for anyone.

...

Yet the problem with Authonomy.com may be that the readers, too, will turn out to be a small coterie of experts. They will be people who like novels. But the few novels that �oebreak out” �" the Harry Potters and Bridget Joneses �" do so by appealing to people who do not normally like novels. The first publisher to turn itself over to a horde of semiliterate philistines may be onto a winner."