“In separate filings this week, Penguin and Macmillan rejected charges that they colluded with other publishers to artificially inflate the prices of e-books,” PW’s Andrew Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “The publishers vigorously denied any wrongdoing in connection with the 2010 switch to the agency model and the launch of Apple’s iPad and iBookstore.”

Alongside word of PW’s Summer Romance focus issue, Rose Fox takes note of Bill and Hillary: The Politics of the Personal by Duke University’s William. PW’s reviewer calls it , “a superior portrait of how the dynamic between Bill and Hillary Clinton affected their achievements in public life… A sympathetic if often regretful account of a stormy, occasionally self-destructive political partnership.”

Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.

In 2012, e-books, multimedia applications, the cloud, and other online publishing platforms have forced publishers and authors to review how they apply copyrights in order to protect their published works. Intellectual property law in the US and elsewhere is also grappling with how the borderless Internet maps to the territoriality of copyright. Joining CCC’s Chris Kenneally with a special preview of his BEA presentation, “An Innovator’s Guide to Copyright,” Skott Klebe shares his thoughts on the relationship of technologists and innovators to the notion of copyright. Are they friends? Frenemies? Or gladiators locked in mortal combat? It depends, of course.

Klebe presents, “An Innovator’s Guide to Copyright – Focus On New Media and New Content Delivery,” on Wednesday, June 6, from 10:00 am – 11:20 am, in Room 1E02, Javits Convention Center.

“Six weeks after Random House took over the publication, and distribution, of E.L. James’s trilogy, the series has already gone through 60 printings, and captured a whopping 25% of the adult fiction market,” PW’s Andrew Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

In reviews, Rose Fox, PW reviews editor who blogs at Genreville, tells of a blogger who takes to audio: Let’s Pretend This Never Happened: (A Mostly True Memoir) by Jenny Lawson covers a range of episodes and escapades that includes the author’s first acid trip, and why she mistook her husband’s marriage proposal for a murder attempt.

Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.

BEA arrives at the Jacob Javits Convention Center in New York City on Monday, June 4. Steve Rosato, BEA event director, joins CCC’s Chris Kenneally to preview the week’s programs and to talk about what’s new for 2012. Highlights include BEA’s Global Market Forum featuring Russia and the BEA Education Program with fresh sessions on the latest trends, developments, and technologies affecting the book industry.

The family that is book publishing is preparing for another annual reunion – otherwise known as BookExpo America. For nearly a week, beginning Monday, June 4, the largest book trade fair in the United States will welcome nearly 8,000 men and women to the Javits Convention Center in New York City.

One of BEA’s most important—and fastest growing constituencies— is librarians, who take to the show floor with passion and professionalism.

Special guests Tina Jordan, Vice President for the Association of American Publishers, and Nora Rawlinson, founder and editor of EarlyWord.com, join CCC’s Chris Kenneally with Publishers Weekly’s Andrew Albanese to learn what librarians will get from BEA in 2012, and what BEA gets from having them there.

Programs planned include AAP Librarian Book Buzz, with publishers sharing news on the forthcoming season, and the 4th Annual Librarian Shout ‘n Share @ BEA, when development librarians share their top picks (and best buys) direct from the show floor.

“We want to offer rightsholders the opportunity to get a one-time payment in exchange for making their books into Creative Commons-licensed e-books. And the way we’re going to do this is by crowd-funding campaigns,” Hellman explains for CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “So if you have a favorite book, a book that’s important to you, a book that means a lot to you, that you’ve read, and you want everybody else in the world to read it, we’re going to offer you the opportunity to join with thousands of people like you to come up with the money to turn it into a book that’s free to everybody, everywhere.”

“The AAR acknowledges they have no idea whether the publishers that settled colluded or not,” PW’s Andrew Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “And, all good points aside, that’s the key issue here. If these CEOs did get together to discuss a price-based response to Amazon, legal experts pretty much agree they are sunk.”

