Publishers, agents, and authors such as J.K. Rowling, Nick Hornby, John Grisham, Salman Rusdie, Ian McEwan, Aravind Adiga and Ken Follett were alarmed yesterday to learn that the American website Scribd has been posting entire copies of their books for free dowload. As Dan Sabbagh reports in a story for The Times of London, the site calls itself “the most popular literary site in the world” and “attracts 55 million visitors a month, many drawn by the chance to download versions of books by popular authors that have been uploaded on to the website without the consent of the writer or publisher.” And indeed, Sabbagh reports finding books by all of the above named authors, such as Rowling’s Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

A Guardian report by Alison Flood adds that “Internet users can not only read free copies of The Tales of Beedle the Bard, The White Tiger and World Without End at Scribd.com, but also download the text onto their computers to edit as they see fit.”

According to The Times, “Scribd was set up by Trip Adler and Jared Friedman, Harvard students in their early twenties, and in two years has become the ‘YouTube for books’, helped by $12 million (£8.4 million) of financing. It makes money from advertising but pays no royalties to authors.” A spokesperson says the company operates on a “notice and takedown system,” which means it will take down books … if they’re asked. “This makes the site compliant with the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act, which means that the site is not held liable for actions of its users of which it is not aware.”

But many in the publishing community say this is not enough. “99% of writers aren’t aware it’s going on,” bestselling science fcition author Christopher Priest tells The Guardian. Priest says he discovered a copy of one of his books, The Affirmation, on the site and demanded it be taken down. “Scribd.com were very courteous and immediately took it down, but since then it’s gone up again,” he says. “It’s very annoying … I’m a writer and I write for a living, I don’t want to have to do this.” Meanwhile, J. K. Rowling’s lawyer Neil Blair says he’s looking into “actioning” against Scribd, Follet’s publisher Macmillan is “looking into this,” and Aravind Adiga’s publisher, Toby Mundy at Atlantic Books, says that “Adiga’s publishers around the world would be taking action.” “We’re in the copyright business,” Mundy tells The Guardian. “We can’t be complacent about this.”

Many, in fact, echo what literary agent Peter Cox tells The Times: “These people are pirates. We don’t have to give in to this. We can’t afford to make the same mistakes the music industry did.”

Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded its ratings outlook on German media giant Bertelsmann AG, the parent company of the world’s largest publisher, Random House. As a Wall Street Journal report by Mike Barris details, ” Moody’s outlook change comes two days after Bertelsmann said net profit dropped 34% in 2008, hit by write-downs and restructuring charges.”

Despite the company’s efforts at trimming debt — visible to all in the New York publishing community, in addition too dumping its 50% stake in the Sony BMG Music Entertainment — Moody’s says it could be in for an even rockier road this year than last, although it did say Bertelsmann has “adequate” liquidity for now. The company is being particularly battered by “the advertising-market slump and waning consumer spending.”

Hearings were held recently in Australia regarding limitations on book imports. “After hearing 270 submissions on whether to lift import restrictions on the book industry — an overwhelming majority of them opposing an open market — the Productivity Commission will issue a compromise discussion paper that leaves the status quo essentially intact,” reports the Sydney Morning Herald.

The main advocates for lifting the restrictions were retailers, while publishers and authors called for keeping the protections in place. Currently the commission has tried to reach a compromise. It has “recommended that the restrictions should stay in place, but then come off after a book has been in print for 12 months.”

The Morning Herald quotes deputy chairman, Mike Woods, as saying: “The changes will preserve some certainty for local publishers to market new books. It will help them to continue to promote the established authors and seek out new Australian talent and invest in their development. But the changes will also allow booksellers to seek out and import cheaper versions of ‘back list’ novels, texts and other books, to the benefit of book buyers.”

And for those who weren’t satisfied with the commission’s results, they have promised to review them again in five years.

The Literaturhaus, one of Berlin's more upscale literary hangouts

“A New York Times report notes that “the word has been out for more than a little while about the cavernous spaces available in Berlin for a seemingly ceremonial fee — even by the standards of crisis-chastened New York and London … that means ultracheap nooks for the aspiring authors who need room only for a laptop (or, in advanced cases of the writing bug, an antique typewriter) and a precarious stack of books.”

What’s more, says the Times‘ Nicholas Kulish, “The teeming masses of authors are supported by a superstructure of foundations and grants and ubiquitous antiquariat (used-book stores) seemingly on every corner, not to mention the noble cultural villas, like the Literarisches Colloquium Berlin and the American Academy in Berlin, both on the same lovely lake — the Wannsee — near where the poet Heinrich von Kleist killed himself in 1811 after first shooting the incurably ill Henriette Vogel.”

While there’s even worse history than that in the air there, of course, Kulish notes there’s no attempt to hide it. “It is that history as much or more than the economics that appeals to writers,” he notes. German novelist Thomas Pletzinger tells him,  “Berlin openly tells stories and heavily breathes history on every street corner.”

