Two Percent

At FutureBook, Jakob Harden discusses the state of Danish publishing in the light of the rise of the e-book, and notes that so far

With less than a 2 % market share, e-books are still to come in Denmark.

Keeping translations alive

The following is mainly related to translations of poetry, though some of it may also be applicable to certain kinds of translated fiction. For some time now – at least during the past decade – I’ve become aware that trying to sell poetry in the form of printed books is increasingly an uphill struggle, and some alternative means of reaching a readership may need to be found.

The struggle has always has been there – for example, when I worked at the UK’s Anvil Press Poetry during the 1980s the firm produced no more than 12-14 titles a year,approcimately half of which were translations, and the notion of making a profit was out of the question. Like Bloodaxe, Carcanet and several other specialist publishers, Anvil survived mainly because of the Arts Council grant it received each year, which accounted for most of its income. In the second part of the 1980s and into the 90s, Bloodaxe Books, under its committed director Neil Astley, took a more aggressive approach to poetry publishing, endeavouring to embrace a wider audience and reach out to readers who didn’t normally read poetry at all. This project had some success – although still heavily AC-funded, Bloodaxe did manage to operate as a normal business, comparable to mainstream London publishers of fiction. Bloodaxe’s poetry translation list was (and still is) impressive, including a wide range of titles and poets. But the new vigour didn’t last – by the 2000s, one was again uneasily aware that the Bloodaxe operation was under something of a strain, and in the early part of the decade many Bloodaxe authors and translators were informed that the unsold copies of their back titles would either be sold to them at a discount, or pulped.

The situation with other poetry publishers was not much better, or even worse. Carcanet, which in addition to original poetry and translations also published fiction, seems to have got by on the strength of its fiction list. The smaller houses like Arc and Dedalus were also in trouble, and in 2008 Dedalus had its Arts Council funding cut drastically. After a long campaign, that funding was restored in July last year, but in the present economic climate the future still remains uncertain. Book publishing is currently undergoing a crisis, and because of their minority appeal published poetry and poetry translation are the the first to be seriously affected.

So what’s to be done? My own feeling is that with the increasing power and presence of the Internet, poetry translators, poetry editors and poets should start to take matters into their own hands. Online and ebook publishing may not be to everyone’s taste – I know that my colleague Eric Dickens heartily dislikes it – but at least it’s a way of sending the work out into the world, and can even be a commercially viable method of sale and distribution. I’ve already started to scan and put online the contents of some of my older Bloodaxe titles – the copyright in those translations rests with me, and the volumes in which they appeared are now of out of print.

Nordic Voices in Print is my first attempt in this direction – it’s only a basic blog, and is devoted exclusively to the reprinting of my translations of Nordic literature and poetry, but in time I hope to develop the project further and extend it into the area of ebook publishing. Above all I think it’s important to avoid the ghettoization of translated literature that’s evident in certain US-based publishing concerns (they shall be nameless) which enjoy a high profile in the translation world at present. While they may once have been inspired by selfless motives, I believe that those publishers are really taking advantage of the ever-growing marginalization of translated work. Poets and translators beware.

Google and the DOJ

The U.S. Justice Department has criticized the Google Book Settlement, saying that the proposals still present copyright and antitrust issues. In particular, it is concerned that the settlement in its current form forces authors

to "opt out" of having their books scanned and digitised, rather than opting in, which is the usual assumption for copyright law.  (Telegraph)

ePub in Sweden

The Swedish print-on-demand company Publit has set itself the task of making all Swedish out-of-print books available as PoD (print on demand) titles. The ePub blog has a post about a visit to Stockholm by one of their members. Excerpt:

During my time in Sweden we discussed the many different areas of the eBook world, including DRM (of course), the processes involved in going from scanned document (TIFF/PDF/DOC) to an eBook Master format and onto ePub creation itself.

Now, the people at Publit are a group of very talented individuals with plenty of technical knowledge, yet there were aspects of ePub which has left them somewhat perplexed. There were two main points which I found interesting and have heard before around the web so I thought I would share them here.

