Thinking about cover design

An interesting post over at Reading the Past gives you an opportunity to sharpen your eye for cover design. Take a look.

Copy-protected books

Suppose you’ve published a book—or perhaps several books—that are of particular use in a certain niche that has an ongoing demand. To take the example that was presented yesterday on a publishing list, your customers might be doctors in a specialty who provide your books to their new patients. And there are always new patients, so there is a steady demand for your books.

Now suppose—continuing with yesterday’s example—that you send out a promotional mailing to your customers advising them that they can stock up on your books at a substantial discount for a limited time. Easy decision for your customer, right? The orders should roll right in.

But suppose the orders don’t roll in. You investigate a bit and hear from customers who say, yes, they love your books and they hand out copies—photocopies, that is—of certain chapters to their patients all the time.

Okay, doctors are well enough educated that they should know such copying is illegal. But apparently a lot of people don’t have any sense of guilt or shame about stealing from you. And you don’t want to engender hard feelings in your customer base by siccing your lawyers on the offenders. Not to mention that it would be hard to discover who all of them are.

Well, I had an idea this morning. Yes, that happens occasionally.

Try scanning a $100 bill—okay, a $20 bill—and opening the image in Photoshop. In theory you won’t be able to. (Yes, a sufficiently devious criminal or the government of North Korea can do so, but this post is about people who see themselves as law-abiding citizens and who just have a blind spot about copying books. Locks are only intended to keep honest people out, as my mother used to say.) The reason is that the Secret Service, the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, scanner manufacturers, and software vendors got together and implemented a technology that allows systems to recognize currency automatically.

I think a derivative of this technology can be designed to prevent wholesale copying of book pages on typical office copiers and scanners. Apply the appropriate digital signature to your pages in Acrobat if you choose to do so; print the book, either offset or digitally; and when a secretary puts the book on the copier and presses Start, blank sheets come out. The concept is proven; all that’s required is development.

Sure, it would take two or three years to develop the technology and another six to ten years to deploy it to offices everywhere as copiers cycle out of service. But why not start now? Publishers unite! You have nothing to lose but your shirts.

And remember you read it here first.

Guest post: The Whole Dirty Story

Twenty years ago, fellow book designer Steve Tiano declared, “I am not a novelist” and never again intentionally wrote a line of fiction. I invited him to write a guest post, and here it is.

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When I was thirteen years old I wrote a short, short story—barely a thousand words about mortality and Coney Island in winter. For some reason I submitted it to a magazine my mother read. The form rejection slip contained a handwritten message that said, “This is very well-written, but there is not enough of it.”

Over the next twenty-two years I reworked that story a number of times. It grew to be part of the core of my first novel, for which I received enough publishers’ rejection slips to wallpaper a small room. In 1976, I drove my first cross-country trip with a buddy of mine. During the trip I kept a journal, which became the basis for my second, bad, and unpublishable novel.

I started a third at some point. This one I alternately described to myself as “a story about ambivalent people behaving ambivalently toward other ambivalent people” and “an ontological detective story; sort of a missing person story, where the missing person is God.”

I carted these manuscripts with me when I moved out of my parents’ and in with a woman I met while working as a fortuneteller. I think I read myself into her cards and life. When I moved back to my parents’ after a short stay and a break-up. I, of course, took the manuscripts. Three years later, I reconciled with that woman, a music teacher fiver years older than I. Pretty heady stuff for me when I was 29. When, after a little over three years, we split up again, I placed the now-finished manuscripts in the trunk of my new car and left them there.

In November of 1988, just about twenty years ago today, I bought another new car, a Nissan Pulsar. It was sporty, effectively a two-seater, with a T-top and a lawnmowerlike engine. When I went about dumping the stuff in the old car’s trunk, including the manuscripts, I decided to retire my old Smith Corona portable electric typewriter, as I had gotten my first computer three years before but had not used it for any of the novels.

I also threw the manuscripts in the trash. And I never looked back until now.

The last few days I’ve had the same song playing in my head, over and over: “Dreamline,” by Rush. Classic.

I was reminded of the new car and the manuscripts this morning, reading the blog of a literary agent. Although I was done wandering the country by car in 1988, it was only today I wondered what my words might have been worth if a real editor had gotten a look.

* * *

Three months after throwing out the manuscripts, on St. Patrick’s Day of 1989, I learned that my immortality had expired. Out at lunch with pretty much the entire local court system—my day job—I drank a half dozen rusty nails (scotch, Drambuie, and ice) in less than two hours. Returning to my office, I became fairly sick and one of my many younger sisters came to pick me up in her new car, the old one I’d given her when I got the new Pulsar. My new car remained in the parking lot at work for the weekend.

When I started to care about drinking to excess I fully embraced the idea that I was no longer young or immortal. And that’s when it hit me that I’d thrown my novels-in-progress away.
© 2008 Steve Tiano

Weeding the blogroll

I have neglected the housekeeping for a while. However, I have now weeded out, from the Blogs I Like listing to the right, defunct blogs and those that have drifted far from my interests, corrected the addresses of some that moved, and added the blog of literary agent Nathan Branford, which I recommend to anyone interested in traditional publishing of fiction (and thanks to Shel Horowitz for the tip).

The enormity of the task that lies ahead

Barack Obama is a great writer, and he chooses his words carefully. In last night’s victory speech, I was struck by this sentence, which is problematic: “You did it because you understand the enormity of the task that lies ahead.”

What’s the problem? The problem is the word enormity, which has a primary sense of monstrosity or outrage. Most careful writers avoid using it to mean immensity (see usage notes here and here), although it is that sense (a common one where unselfconscious and less-skilled writers are involved) that I think Obama intended.

Then again, maybe he looked at the ugliness of the current financial and economic crisis and decided that enormity was le mot juste after all.

Google book search settlement

Start here for information about the proposed settlement in the lawsuit brought against Google for wholesale copyright violation in the scanning of in-copyright books.

A couple of notes:

• The proposed settlement has no bearing on the copyright held by artists in book illustrations or covers. It applies only to publishers, authors, and their heirs and assigns. If your copyright illustrations are scanned in the course of scanning a book, take the issue up with the book’s copyright holder, because Google doesn’t want to hear from you.
  
• The propose settlement appears to weaken the protection of copyright law for the creators of works, because copyright holders must positively reassert the rights they already have—by opting in to the settlement or by registering their works with the yet-to-be-formed Book Rights Registry—in order to retain those rights. Otherwise, the way I read the settlement, they in effect forfeit those rights to Google.

This is another situation where the courts have confused copyright owners (mostly publicly held corporations) with the content creators (individual writers and artists) the copyright laws were initially designed to protect.

In other words, what else is new?

It's good to know the Secretary of the Treasury can count

“Regulation is not a four-letter word.”

—Henry Paulson
testifying in a House Financial Services
Committee hearing yesterday