In her review of the upcoming week’s reviews, PW reviews editor Rose Fox, who blogs at Genreville, takes note of two emerging Sci-Fi series: Caliban’s War by James S.A. Corey, is the second in the Expanse space opera series with aliens trying to spark war between Earth and Mars “The first book in the series, Leviathan Wakes, is starting to get award nominations,” says Fox. “Another notable book two is Queen’s Hunt by Beth Bernobich, follow-up to last year’s Passion Play. It’s a fantasy novel with intrigue among nations, daring escapes, and magical jewels. Our reviewer says that all the promise of the first book is realized in the second.”

Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.

But there is trouble in e-book Eden. News that the US Dept. of Justice is suing a number of publishers and Apple over alleged price-fixing for e-books has thrown a spotlight on the issue, raising questions in the minds of consumers and publishers about costs, prices, and profits. In a recent report for Digital Book World, Jeremy Greenfield, DBW editorial director, found confusion and even anger among consumers. He tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally that publishers are now struggling to defend their pricing practices, while bemoaning that consumers aren’t seeing the whole story.

“What we’ve learned is that a volume of titles makes such a difference. For those of you out there who are self-published authors or for those of you out there who are small to independent publishers, I’m going to just tell you, what makes the most difference in Amazon is not doing just one e-book,” Vook VP Matthew Cavnar tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “You have to do multiple e-books.

“If I’m looking at an Amazon product page, you’ll see the recommendation engine right underneath the book title,” Cavnar explains. “That recommendation engine is really the one thing in Amazon’s very complicated and excellent algorithms that they use that you can control. And how can you control that? Well, almost always, they recommend other books by the same authors or other books in the same series. So if you want the recommended titles to be similar to your own content, you need to have, one, a series, two, consistent branding, and three, probably chunks, episodic content.”

Earlier this year, Vook launched a cloud-based e-book publishing platform for authors and independent publishers. The company has also published a free guide to e-book creation, including advice on pricing and marketing.

“From the questions he asked from the bench, it certainly seems like Judge Denny Chin wants to see the Authors Guild lawsuit against Google and its library book-scanning program proceed as a class action, and the Authors Guild has a strong argument for pursuing their claim,” Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly’s Features Editor, tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

Google, however, firmly pushed back, with attorney Daralyn Durie highlighting findings of a $100,000 survey of authors that Google commissioned.

“Despite the AG’s claim of harm to the class,” Albanese explains, “about 45% of 880 author respondents think Google Books is beneficial to them, and only 19% think it harms them.”

In his review of the coming week’s reviews, Mike Harvkey, PW’s Deputy Reviews Editor, notes the timing is right for Fifty Sides of the Beach Boys: The Songs That Tell Their Story. This summer, the legendary California band goes on the road for their 50th Anniversary Tour. Harvkey says the PW reviewer finds the book by Toronto-based journalist Mark Dillon, “well-written and relevant to today’s music scene.”

Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.

To understand better the issues affecting how American musicians earn a living today, the Future of Music Coalition launched in 2010 Artist Revenue Streams, a multi-stage research project to document musicians’ revenue streams. Kristin Thomson, co-director of “Artists Revenue Streams,” shares the recently-released results with CCC’s Chris Kenneally.

“We wanted to make sure we understood who musicians were relying on, their support structures. So on the survey, we had a list of about 15 different possible teammates that would include people like a record label, or a publisher, or a webmaster, an accountant, an attorney. What the survey data showed us was that bandmates were always the most important other team member. And that does make sense,” Thomason notes.

“But I think it was fascinating to see how different it was for different strata,” she adds. “We have a data cut of people who earn more than $100,000 from music, and for those people, after bandmates, the most important folks were an attorney, an accountant, and a webmaster. And there’s this chicken-and-egg question there: Does the person have an accountant because they’re making $100,000, or do they have $100,000 because they have an accountant?”

