We will take this information and your questions to Greenpeace, to the Green Press Initiative (with whom we work) and to other organizations working on e-waste and paper issues, and also to Google, Microsoft, IBM, and other technology companies.

Any comments here may be quoted in reports or other resources we develop, so please ensure that we have your name, email, academic or other affiliation. If you prefer to be anonymous, that’s fine, but please state this in your comment. We will give proper attribution, and we’ll also do our best to ensure that you get specific feedback to your questions as information comes to us.

My dear Ms. Roberts,

I fully intend on supporting Grinnell once I’m old and wrinkly and have silver dollars spilling out of my top hat onto my diamond-tipped cane and be-spatted wingtips, but being presently skint, jobless, and my saving getting bled dry by Fannie Mae I’m unable to. Is there a way to get off this mailing list without drawing the ink-black wrath of the Grinnell gods? I’d like to send my kids there someday, in the brightest of a spectrum of dark futures.

But I somehow suspect that getting persons like myself to donate is less about the money, than the mission, or some such ma-lark. In which case, I might donate a similar amount as I donated to the senior challenge imps, when they assaulted me outside the dining hall so many long and dusty days ago.

One dollar.

One drop, a drop of startlingly clear legal tenderness, from my heart to yours. As a symbol of much largesse to come, I assure you.

By the way, I suggest you insure the envelope, to protect the meticulously embossed forms Grinnell is always so kind to send. $20 should be enough, and is probably quite affordable.

T. Christensen, Beijing, PRC 9 September 2009

By Karen Christensen, Berkshire Publishing Group

Our problem is that the people at Google don’t really get books.

They want to believe that books are just primitive webpages, nothing but more information to be organized for the benefit of everyone.

Google Print recently wrote to publishers saying, “It’s also important to bear in mind that, just like web search, any copyright holder can ask to have their books excluded from the Library Project by following these instructions: . . . .”

But websites are built for the web. Books were not written for Google Library. Forcing publishers and authors to opt-out, instead of opt-in, is not fair. It’s coercive.

Not to mention a processing nightmare. With the opt-in program Google Print, in which publishers provide the books (and permissions), Google has had many delays. They even sent a Google Gumby clock as an apology to participating publishers. I can only imagine the mess that Google Library could turn into, and the errors that will result.

Librarians, unfortunately, don’t understand the rights of the creators and producers of books. Most librarians do not understand the work and expense, the expertise and talent, involved in creating the publications they buy. And quite a few believe that information should be free—unless it is only available through them.

Besides that, Google has an unhealthy fascination for librarians: they are (rightly) terrified by the fact that students go to Google instead of to them, but they can’t take their eyes off it. Google is taking advantage of librarians by making them partners in a process that undermines the sources of information and knowledge that their institutions and communities depend on.

As a result, authors and publishers can easily be made to look obstructive and mean-spirited. Our task now is to explain that while we’re increasingly receptive to online marketing and publishing opportunities, our books are original creative work and we think that any money they earn, or enable others to earn, should be shared with us. And we certainly don’t think anyone should do anything with our work—in any format—without our permission. (Most e-rights book contracts give the author the right to check the digital version for errors. What protection do we have with Google? )

But we’re going to struggle to get the public, people outside the creative professions and academia, to understand this. Most people think that being a published author should be its own reward. And Google looks so friendly, so open-hearted, so democratic. It’s a good thing the Google lawsuit isn’t going to be decided by a public referendum, because we authors would lose hands down.

I’ve taken to asking people whether, if it were possible, they would be happy if they knew Google was going to scan, store, and index copies of all their personal photographs and diaries, photos of the interior of their house and their closets, all without permission? (And use that content to make money.)

Our challenge is to show people just what it takes to create and publish a book and that intellectual creation merits every bit as much protection as physical property. And we need to talk about this is simple terms. When Google says it will take and hold and use content that does not belong to them, without asking permission, they are coming awfully close to breaking their own rule, “Don’t be evil.”

© Karen Christensen 2005

[Page 106]. . . when plate tectonics came along, it was realized that geology had been spending its previous two millennia as a major science looking in great detail at sandstones, gneisses, rift valleys, and ammonites—but had never been able to stand back and look at the planet as a whole and then to work out the details, as happens with most sciences where man is generally bigger than whatever it is he is studying.

