In this era of the explosion of "content" and of ease of access to it, copyright law and publishing practice in the dispensation of rights to excerpt, anthologize and quote is actually creating barriers to creative literary expressions and academic writings in new forms of anthologies, collections and analytical works.

It has become increasingly evident in recent years that major aggregators of "content," (that is conglomerate book publishers who have amassed huge collections of backlist titles, or newspapers or magazines whose back issues reach back into generations of narratives), have begun to decouple the two parts of "intellectual property," in their business models.

Major publishers are abandoning the "intellectual part" -- their obligation as the trustees of our cultural archive of ideas and knowledge to facilitate its continued discovery, access and application. "Content," and the dispensation of rights to excerpt and collect it in other works and anthologies, are now seen increasingly and exclusively as a profit center –the "property" part.. Licenses are issued based on arbitrary assignments of value that have no relation to the capacity of the intended use to generate the revenue that would make it economically viable to re-use, or to make possible benefits to the advancement of knowledge and the arts.

By demanding unrealistically high prices (from hundreds to thousands of dollars) to use a paragraph or a page or two, a short essay or a news article in another work is creating a paradox – publishers are erecting barriers too costly to scale. Authors and other publishers cannot afford to take advantage of "the enhanced analytical methods and techniques of information science," that is providing "a changing map of knowledge as a source of books" made possible by the "electronic transition" that Peter Dougherty, Princeton University Press Director, wrote about in ForeWord's most recent eWord supplement.

The issue is highlighted in "What We Owe the New Critics," an article by Marc Bauerline, a professor of English at Emory University, in the December 21 issue of The Chronicle Review in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Although its primary thrust concerns compilation of a new selection of essays on the formalist study of literary language, the author devotes half the article to what are to me infuriating difficulties that the compilation's author, Garrick Davis, founder of the Contemporary Poetry Review, had in assembling the work, Praising it New: The Best of the New Criticism (scheduled to be published in 2008 by Ohio University Press in partnership with Swallow Press).

Bauerline gave me permission to cite from his article, and here are some examples of fees for permission to use essays: (1) on the manageable side -- $50 to $100 from New Directions, Kenyon Review and The Nation;(2) not likely manageable if not the exception -- $300 to $550 from University Press of Kentucky and Charles Scribner; (3) and then, the outrageous:

"He [Davis] asked Harcourt Inc. for permission to reprint an essay by Blackmur entitled 'A Critic's Job of Work,' and Harcourt came back with the outlandish price tag of $2,350. That sum was 23 times what New Directions had asked for a Pound essay. That must be a mistake, he thought. Blackmur's essay has no commercial value, and, as far as he knew, no for-profit press planned to reissue Blackmur's works. The Ohio press is small and will be happy if the volume sells a few hundred copies a year.

"Davis replied with an indignant note about the out-of-sight fee and asked for a reduction. Harcourt replied curtly and refused to negotiate. 'Because of the amount of material contained in the essay we are not willing to reduce the fee to what you are able to pay,' Christine Smith, paralegal, wrote. 'I have canceled the agreement and am sorry you will not be able to include it in your anthology.' She didn't explain what she meant by 'amount of material contained in the essay,' but her phrasing seems to refer to simple word count."

Upon appealing for a reconsideration, Davis received the following reply (sort of in the class of a form letter from the IRS), clearly from someone schooled by a system invented by a book publisher to be indifferent to scholarly or literary purposes:

"Because, as you were informed, the Blackmur agreement has already been canceled you will need to reapply if you care to use that material. Your previous e-mail was forwarded to Kent Wolf, Adult Subsidiary Rights Manager in our New York office."

Back in the days when I handled permissions as director of production at the Prentice Hall subsidiary, Goodyear Publishing Company, we charged permissions fees on a nominal page rate or on the basis of the use's prorated percentage of total text in the book multiplied by estimated revenues from the planned printings. It was a form of courtesy, as we expected the same consideration in return. When the use was not for profit or educational, we gave permission with the understanding of the limits on its use.

It is true, of course, that a publisher's most valuable asset is its intellectual property – more accurately, the rights that it owns to publish that property in various media, formats and languages to markets throughout the universe (as contracts now assert).

