FYI: Virtu

[truepenny]

[ETA For those of you who would, in fact, like to own The Virtu in hardback, sleary is the Hero of the Revolution to whom you should apply.]


Right now, The Virtu is out of print in both hardback and paperback. My editor is trying to get it into the POD program Ace is starting up, and my agent is making a formal protest on my behalf to Ace Books. But unless and until Ace changes their mind (or the rights revert to me and I figure out what to do to make the book available), you're going to have to look for it used or remaindered.

Yes, this also means the Google Book Settlement is, hello, extremely concrete and personal right at the moment, and I have to say, for a company whose motto is, "Don't be evil," Google is and has been behaving like, well, serious evil on this subject. Essentially, as I understand it, what Google's position boils down to is, We aren't going to respect your copyright and you can't make us respect your copyright. If you want ANY say in what we do with your copyrighted material, you have to agree that it's ours to begin with. [That would be opting in to the settlement. And please notice that this involves agreeing to Google's false premise that they can ignore your copyright in the first place.] And if you don't agree [i.e., if you opt out], well, we're going to do it anyway unless you sue us. And if you sue us, we can squash you like a BUG, little author, because we're Google and you're not. Neener neener. Opting out of the settlement doesn't actually protect your copyrights from Google, it just means that you don't agree with the deal the Authors Guild worked out. Which I don't, because it looks pretty much like signing away your birthright for a mess of pottage.

So, yeah. Dear Google, what happened to "Don't be evil"?

[ETA: And opting in ALSO tacitly agrees to the false assumption that the Authors Guild has the right to represent me. As someone pointed out on a mailing list I'm on, Google is not the only entity behaving like an asshat here.]

Comments

[mcurry.livejournal.com]

One choice on Google Reads, assuming you don't want them doing the various things the settlement says they can do with your materials, may well be to opt into the settlement, opt your works out, and then file a written objection to the terms of the settlement (see their FAQ for how to do all of that). Apparently you can also opt out of the settlement and, while doing so, ask that your works not be digitized/displayed, but in that case Google won't be legally obligated to follow your wishes, though they've indicated that they intend to.

While I was (and am) in support of the part of Google Reads where they were just going to scan books so as to have excerpts of them appear in searches, the bit in the settlement where they apparently get to decide when a book is no longer "commercially available" and then, within an unreasonably short period of time, make it available in its entirety as a POD version, is bad stuff. Hopefully the people who are challenging the details of the proposed settlement will be able to get substantive changes made to it, starting with the ridiculous May 5th deadline..

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Which would be a better thing to do, in terms of making my voice heard and protecting other authors, etc. etc. But--and this is what REALLY grates my cheese about the whole thing--why is this MY job? Why is Google getting to start out the game three steps ahead?

(And I know the answers. It just really does make me mad.)

It's a similar thing with the no-call lists. Why is "opt-in" the DEFAULT when no one in their right mind would sign up to be harassed and pestered by telemarketers?

(And, yes. Because they can get away with it.)

Grumble bitch complain.

[mcurry.livejournal.com]

I personally think the short-sighted AAP totally used the Authors Guild as their patsy in this one, in order to get the lawsuit class action status (which it still shouldn't have, given the relatively small number of authors who are actually members of the AG). The reason it's short-sighted is that it's getting them a cut of Google's ad revenue today while threatening their business model down the road. They apparently don't think they should care about some of what Google plans to do with things that go out of print, as they consider it to be the author's problem, but that just proves they have become incapable of playing the long game. It's the same great reasoning that makes then chase blockbuster books instead of nurturing and maintaining a reliable mid-list.