The extraordinary good will Amazon has engendered for itself in the publishing community recently (kidding! kidding!) has spread into the writing community: As a Publishers Weekly story reports, the Authors Guild has launched a program on its website that “allows authors to track the buy button status of their books on Amazon.”

To use WhoMovedMyBuyButton.com, “authors need to register their ISBNs with the Guild for monitoring. According to the Guild, authors will get an e-mail alert if their Amazon buy button is removed.”

As the Guild explains on the site,

It happens without warning, always. Just ask the authors in the U.K., well published by major houses, who woke up to find their Buy Buttons had gone missing. No “pardon the inconvenience” e-note from Seattle, just a quiet severing of ties with a few million customers. It’s happened here in the U.S., too, more times than you know. See, the folks at Amazon have a headlock on the online book world, and they tend to get carried away.

After the Justice Department filed a brief contesting the revised version of the Google Book Settlement last Friday (see the earlier MobyLives report), the Authors Guild has elaborated on the somewhat defensive, somewhat confusing statement issued hastily last Friday — the one saying it disagrees with the DOJ except for the parts it doesn’t disagree with. Also, that it could have pressed its case harder against Google — even though it, uh, sided with Google — and that it might have won, although it might have lost. In the AG’s words:

We disagree with the Justice Department’s reading of the law. At the same time, it’s good to see the Department recognizes the settlement’s many benefits. In our view, it’s best for everyone that out-of-print library books be made available through reasonable, market-based means to readers, students and scholars. Without a settlement, that won’t happen. It’s also best that authors have direct control of the scans that Google has made, with the power to compel Google to hide, display or remove those scans. Without a settlement, authors have no such control. Google’s scanning and use of authors’ books would continue until the lawsuit was finally resolved.

Some authors and authors’ groups have asked why we didn’t press the litigation through to the end. The answer (besides the benefits we saw for authors in creating new markets for out-of-print works), in part, is that copyright litigation is uncertain. Fair use law is complex. One could fill a good-sized law-school classroom with copyright professors who believe that Google’s scanning of your books is a fair use. We don’t agree with that view, but our opinion may not have prevailed. If we’d lost, it would then be open season on scanning of your out-of-print and in-print books. All one would need is a scanner and a friend with a little bit of technical knowledge to start displaying “snippets” at your science fiction, humor, Civil War, or Harry Potter website. All perfectly legal; all without obligation to authors to properly secure those scans. Nothing gets illegal file-sharing going quite so much as millions of unsecured digital works floating around the Internet.

We also could’ve won. That would’ve been sweet. But here’s the thing: copyright victories tend to be Pyrrhic in the digital age. Our settlement negotiations went on with full knowledge of what happened to the music industry. The RIAA (the Recording Industry Association of America) won victory after victory, defeating Napster and Grokster with ground-breaking legal rulings. The RIAA also went after countless individuals, chasing down infringement wherever they could track it down.

It didn’t work. The infringement just moved elsewhere, in unpredictable ways. Nothing seems to drive innovation among copyright pirates as much as a defeat in the courts. That innovation didn’t truly abate until Apple came along with its iPod/iTunes model, making music easily and legally available at a reasonable price. By then, the music industry was devastated.

We think he’s great, too, but now it’s official: Melville House author Raj Patel has been declared a god. Yes, that’s right — Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved, has been deified. According to this report in the New York Times, Patel has been “proclaimed the messiah Maitreya by followers of the New Age religious sect Share International.”

How does such a thing happen? According to the Times report, things got rolling “when Benjamin Creme, the leader of Share International, who is also known as the Master, proclaimed the arrival of Maitreya. The name of the deity has Buddhist roots, but in 1972, Mr. Creme prophesied the coming Maitreya as a messiah for all faiths called the World Teacher. Mr. Creme did not name the messiah, but he revealed clues that led his devotees to fire up their search engines on a digital scavenger hunt that would lead them to The One.”

Patel, who currently lives in San Francisco, grew up in London and was raised a Hindu, is dismayed about his new godly status. He happened to be hard at work promoting his new book, The Value of Nothing, when followers of Mr. Creme started putting two and two together. Clues included his birth date, his dark skin tone, having traveled from India to London, and the kicker — a stutter. While promoting his book on the Colbert Report, Patel hesitated on a few words, and that was it. Mr. Creme’s followers were sold.

Patel has vigorously protested being called a god. But that’s just further proof, say Creme et al: The Maitreya is supposed to deny that he is the Maitreya.

We’re inclined to say the books speak for themselves.

Lest all the hoo-haw over Apple’s iPad, and while Amazon is still dusting itself off after some of its worst press ever, Barnes & Noble announced yesterday that “its popular nook e-book reader is back in stock online and will be rolling out in the majority of the bookseller’s U.S. stores this week.”