These rights do not appear on the balance sheet, except as they are reflected in advances or purchases. Most often, however, those costs have been long since amortized for back lists (or back issues in the case of periodicals), and they reside in the latent potential for commercial application or repurposing (e.g. creating a selection of out of print short stories by various authors.)

If the publisher has another profitable use (and by extension the author), of course they should exercise their right to publish in any form, or to withhold publication for a more propitious time. But arbitrarily withholding publication or holding out for arbitrary fees regardless of the intended use or its profitability to the user really shames the publisher for being so bound by the Property Mission as to have abandoned its Intellectual Mission's redeeming social purpose for existence.

The now 95 year span of copyright law (life of the author plus 70 years and for works of corporate authorship to 120 years after creation or 95 years after publication, whichever endpoint is earlier), retrospective as well as prospective, when it was recently extended, is a far cry from the 14 years plus renewal that held until 1909, and 28 plus renewal years till 1978. It has exacerbated the negative effects of this practice as it can place some content out of reach for creative repurposing and analysis for generations.

In another blog I will discuss why the concept of intellectual property (which I believe in), gets abused when authors and publishers take for granted the culture on which they depend in order for intellectual property to have value in the first place.

What's on your mind?

Posted by: Eugene G. Schwartz

We all entered the book publishing space early in life without realizing it – it was the day we were first aware that the words on a printed page meant something and that the words and meanings stayed there.

As a practical matter, our next significant entry probably came in school, college or out in the working world when we realized we could attach our life’s work or major interests to some aspect of the industry – perhaps, originally, not even realizing the connection.

So it was for me -- passing through childhood in a small Bronx apartment filled with my mother’s books, few of which I read (but of those few marked by them forever by the wonders of imagination), World War II military service, a civil engineering degree and thirteen years in the printing business -- before I crossed the line to work as a production manager for what was then Monarch Press, a competitor to Cliff’s Notes in their early days.

Fast forwarding through work at Random House, Psychology Today Magazine/CRM Books and Prentice Hall/Goodyear and 24 years in Southern California in book production, trade organizations, small town civic engagement, writing columns in the local papers and independently consulting, I came back east to the mid-Hudson Valley in 1992 and by virtue of good fortune was engaged by Victoria Sutherland and Mardi Link to help them plan ForeWord Magazine in time for Book Expo in 1997. I stayed with them ever since as Editor at Large.

So now, ten years later, the internet and digital technologies have created a new platform for expression and infinite opportunities for publishing in many forms and formats.

Limitless subjects to blog about

In this blogging column I will seize the opportunity thus presented to talk about the past, present and future horizons of all of the elements that make up the functions of publishing – “making things generally known,” as is its generic definition.

We are at the center of a transforming industry and culture. So many of the legal foundations, business models, technologies and marketing tools that we use don’t seem to apply to the realities around us or when, as many of them do, they apply in new ways.

There is no end to the topics we can pursue , the ideas and the practices we can challenge:

• How should we manage intellectual property in the digital era of cyberspace?
• Will upcoming generations care about reading? In what interest areas? In what forms? For what purposes?
• What literary genres are ebbing and flowing – such as graphic novels, mind/body spirit, religion, science fiction – and what does it say about society in general?
• Does the author really make a difference? If so, how and when? Or is free access to content a right we enjoy without obligation.
• What are the new roles emerging for brick and mortar libraries and bookstores in the cyberspace world?
• How much does human nature need the codex (written book) as a medium of story-telling, information collection and cultural transmission?
• How will content and all of the existing publishing channels find synergies with portable hand-held, wireless portable multimedia devices?
• Do we need new business models to create revenue streams to compensate authors and publishers?
• How will new supply chain and work flow efficiencies affect job descriptions, job opportunities and career planning?
• To what extent will toner printing replace offset printing, and more importantly, how will real-time updating and multiple versioning of books affect reading patterns as well distribution channels?
• And super-ordinate to all of this are the issues affecting local politics as well as world order, civil society, faith, the creative and practical arts and human liberties – all of which are the stuff that publishing is all about.