Is Amazon.co.uk targeting Britain’s indie publishers with an offer they have little choice but to accept? That’s what the trade group the Independent Publisher’s Guild is saying after a Friday meeting with Amazon in which the American internet retail giant refused to negotiate a new demand for greater discounts from the indies. As originally reported by Catherine Neilan for The Bookseller, Amazon was demanding a greater discount from publishers of another 2%, in return for which it would offer publishers an “early payment” of 15 days. Publishers who refused, reported Neilan, “will see their payments made on Amazon’s ’standard terms’—effectively 60 days. This means a publisher who sells a book through Amazon in April would not be paid until the end of June. Under the revised terms, a publisher would be paid on 15th May—a full 45 days earlier.”

More simply put, publishers either accept a discount they can’t really afford (Amazon already gets higher discounts than all other retailers) and that gives Amazon an advantage over other retailers friendlier to independent publishers (such as independent bookstores); or they wait a month longer for Amazon to pay them. That permits Amazon to behave like a bank and have more time to earn income off that money belong to the publishers, while wreaking havoc “on the most cash-flow vulnerable publishers,” as IPG director Bridget Shine complained.

In a new Bookseller report on Friday’s meeting between IPG and Amazon, Neilan reports that IPG also complained that Amazon gave little publishers extremely short notice of its demands: “Publishers were told by email that they had until 1st April to pick one of the options available to them.”

The complaints seem to be falling on deaf ears, however. At Friday’s meeting, according to Neilan, Amazon’s “director of books” Gordon Willoughby told IPG reps that the demans were part of “a global programme” and that Amazon “would not be able to alter the terms.”

“If recent reports are to be believed,” observes Sam Jordison, “people have started seeing parallels between our current economic meltdown and the world collapse outlined in the 1200 pages of Ayn Rand’s libertarian classic Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s fans proclaim her a prophet — the hero whose teachings will rid us of recession.”

So, as Jordison details in a post for the Guardian’s book blog, he decided to read the book. “I hated the thing, but I couldn’t put it down.” he says. “It was worth the effort too, because the conclusion is one of the funniest things I’ve read.”

Still, says Jordison, “Such laughs, however, come bitterly, given how seriously so many take this stuff … The cruel irony is that the true absurdity lies in Rand’s insistence on selfishness, the need to create wealth at the expense of all else and the prohibition on sharing it — as recent events have shown.”

Here, Mike Wallace talks to Rand in a 1959 interview.

A little rusty on your geography? Well, a new geography textbook from Brazil’s Ministry of Education will make you feel better. According to an Associated Press report by Bradley Brooks, maps in this textbook “distributed by the education ministry in Brazil’s most populous state botches the location of most of Brazil’s neighbors. Paraguay is switched with Uruguay, and a second ‘new’ Paraguay is shown with a coastline at the southern tip of Brazil.”

The good news is, “Bolivia is fortunate enough to appear on the map, but the book misses its border with Paraguay — the Paraguay that sits where Uruguay should be, that is.”

The bad news is, the publisher, Vanzolini Foundation, printed 500,000 copies of these babies — which it will now have to eat, and replace with a new printing of the book, hopefully with more accurate maps.

Rachel Ray

Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain has never hidden his feelings about the indefatigable cookbook author, Food Network personality, and Dunkin’ Donuts spokesperson Rachael Ray. She’s “evil,” he’s said, and her show is “vomit-inducing.” But then ….

“I read something really disturbing while leafing through a magazine in my most recent airport,” Bourdain relates on his Facebook page. “Rachael Ray, it appears, when booking acts for her South By Southwest indie rock-meets-Sloppy Joes fest, invited the New York Dolls to perform. THE NEW YORK DOLLS!!” Bourdain, it seems, likes the New York Dolls. (He says they were “one of the greatest, most important, criminally neglected, wildly influential bands in the history of well … the freakin’ UNIVERSE!!”)

As this New York Daily News gossip item notes, Bourdain went on to say that this, “following hot on the heels of Rachael saying nice things about me on ‘Nightline’ [she told interviewer Cynthia McFadden that she “absolutely loves” Bourdain and has “an enormous amount of respect” for him] has caused me no small amount of confusion, panic and misery. I don’t know whether to go out and shoot a puppy, or send Rachael a fruit basket. It just does me no good at all to think of Rachael as a Dolls fan. It’s really only a matter of time now until my daughter looks up from her grilled cheese and says ‘Yummo!!’”

Anthony Bourdain

Ray promptly outflanked Bourdain and sent him a fruit basket and a note asking him not to kill any puppies.

Shortly thereafter, in an interview with Metromix Los Angeles, Bourdain seems to be weakening: “I could see myself getting drunk with Rachael Ray,” he says. “By all accounts, she’s pretty nice. My only problem with Rachael is the cooking part. Given she stopped cooking, I think we’d happily have shots of tequila together.”

Now it can be told: Thirty years after the fact, Jerry Casale of Devo explains that one of the band’s greatest songs, “Whip It,” came from his reading. “I had these ‘Whip It’ lyrics from my attempt at doing a Thomas Pynchon parody,” he explains in an interview with Flavorwire. The song was also “a parody of the whole Horatio Alger ‘You’re number one, there’s nobody else like you, you can do it’ thing.”