The electronic antiquariat

An increasing number of out-of-copyright editions of Nordic classics are now being scanned from the collections of U.S. university libraries and uploaded to the Internet Archive. Recently I've been looking at the 1901 edition of Arvid Mörne's Nya sånger and the 1903 edition of Ny Tid, both from Harvard University Library. I also found it interesting to finally read Mikael Lybeck's plays about Finnish fortune-seekers and European industrial magnates in pre-revolutionary St Petersburg, Dynastien Peterberg (The Peterberg Dynasty) and Den röde André (Red André). But if one looks further, both in the Archive and in Project Runeberg, there is now a very large amount of similar scanned material by Nordic authors available online, ranging from the works of Strindberg and Ibsen to much less well known names.

Serial readers

Over at Books from Finland, Teemu Manninen talks to science fiction author Michael Stackpole about publishing innovations:

Of course, Stackpole doesn’t take the problem of quality control into account. After all, the ‘job’ of most publishers is not just to deliver content but to find the best writing out there; good publishers are also reliable critics. But he does intuit, and I believe correctly, that digital publishing is already having an impact on the nature of what we read. He cites the example of the ‘commuter market’: people who read one or two chapters on their way to work or home. This kind of reading, Stackpole surmises, could point the way to a return to 19th-century publishing models, such as serial fiction (think of Dickens, whose fame and wealth was based on serialised novels which appeared in literary magazines).

Uppslagsverket Finland on the Web

The whole of the extensive 5-volume Finland-Swedish encyclopedia and reference work Uppslagsverket Finland is now available on the Web. Access is free of charge.

The official URL appears to be http://www.uvf.fi/, but this translates to Uppslag.kaapeli.fi/bin/view/Uppslagsverket/WebHome

Access was a bit patchy today, but hopefully these are just teething troubles. Hufvudstadsbladet has a feature on the project.

E-books and translation

Over at Three Percent, Chad Post is publishing in four parts the presentation on e-books and literary translation he will deliver at next week's Icelandic Literary Festival in Reykjavik. The first part can be read here, and the subsequent installments are appearing on a day-to-day basis.

The skills gap

Something that translators might want to bear in mind when dealing with publishers nowadays: according to a new report by the U.K.'s Skillset council, the move to digitization in the publishing industry has "exposed existing skills gaps", some of which the report calls "critical". The Bookseller quotes Random House CEO and chairman Dame Gail Rebuck as saying:

"There are those who know the [publishing] business really well — often those who are more experienced, middle-management types — who are very uncomfortable with the wholly changing digital landscape.”

Kierkegaard resources on the Web

Two websites give extensive access to works by Kierkegaard and secondary literature about him. SKS.DK has a large collection of the printed writings in Danish, including all of the major classics such as Enten Eller, Begrebet Angest and Opbyggelige Taler, while Kierkegaard Resources World Wide, though in need of updating (the site was established back in 2004 by Dr. Julia Watkin of the Howard and Edward Hong Kierkegaard Library at St. Olaf's College, Minnesota), has links to many monographs, research papers and other documents, including keys to the philosopher's Gothic handwriting, and to his abbreviations (pdf) and spelling (pdf).

Freely accessible online English translations of Kierkegaard are rather harder to find, though the Internet Archive has a copy of the Alexander Dru translation of the Journals, and also of L.M. Hollander's translation of several works, including Fear and Trembling, Preparation for a Christian Life and The Present Moment.

The English translation of Kierkegaard still seems to be something of a controversial area, and it may be for this reason that most of the out-of-copyright translations still apparently remain undigitized in Project Gutenberg and other online libraries. It would be interesting to know more about this, if anyone has details.