According to a Newsfactor report by Mark Long, at least one analyst expects it to do well, despite a rocky start wherein it got terrible reviews, and wasn’t available for the holidays as expected. James McQuivey of Forrester Research says, “The nook, despite its slow start, is priced right, targeted to book readers rather than skipping off to focus on magazine or newspaper readers, and, most importantly, the nook will be featured in front of millions of book buyers every month as they walk through the store. You can’t underestimate the power of that.”

Meanwhile, Newsfactor reports,

The temporary time-out on nook sales gave the bookseller enough breathing space to address some of the machine’s software shortcomings. “nook v 1.2 will be made available to customers in a seamless over-the-air update over approximately the next week,” a Barnes & Noble spokesperson wrote in a blog.

Among other things, the software upgrade improves the way e-books and periodicals open on the machine, as well as enhance the response of the Reading Now & Settings buttons. Moreover, the current reading page, as well as the bookmarks on all e-books, becomes saved automatically whenever the nook is powered off. And personal files that have been downloaded onto the machine can now be sorted by author and title.

Today’s a big day for writer Zachary German: his debut novel, Eat When You Feel Sad, hits shelves and tonight, the lovely WORD bookstore in Greenpoint, Brooklyn hosts his launch party.  Freshly 21 years old, Zachary’s novel is the story of Robert, also in his early twenties.  Eat When You Feel Sad is a selection of scenes from a life: Robert watching television and drinking beer, Robert at a Chinese restaurant, Robert getting mustard on his clothes and talking on G-chat.  In the tradition of Bret Easton Ellis and Tao Lin, Zachary portrays the day-to-day life of a generation, complete with movie references and a soundtrack listing (seriously, its all indexed in the back of the book).

Eat When You Feel Sad– a book trailer from Catherine Lacey on Vimeo.

In celebration of the book, Zachary has been collecting video of what people eat when they feel sad.  Visit www.eatwhenyoufeelsad.com to see your favorite writers and bloggers eating when they feel sad, including Shoplifting from American Apparel author Tao Lin and Gigantic mag founding editor James Yeh (with his roommate Ben Blum).  Submit your own video and you might just win a signed copy of Zachary’s book.

See you at WORD tonight!

The man Dave Eggers named his McSweeney’s Quarterly after (full name: Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern) has died, according to an a brief essay by Eggers posted on the magazine’s website. Timothy McSweeney was 67 years old. Eggers first encountered McSweeney after receiving a series of mysterious letters from him: he made a habit of sending confusing “notes written on pamphlets and other sorts of mail that required no postage” to Eggers and his mother which said he “was hoping to visit soon.” As it turned out, McSweeney was a mental patient and sent the letters from an institution.

None of this was know to Eggers in 1998, when he got the idea to use the name for his magazine. It simply seemed appropriate: “It made sense on many levels. I was able to honor my Irish side of the family and also allude to this mysterious man and the sense of possibility and even wonder he’d brought to our suburban home.”

In 2000, Eggers learned the real story of Timothy McSweeney, who had studied and later taught at Rutgers University before suffereing from seious bouts of alcoholism and mental illness and, eventually, being instiutionalized. According to Eggers “Knowing that the journal bore the name of a real person who had endured years of struggle threw melancholy shadows over the enterprise. But the McSweeneys insisted that the use of the name was acceptable, even appropriate, given Timothy’s background as an artist and search for connection and meaning through the written word. Since 2000 we’ve implicitly dedicated all issues to the real Timothy.”

Well, at long last the war between Amazon and Macmillan is kind of sorta for the most part just about pretty much over. While some sort of agreement seems to have been reached, once again in the low visibility of the weeken hours (and as per MobyLives‘ Friday night report). Stiil, as is their wont, Amazon can’t seem to keep from — there’s no other word for it, really — fucking with Macmillan. For example, while all the buy buttons have been replaced for Hilary Mantel’s Booker-winning Wolf Hall, the print version of the book is being discounted an extraordinary 50%, and the ebook version is for sale at $9.99 … whereas, wasn’t this whole thing basically a hissy fit about the difference between $9.99 and $14.99? (Of all the angry ridicule circulating the web attempting to describe Amazon’s behavior, a post from Quill & Quire put it best: “It’s not difficult to imagine Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos fluttering his fingertips together and ordering Smithers to remove the buy buttons on book pages that don’t please him.”)