And that is just a partial list.

There is no wanting for questions to ask; ideas to offer and challenge, new practices to learn about and old practices to wonder about. And, reaching back into our histories, commenting on the present and speculating about the future.

They are all game for this blog. What’s on your mind?

Posted by: Eugene G. Schwartz

For starters, I would like to share with you my own recollection of the printing business in New York City, which is how I got into all of this, and is why I have been a champion of small business, free markets, and the civil societies on which they depend, ever since.

Reading recently an article in "Heard on the Web" (www.bosacks.com) – a bulletin from Bosacks (Robert Sacks) – brought me back to an earlier era in the 1950's in New York City, and a neighborhood a bit northeast of the rumbling (and sometimes roaring when you got close) presses of the Hudson and Varick Street sector of the printing  business in lower Manhattan.

I'm thinking of the network of commercial printing job shops south of Union Square and north of Canal that handled much of the short run brochure, announcement, newsletter, booklet, broadside and direct mail needs of the city's businesses, agencies and studios, and non-profits.

I started out as a young salesman in 1954 for Carnegie Press, Inc., a small letterpress shop (two #2 Kelleys, a Miller Simplex and Miehle Vertical), on the 10th floor of 104-110 Green Street, corner of Prince - now converted to an upscale condo in Soho. My bosses, Lou Auerbach and Ozzie Schroeder (the outside man and the inside man) took me in and taught me the ropes.  My beat was South Ferry to 57th Street.

We shared the floor with Winslow Ink Co., and all the 12 or so floors of small businesses relied on one freight elevator and a wide flight of stairs.. If Winslow couldn't come up with a special ink we needed (I would sometimes watch the chemist mix matching swatches with his pallette). I would hike over to get it at Superior Ink in the Puck Building on Lafayette Street. We did all our binding (except for small Baumfolder jobs) with Tomash Bindery on Astor Place, who picked up sometimes twice daily.

We got our paper from houses such as Lindenmeyer, Milton, Case and Marquardt - ordered by phone and by the job (early forms of just-in-time inventory), and delivered by them the next day. Marquardt was just a few blocks away and so we could pick up a rush order of pastel colored Strathmore or Curtis texts in emergencies. Lindenmeyer provided us with rice paper and other specialities. We used a steady supply of Warren antique book, lustro gloss and machine coated Printone - firsts or job lots - from a variety of merchants.

Occasionally an account gave us a large job to farm out, and we'd get 77" offset sheet work done at Landes Offset on Broadway, or get a book plated and printed and bound at H.Wolff.

Athough we had our own two Model 8 linotypes, foundry and Ludlow selections, we jobbed out a lot of special typesetting jobs - I remember one of those times when that elevator broke down, and I lugged a load of monotype that we got from H.O. Bullard up 10 flights of steps for a NY Bar Association publication that was on deadline.

We had a folding box shop on the ground floor, and various die-cutting, engraving and finishing shops dotted all over that neighborhood. Those were the days of zinc and copper engravings, Dupont's introduction of Dycril as a plastic substitute (which we tried with some success), and decorative wood type from American Wood Type.

There was a great old mahogony bar-anchored tavern at the corner of Prince and Green, with cut glass windows in the doors, and a special ladies entrance (for the evenings I suppose), where we'd get a quick savory corned beef and cabbage and/or potatoes hotplate, rye on  the side, and a mug of beer for lunch.

From dawn to dusk the neighborhood was teeming with people coming and going on the sidewalks, and with trucks vying for curb space for pickups and deliveries. NYU, Carl Fishers, Wanamakers, Cooper Union, Little Italy, Kleins on the Square, used book store row on 4th avenue (Park Avenue South), Greenwich Village -- all those great features of lower Manhattan so easily accessible ringed the area and were part of our reward -- we who powered the clatter and the hum of the printing shops and all the other light manufacturing, converting, supply and distribution services that pumped life and opportunity into our great city.

Which, at the time, seemed perfectly normal  -- seeing as the whole island was alive with enterprise.

What's on your mind?

Posted by: Eugene G. Schwartz