Plate tectonics offered for the first time an intellectual mechanism for taking the earth and looking at it as an entity—and the fact that its emergence as a brand-new science coincided so nicely with the development of satellites that could look at the planet as a whole as fortuitous, to say the least. One might say that all this meant that, for the first time, geologists were able to begin looking at things right side up.

[Page 269]. . . here was one of the first provable instances in which a natural event occurring in one corner of the planet had effects that spread over the entire world (or what would be the entire world, if further records could be sought from the Americas and Asia and elsewhere, for they would show the same evidence). Here was the event that presaged all the debates that continue to this day: about global warming, greenhouse gases, acid rain, ecological interdependence. Few in Victorian times had begun to think truly globally—even though exploration was proceeding apace, the previously unknown interiors of continents were being opened for inspection, and the developing telegraph system, allowing people to communicate globally, was having its effects. Krakatoa, however, began to change all that.

The world was now suddenly seen to be much more than an immense collection of unrelated peoples and isolated happenings. It was, rather, an almost infinitely large association of interconnected individuals and perpetually intersecting events. Krakatoa, an evened that intersected so much and affected so many, seemed all of a sudden to be an example of this newly recognized phenomenon. And so it was up to a British scientific society—most decidedly a British one, given the imperial mood of the day, like it or not—to investigate it.

150 years ago a British Government sent an ill-prepared, poorly equipped army to war in a foreign land. What has changed?

Foreword by Patrick Mercer, author of To Do and Die Delane’s War is the story of how John Delane, editor of The Times, brought about the resignation of the entire cabinet of the British Government over its conduct of the Crimean War. In the aftermath Britain came close to revolution. The British went to war ill-prepared, poorly equipped and desperately undermanned. Within a matter of weeks their numbers had been decimated by disease and the harsh rigours of the Crimean winter through their inadequate clothing. In addition, poor intelligence had not predicted a spirited Russian defence. Using the first war reporters and “embedded correspondents” The Times revealed to England the terrible drama as it unfolded, in a premonition of modern war journalism. Lack of censorship allowed
The Times’ correspondent William Howard Russell to send back reports on astonishing military incompetence. Delane printed them verbatim and ran excoriating editorials against those in command. He also ran the world’s first newspaper appeals, which would inspire Florence Nightingale to visit the Crimea and work in the military hospitals at Scutari.

Delane’s War describes the four months between October 1854 and January 1855, during which time the Government and Army tried to silence and deride Delane and his newspaper for his coverage of the war, accusing him of treachery, deception and exaggeration. Delane was steadfast in his editorial line and would not be ignored. Eventually a dramatic debate in Parliament brought about the largest ever defeat of a British Government in office. With the resignations of ministers, the lying of politicians, the aloofness of generals and the suffering of the troops, this book paints a sadly recognisable picture. From it, however, John Delane stands out as one of the heroes of Victorian England.

Click here to pre-order it from Amazon UK. The publication date is 12 October 2009. And do visit Tim’s remarkable and historic blog, archived by the British Library as a part of British political history (and hosted and sponsored by Berkshire Publishing, by the way): The Good Library Blog.

A few days ago I received an e-mail from the authorized biographer of Harold Abrahams, the sprinter from the movie Chariots of Fire, asking me to put him in touch with Valerie Eliot in the hope that she would have memories of Abrahams, who was apparently life-long friends with the family of Frank Morley, who was like T. S. Eliot a director of Faber and Faber. Abrahams was one of two British runners whose Olympic story was told in Chariots of Fire. Here’s the background, if you don’t know the film or the story.) The other runner was Eric Liddell, whom we wrote about recently in China Gold: China’s Rise to Global Power and Olympic Glory (e-book and preview available at Scribd.com) because he is sometimes referred to as China’s first gold medallist, who grew up in Tianjin with his missionary family. He died, too, in China, in a Japanese internment camp.

Now I wonder what Eliot, also a devout Christian but much more high church than Liddell, thought about athletics events on a Sunday.

Americans are in the position of nineteenth-century Europeans who acted as if America’s industrial rise could be explained simply by its vast natural resources and its exploitation of immigrant and slave labor, plus its very casual attitude toward copyright and patent laws protecting foreign, mainly British, books and inventions. (Today, Americans walk the streets of China and see their movies, music, software, and books sold everywhere in cheap pirate versions. A century and a half ago, Charles Dickens walked the streets of young America and fumed to see his novesl in cheap pirate versions.) All those factors played their part but they were not the full story of America’s rise – nor do the corresponding aspects of modern China’s behavior fully explain what China has achieved.

