One Long, One Short, One Longish, One Bizarre
Image from Cal Newport’s blog.
I was saddened to learn earlier today that Anders Ericsson, creator of deliberate practice theory, recently passed away. Longtime readers of mine know that his work greatly influenced me. I never met Anders in person, but we shared a sporadic correspondence that I cherished. I thought it appropriate to offer a brief personal tribute to his powerful ideas.
Anders tackled the fundamental question of how experts get really good at what they do. The framework he proposed, which clarified a lot of confusion in the field at the time, introduced these two big ideas (among others):
Read the entire blog post here.
#PublishingPaidMe and a Day of Action Reveal an Industry Reckoning.
Authors and book publishing employees are speaking out against the homogeneity of their industry and how much writers of color are paid, issues that are gaining urgency as protests against systemic racism continue around the U.S.
Hand-wringing over diversity is nothing new in publishing — its work force is more than three-quarters white, according to a survey released earlier this year by the children’s book publisher Lee & Low Books — but over the weekend, conversations that have been occurring for years took a turn into public protest.
Using a hashtag, #PublishingPaidMe, that quickly began trending on Twitter, authors shared their advances, which is the amount of money they receive for their books before any royalties, typically based on copies sold, start coming in. The young adult author L.L. McKinney, who is black, started the hashtag on Saturday, hoping to highlight the pay inequality between black and nonblack writers.
“These are conversations black authors have been having with each other and trying to get the industry engaged on for a long time,” she said. While she wasn’t surprised by the disparities that were revealed, she was hurt, she said, by “how deep it went.”
Jesmyn Ward, a critically acclaimed novelist, said on Twitter that she “fought and fought” for her first $100,000 advance, even after her book “Salvage the Bones,” for which she said she received around $20,000, won a National Book Award in 2011. After switching publishers, she was able to negotiate a higher advance for “Sing, Unburied, Sing” — for which she won a second National Book Award, in 2017 — but, she said, “it was still barely equal to some of my writer friends’ debut novel advances.”
Read the entire article here.
Publishers Sue the Internet Library for Scanning Books and Doing the Unthinkable. Lending them. :)
On June 1, four major US commercial publishers sued the Internet Archive for “willful mass infringement” of copyrights by scanning books and distributing copies on the OpenLibrary.org and Archive.org websites, without any permission from, or payment to, the publishers or authors of the works included in those books.
The lawsuit was filed in Federal court in New York City by Penguin Random House, Hachette Book Group, John Wiley & Sons, and HarperCollins Publishers.
The complaint notes that these four publishers are all members of the Association of American Publishers (AAP). AAP was one of 40 signatories, including the NWU, of a joint Appeal from the Victims of Controlled Digital Lending issued in 2019. Two of the four publishers bringing the lawsuit are US subsidiaries of European parent companies (Hachette Livre, which is part of the Lagardère Publishing group, and Bertelsmann) that are affiliated with the Federation of European Publishers (FEP), which also co-signed the Appeal.
The court complaint, however, was brought only by the four named publishers, and not as a class action. At least as originally filed, neither AAP, FEP, nor any authors or organizations of authors are parties to the lawsuit. The NWU had no advance knowledge whatsoever regarding this lawsuit.
The complaint addresses the book-scanning projects the Internet Archive self-describes as Controlled Digital Lending and the National Emergency Library, but not some of the Internet Archive’s other activities such as “One Web Page for Every Page of Every Book“.
This is the first challenge to the Internet Archive’s book-scanning in US court. But the Internet Archive is already facing lawsuits in other countries where the law creates fewer and narrower exceptions to copyright than in the US. Last year, the German publisher S. Fischer Verlage sued the Internet Archive in German court. The Internet Archive tried to argue that scanning books published in Germany, and distributing copies online to readers in Germany, was not subject to German law. That argument was rejected (text of ruling in German) by the German court. So far as we have heard, that case is continuing in Germany in parallel with the new lawsuit in the US.
Read the entire thing here.
PS: Want to become an affiliate? You, too, can scrounge for pennies online! :)
Maybe go visit a bookstore? :)