Scrivener's Error

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Scrivener's Error	Law and reality in publishing (seldom the same thing) from the author's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting.

02 January 2012

link to: 10:42 [GMT-6]

Beginning of the End of the World News

It is 2012 now, after all. It's not just the Mayans; it's also Nostradamus. And an unjustly underappreciated Anthony Burgess novel. And if the incessant blathering of the Heffalumps isn't enough to make one wish for the end of the world, I don't know what will be...

Stephen Hawking nears 70 and is still more productive trapped inside of an ALS-ravaged body than any politician or business leader.
~~Sauron~~ Rupert Murdoch joins Twitter. How's that MySpace purchase working out again?
Another lament about resale price maintenance agreements for e-books (misleadingly mislabelled the "agency model" by its conglomerate-publisher advocates) and their negative effects on everyone involved. When you come right down to it, the real justification for RPMAs in book sales is to prevent unpredictable sales shifts between products in the same conglomerate more than anything else. This upsets all of the pseudomathematical models from accurately predicting cash flow, royalty obligations, etc.,¹ and therefore upsets all of the MBAs now running the show.
The almost incomparably wise Ursula K. Le Guin objects to the award culture and its underlying assumptions. She's a lot more generous than I would have been: The primary objection that I have to awards is that too often, they're made too soon. To draw on an example from her piece, right now is about the soonest that anyone should really, really be considering what were the "best" works in category x of the last half of the twentieth century under any criterea — the shininess of the new should have worn off by now so that we can realistically expect to compare, say, JR (National Book Award, 1976) to Sabbath's Theater (National Book Award, 1995) and come up with a reasoned answer. It won't be a definitive answer, by any means — if only because taste really does enter into the discussion — but it will be reasoned. And the less said about the way H'wood establishes eligibility for awards based on when a work is in limited release in two cities, instead of generally, the better...

Two observations:
- Just because it's got numbers associated with it doesn't make it mathematically sound. If you want a classic example, consider net-present-value calculations, which are no better than the multiple assumptions built into them about interest rates, uniform time-value, opportunity cost, etc.
- Then, too, there's the issue of royalty obligations and predictability. If one believes publisher accounting, or even the stark evidence of publisher royalty statements and the absence of checks attached thereto, the "vast majority" of books never end up paying royalties to authors; instead, royalty earnings chew away at the advance, which all too often remains as out of reach as the tree is to Xeno's arrow. For example, if one accepts the industry meme that 80% of books never earn out their advances, a particular sales cannibalization within an imprint — or even across imprints within the same conglomerate — has a (0.80)² = 64% chance of not increasing the actual publisher outlay to any author. Only when sales aggregate do they result in such payments... and that demonstrates the quantum effect of royalty calculations. (Unfortunately, my HTML-fu is not good enough to accurately represent the underlying math.)

Labels: arts, mass media, publishing, science

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Archives

Warped Weft

Now live at the new site. I have arranged some of the more infamous threads that have appeared here by unravelling them from the blawg tapestry (and hopefully eliminating some of the sillier typos). Sometimes, the threads have been slightly reordered for clarity.

Links of Interest

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Writer Beware and the Writer Beware Blog provide essential knowledge for writers who don't want to be ripped off
Writing-World.com published by the former managing editor of the now-defunct Inklings
Agent Research & Evaluation provides both free and paid analyses of literary agents
US Copyright Office, including both registration forms and records and quite a bit of other helpful information
Trademark Electronic Search System (TESS) allows searches of granted, pending, and some rejected trademark registrations
US Supreme Court Opinions from the current and past couple of terms
Law Library of Congress includes statutes for free
The Public Library of Law can help you find the law... but not use it in court, as many of its resources are not in proper form and do not provide all of the citation information needed in court papers
Legal, free e-books are available through Online Books (University of Pennsylvania) and Shakespeare (MIT)
Legal, free music is available through
- ClassicCat.net (what kind of music do you think you'll find here?)
- Music.Download.com (long-awaited successor to MP3.com)
- Janis Ian (artist)
- John McCutcheon (artist)

Other Blawgs, Blogs, and Journals

These may be of interest; I do not necessarily agree with opinions expressed in them, although the reasoning and writing are almost always first-rate (and represent a standard seldom, if ever, achieved in "mainstream" journalism). I'm picky, and have eclectic tastes, so don't expect a comprehensive listing.

A blawg is sort of like a blog on legal issues, but usually has a lot more links to outside resources (other than other blogs) than does a typical blog. Scrivener's Error is a blawg, not just a blog. You can find other blawgs at < ? law blogs # >.

How Appealing is aimed at appellate lawyers and legal news in general. If you care about the state of the law, start here — Howard's commentary is far better balanced, better informed, and better considered than any of the media outlets. To concentrate on the Supreme Court, don't forget SCOTUSBlog.
Some academics' blawgs with a variety of political (and doctrinal) viewpoints:
- Professor Anthony Arend (Georgetown Law)
- Professor Stephen Bainbridge (UCLA Law) (aka "The Perfesser")
- Professor Jack Balkin (Yale Law)
- Professor Dennis Crouch (Missouri Law) (better known as Patently-O)
- Professor Michael Froomkin (University of Miami Law)
- Professor Eric Goldman (Santa Clara University Law)
- Professor Rick Hasen (Loyola-LA Law)
- Professor Brian Leiter (U of Chicago Law/Philosophy)
- Professor Lawrence Lessig (Stanford Law)
- Professor Michael Madison (Pitt Law)
- Professor Rebecca Tushnet (Georgetown Law)
BoingBoing, by speculative fiction writer (and 'net activist) Cory Doctorow, is quite hostile to copyright enforcement efforts, particularly regarding file-sharing
The main European IP blawg of interest remains the UK-based IPKat, on a variety of intellectual property issues, with some overlap (with a less Eurocentric view) at IPFinance
Cyberlaw (Stanford) has its agenda grounded firmly in the so-called "digital commons," which might make a bit more sense if any of the advocates of that viewpoint understood diddly-squat about population ecology
The American Constitution Society blawg is a purportedly "liberal" counterweight to the so-called "Federalist Society" (which, despite its claims, should be called "Tory Society") that has yet to establish much coherence... but maybe that's all to the good.

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