See also in this blog: Herder and Hegel

E-books in Scandinavia - 3

In its blog, Publit, the Swedish print-on-demand publisher we mentioned in an earlier post, refers to an interesting survey of e-book use among unversity students that was carried out recently by the UK's JISC (Join Information Systems Committee). Although the findings relate to e-books in the academic world, they may have some relevance to the field of electronic publishing in general. Print sales, the survey suggests,

indicated that making course text e-books freely available through the library is not a threat to print sales revenue. Many of the print versions of the e-books made available through the Observatory project actually increased their sales against what was expected. So just as the librarians say, students are using e-books in addition to the print they have bought or borrowed; they co-exist.

Google Books antitrust probe to go ahead

Google's $125,000,000 book-scanning settlement is to be investigated by U.S. antitrust legislators, according to Bloomberg. The Register reports that

deputy attorney general William F. Cavanaugh sent a letter to the federal judge overseeing the proposed settlement, saying that the deal may run afoul of US antitrust laws. "The United States has reviewed public comments expressing concern that aspects of the settlement agreement may violate the Sherman Act," Cavanaugh wrote.

At the centre of the probe will be the issue of the so-called "orphan works" - books whose rights are controlled by authors and publishers who have ceased to exist or cannot otherwise be located.

E-books in Scandinavia - 2

News from Sweden that print-on-demand publisher Publit is to develop a software-based e-book reader specifically for the Swedish book market. E-books have been slow to gain acceptance in Scandinavia, even though they have been discussed for ten years now, and Publit hopes to change this.

See also: E-books in Scandinavia

Pirates of the new EU

One of the large number of "fringe" political groupings that scored a success in Sunday's Euro-elections was Sweden's Pirate Party, which secured 7.1% of the Swedish vote.

In the Aftonbladet newspaper, author Jan Guillou attacked his colleague Lars Gustafsson, saying that "the author, or indeed anyone who is active in cultural life, who votes for the Pirate Party is the sheep who votes for the wolf."

There are more reflections on the topic here.

Google to sell ebooks

The New York Times reports that Google is to introduce new technology that will make it possible for publishers to sell digital versions of their newest books direct to consumers, thus effectively bypassing Amazon. According to the report, the ebooks will be available in several formats, and will not be targeted specifically at the Kindle device. One major factor in the move is pricing - under the Google scheme, publishers will be allowed to set their own prices, something that does not happen presently with Amazon's Kindle-based ebook marketing.

The Unbook

The new Books from Finland WordPress-powered magazine/blog/website continues to grow and expand. In the latest batch of posts, features and articles, Finnish poet and literary critic Teemu Manninen explores the world of print-on-demand (POD) publishing, which makes it possible for publishers and authors alike to keep their books in print independently of the vicissitudes of the book market. Indeed, using this new Web-based service, authors can bypass publishers altogether if they want to.

Getting one's own book out without the help of a commercial publisher used to be known as "vanity publishing", and was generally frowned on by authors. Nowadays, however,the "papernet" and "podism" have opened up new horizons -- minority genres like poetry can now find a way to reach readers without the constraints imposed by sales figures and publishers' desire to create a brand or image. And the trend has put new life into the old-fashioned "paper book", which many had thought might be dying.

Above all, POD is potentially interactive. Manninen describes the recent phenomenon of the "unbook":

The concept was invented by Jay Cross, an internet consultant known for his work on informal learning and systems thinking, and Dave Gray, the founder and chairman of XPLANE, a ‘visual thinking company’, although both imply that they are only describing practices which already exist.

Whereas a traditional book is published in editions whenever it gets revised (or it has sold out), an unbook is released in versions (1.0, 1.13, 2.0 etc) which are never finished but always open to feedback from readers. Both Cross and Gray have written books by bringing the readers along into the process of editing their content even before publication. As Gray says, ‘the dialogue is critically important to the development of the ideas, and now that I have tried this approach I can’t imagine doing a book any other way.’

Read it all.

Google Book Settlement Website

It may be of interest to point out that the Google Book Settlement website has detailed information about the settlement agreement, and also online and downloadable claim forms. N.B. the UK's ALCS (Authors' Licensing and Collecting Society) has published a warning about third-party phishing operations that may target users of the site.