But the Wall Street Journal’s Jeffrey A. Trachtenberg and Geoffrey A. Fowler say it’s so, and so it must be true. As per their report, “the two sides have settled their differences and books by Macmillan authors went back on sale on Amazon’s Web site over the weekend…. Specific terms of the Macmillan agreement couldn’t be learned. However, they are expected to include higher prices for e-books, mirroring those offered by Apple on its coming iPad device.”

What’s more, “The pact between Amazon and Macmillan will likely serve as a template for other publishers during their coming discussions with Amazon. Last Thursday, Lagardère SCA’s Hachette Book Group sent a letter to book agents stating that it is adopting the Apple e-book pricing model for the sale of its e-titles. Others publishers, large and small, are expected to follow.”

So who won? Well, Apple, of course. As the WSJ report astutely observes, “By agreeing to accept a new pricing model, Amazon has publicly acknowledged the sudden emergence of a rival that may not only threaten its highly popular Kindle franchise but also its total domination of e-books.” And then there’s the coming Google ebook store …. In short, “The settlement sets the stage for what will almost certainly be a transformative year in publishing ….” And the implications loom large not just in the U.S., as indicated by this report from The Bookseller, which notes thar one “senior UK publishing executive” says the eight-day war was a “very significant week and genuinely a very good week for book publishers, authors and readers.”

At the end of it all, both parties remained true to form, giving perhaps some notion of how Amazon is going to confront change: the WSJ report says Macmillan CEO John Sargent issued a classy statement saying he was “delighted to be back in business with Amazon.”

Jeff Bezos, meanwhile, who hasn’t said a word to explain his company’s behavior since the fracas started, maintained his petulant silence: Amazon refused to comment.

Germany’s constitution has made it illegal to disseminate Nazi propaganda since the end of World War II, but now it looks as if the book that sold so well it made author Adolf Hitler a multi-millionaire, Mein Kamf, is head back to print in just a few years.

As a Daily Telegraph report by Allan Hall explains, “the copyright, held by the state of Bavaria where the Nazi movement began life in the 1920s, expires in 2015, 70 years after the death of its author in his Berlin bunker.”

Hall does not explain why the copyright running out suddenly makes it legal to publish the book, but he does go on to report that “the Munich-based Institute of Contemporary History (IfZ) pledged to publish an ‘annotated version’ with historical notes that it hopes will see the book used in schools and colleges.” And ifZ spokesperson tells the paper, “we think our version, with sensible notes and comments pointing out the falsity of much of what he wrote, will be far better than neo-Nazis putting out their own versions.”

What’s more, German Jewish leaders are supporting the publication. Hall runs an unattributed quote say “they” — presumably Jewish leaders –believe it “would prevent neo-Nazi from profiteering from Mein Kampf. while an aggressive and enlightening engagement with the book would doubtless remove many of its false, persisting myths.”

Chicago Public Library/Police Station

As a report from the Chicago Sun Times puts it, “A police station in a library? Yes.”

In a pilot program, “residents of the Southwest Side’s Clearing neighborhood will now be able to go to the library to fill out police reports,” according to the Sun Times. “The Chicago Police Department has added a satellite office to the Chicago Public Library’s Clearing Branch at 6423 W. 63rd Pl.”

In what used to the be library’s computer lab, which has been moved to another area of the library, residents can file reports, talk to officers about community policing concerns and report on any criminal activity in their neighborhood. Also, they can discuss the latest reading group pick, the newest bestseller or story hour with the officers.

Only police officers will be housed there, assured the Sun Times. No actual criminals. Library spokeswoman Ruth Lednicer tells the newspaper that “the satellite office will be helpful because the area is divided by railroad tracks, and some residents may find it easier to get to the library than to the Chicago Lawn District’s headquarters at 63rd and Homan.”

“It’s also a less-intimidating atmosphere,” she pointed out. Though folks with really overdue books might want to go to another branch….

The first iPad?

We missed this post from futureofthebook.com last week showcasing a Columbian Press from 1843 — the early nineteenth century iPad.

According to futureofthebook (devoted to the “preservation and persistence of the  changing book”), the printing press, recently donated to the Center for the Book at the University of Iowa “represents an early American contribution to world-wide printing technology….

This innovative U.S. export product, introduced in the early 19th century, was destined to capture a huge market in England. That product success occurred at a time of outright war between the two countries and the ornate motifs of U.S. ascendance could hardly have been more distasteful to the English. But the allure of new technology was just irresistible.

The introduction of Apple tablet pad replays many of these themes. At a time of economic adversity an innovative media technology again attempts to succeed wildly.”

Fututerofthebook goes on to contrast the i-pad with “dedicated hand-held readers” (like the Kindle) and notes their popularity among “genre avid readers, children, seniors, and academics.”
Of course, “the most dedicated hand-held reader is the print book.”