A crowd of people are standing by a deep, fast-flowing river.

A government official falls in. “Help, help!” he screams. “I’m drowning. Please save me!” The crowd turn their backs, and the official drowns.

Then a stockbroker falls in. “Help, help!” he screams. “I’m drowning. Please save me!” The crowd pick up rocks from the river bank and throw them at the stock broker.  He drowns.

Finally, a China national football (soccer) player falls in. “Help, help!” he screams. “I’m drowning. Please save me!” Everybody immediately jumps in to save the footballer, dragging him to safety on the river bank.

“Why did you save me when you let the government official and the stockbroker drown?” he asks.

“We weren’t saving you!” they reply. “We were saving our water from contamination.”

Not to bodysurf, but to learn to bodysurf.

Learning means doing, which means trying to catch the right wave at the right moment. This is exceedingly difficult. Most of the time I miss because of poor timing, or the wave catches me (instead of my managing to ride with it). When that happens,  I am pummeled into the sand, and tumbled like a stone or seashell (a non-surfing companion looked up from a book on Monday and saw nothing but my feet sticking out of the water). But I discovered, after a previous weekend when I got my head and shoulder banged up, is that when a wave has me I need to behave exactly as I did in aikido – a sport that is entirely circular and dynamic. In aikido, instead of fighting an attacker, you use their energy to defend yourself and move out of the way.

How wonderful to find that a sport I learned in London in my 20s is helping me learn a completely new sport. And how appropriate to be trying something utterly different. 2010 is going to be a big year for world sports, with a host of major international competitions, and we’re planning a new expanded and enhanced edition of the Berkshire Encyclopedia of World Sport.

I was thinking about sports a lot last year, of course, as we read and wrote about the Beijing Olympics and prepared China Gold: China’s Quest for Global Power and Olympic Glory (now available as an e-book at Scribd.com). Sports is a signficant part of the Berkshire portfolio and it fits more than a lot of people think. Like our other specialty subjects, sports are about human connections and interaction. In fact, sports are one of the most important ways in which ordinary people connect across borders, and I’m looking forward to tackling the subject anew in 2010, bringing together our expert networks on sports history, physiology, marketing and management, sustainability, and extreme sports and women’s sports – on which we have published separate major encyclopedias.

Plotkin, Robert. The Genie in the Machine: How Computer-Automated Inventing Is Revolutionizing Law & Business. Stanford Law & Politics: Stanford Univ. 2009. c.288p. index. ISBN 978-0-8047-5699-0. $29.95. BUS

There is little argument that invention spurs innovation, competition, and economic growth. With technology today, however, inventors can simply input a problem (a “wish”) into a program and have the computer (a “genie”) generate, or “invent,” the ultimate solution. Who or what, then, is the true inventor of the final product? Plotkin, an intellectual property attorney, tackles this intriguing question by stating that patent law today does not lend itself to such broad interpretation. Further, the author convincingly illustrates an urgent need to reform current law so that it is neither too strong nor too weak in order to protect the future rights of inventors, businesses, and consumers. VERDICT Plotkin posits that “Computer Automated Inventing” or “Artificial Invention Technology” does not replace the human mind; rather, it augments and partners with its human counterpart to build a better mousetrap, whatever that might be. From toothbrushes to auto assembly, the author uses easy-to-understand analogies that most lay readers will understand. Recommended for committed readers in business, computer science, or law.—Judy Brink-Drescher, Dowling Coll., Oakdale, NY

“Invention” is obviously another topic for a publication I’ll soon get underway, to update and expand from the Berkshire Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. Think of all the developments: micro-blogging, mash-ups, and even computerized customer service!

1. What is world history and what makes it different from other histories?
2. Is world history informed just by history or does it also need to integrate knowledge from anthropology and geography?
3. When did world history begin?
4. What periodization scheme helps us to best organize the chronology of world history?
5. What are the controversial concepts employed in world history and how are they most objectively presented?
6. How should women and minorities be covered?
7. How does one move between the general and specific?
8. How does one get non-world historians to write within a world history framework?