From the FAQ:

I am not a United States citizen, or I live outside of the United States. Am I included in this Settlement?

Yes, most likely you are. If you are a citizen of another country or live in another country, you are likely to own a U.S. copyright interest if:

Your Book was published in the United States;
Your Book was not published in the United States, but your country has copyright relations with the United States because it is a member of the Berne Convention; or
Your country had copyright relations with the United States at the time of the Book’s publication.

You should assume that you own a U.S. copyright interest in your Book, unless you are certain that your Book was published in, and that you reside and are located in, one of the few countries that have not had or do not now have copyright relations with the United States. The Copyright Office has published a list of countries with which the United States has copyright relations, available at www.copyright.gov/circs/circ38a.pdf. If you have further questions about whether you own a U.S. copyright interest in your Book or Insert, you can contact Class Counsel, who are the attorneys representing the Settlement Class. Their names and contact information are on the Notice. You may also seek advice from an attorney or a rights organization in your country.

P.S. The Irish Times has quite an interesting article on the whole issue here.

Google Book Settlement - the saga continues

According to Dagens Nyheter journalist Juan Flores, who seems to be the man on the case for that particular Swedish daily, Bonnier has become the first large publishing house in Sweden to dispute the Google arrangement. Bonnier's company lawyer, Dag Wetterberg, will be quite busy right now, as Google has evidently scanned some 60,000 titles by Bonnier authors, and in 6,000 of these cases the whole book has been scanned. Bonnier is being offered a lump sum of a million Swedish kronor (i.e. about €100,000, slightly less in sterling) for this monumental control of titles, which Bonnier thinks is far too little money for far too much long-term power.

It would seem to outsiders like me that this is becoming a rather hubristic exercise on the part of Google. It also looks as if Google has been scanning thousands, maybe millions of books, if we extrapolate from the Bonnier case, on the sneak, hoping that they will be able to do something with these scans that will afford Google a profit. According to the Bonnier lawyer, Google seem to have been scanning away at U.S. universities that have Swedish departments (well, no problem in the UK, there aren't many...), and this could mean that every Swedish book bought by these universities before the beginning of 2009 can end up on a Google data base.

The Bonnier lawyer does not appear to be a Luddite, merely wondering who is going to profit from all this. Obviously, it is a great boon for books to be scanned, should the originals be destroyed by accident or war. But I hope that European publishing houses will wake up to what is going on, before they find out that, by doing nothing, they have signed up to wholesale control of their publications by Google.

The other large Swedish publishing house, Norstedts, has not yet come to a decision as to how to tackle this issue.

I do get the feeling that this whole issue has been handled badly by the various players, leading to a situation where publishing houses worldwide are suddenly finding themselves in an opt-out position, never an enviable one to be in.

Google Books and the EU

Dagens Nyheter's Juan Flores has taken up the question of the Google book digitization project, reporting that Germany intends to raise the matter at next week's meeting of EU ministers of culture. Attitudes among EU members differ, though. As Eric pointed out in the comments:

"the German publishers' association was critical of Google; the Swedish publishers' association sat on the fence, leaving it to individuals to decide for themselves."

See also in this blog: Orphans and Foundlings

Orphans and Foundlings

News from Washington, D.C. that the U.S. Justice Department is looking into the Google books settlement with a view to determining details of Google's newly acquired right to digitize entire libraries. One important emerging problem is the potential antitrust issues that may arise from the company's ability to commercialize content on an exclusive basis. Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive -- another organization that is building a large online digital book collection -- has expressed the hope that U.S. District Judge Denny Chin will reject the settlement as it presently stands on the grounds that Google's ability to digitize the so-called "orphan books" (books or materials for which the copyright owner can't be found, but which are none the less covered by U.S. copyright law) gives it a free pass for infringement.

See also in this blog: Going Google
The Digibooks Row