Kristin Thomson is a community organizer, social policy researcher, entrepreneur and musician. From 1992 to 2000, she co-ran Simple Machines, an independent record label. Over the label’s 8-year history, Simple Machines released over seventy records and CDs, published the Mechanic’s Guide to Putting Out Records, Cassettes, and CDs, and organized three high-profile music festivals in Washington, DC.

“Tor Books, the venerable sci-fi imprint of Macmillan has announced they would no longer use Digital Rights Management locks on their e-books,” PW’s Andrew Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “This is pretty big news, because this could be the first domino to fall in the eventual elimination of DRM for e-books published by the big houses.”

Among her review of PW’s upcoming reviews, reviews editor Rose Fox takes note of Jack 1939 — the tale of FDR hiring Harvard student Jack Kennedy to be his personal spy. “JFK seeks to stop a courier bringing German money to America,” she explains. “It’s all part of Hitler’s plant to defeat Roosevelt in the 1940 election.”

Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.

In an op-ed for the Philadelphia Inquirer, Victor Pickard of the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania, has made the case that much more is at stake than the jobs in the Inquirer newsroom or printing plant — indeed, nothing less than the future of democracy.

“The plight of newspapers is treated as some sort of business tragedy, or perhaps as about technological progress,” Pickard tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “But as many of us learned in grade school, journalism is absolutely vital to the prospects of democratic society. So whenever we’re seeing newspapers suffering in the way that they are today, this is also about the loss of journalism.”

Along with Robert McChesney, Victor Pickard is the co-editor of the book Will the Last Reporter Please Turn out the Lights (The New Press). His research explores the intersections of U.S. and global media activism and politics, media history, democratic theory, and communications policy. He is currently working on a book on the history and future of news.

“I was taken with the talk by Jim Griffin, managing director of OneHouse LLC, who spoke of what he called the ‘Tarzan economics’ of the digital age, where companies ‘cling to the vine that keeps them off the jungle floor,’ while having to reach for the next vine to move them forward,” Publishers Weekly features editor Andrew Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “One thing he said really caught my attention: he expects publishing will more toward actuarial models, like for radio licensing of recorded music, where you pay into pools of money and that money is then distributed to content owners via collective licensing.”

In her review of this week’s reviews, Rose Fox has something sweet to say about Alexander McCall Smith’s latest, A Conspiracy of Friends, the third book in the Corduroy Mansions series. This “confection,” says the PW reviewer, is “short on plot but teeming with charm.”

Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.

“I don’t think copyright infringement is stealing,” he told the Columbia Law School audience. “The idea that this is stealing, I think, introduces a moral tone that I don’t like. I don’t like to treat it as a moral issue. I’d like to treat it as a legal issue and an economic issue.

“It’s also not sharing,” he continued. “ Sharing implies good. If you’re sharing my book, that implies that you’re doing something good. I think stealing and sharing are both not what’s going on. I think copyright infringement is a very good term for what’s going on. I would encourage more people to use it.”

Robert Levine covers the culture business from New York and Berlin. Free Ride: How Digital Parasites are Destroying the Culture Business, and How the Culture Business Can Fight Back is his first book. Fortune called it, a “smart, caustic tour of the modern culture industry,” and Bill Keller in his New York Times review praised Free Ride as, “a wonderfully clear-eyed account of this colossal struggle over the future of our cultural lives.” Levine previously was the executive editor of Billboard and has written for Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and the arts and business sections of the New York Times.

This week, CCC’s Beyond the Book podcast series presents Levine’s full address at OnCopryight 2012; for video and more on the full day’s programming, go to www.oncopyright2012.com.

“It is important to note that this case was never about the agency model; it is about how these five publishers got to the agency model. And the settlement is not designed to force fundamental reform on the e-book market, but to punish these five publishers for their alleged conspiracy,” explains Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly features editor. “The real pain is in compliance. Each settling publisher will have to engage in a number of compliance measures.”

As Albanese tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally, three publishers who have reached a settlement with DOJ must “maintain and furnish a log of all oral and written communications, excluding privileged or public communications, between any employees involved in e-book strategy. The feds can also invite themselves over to poke around, and the settling publishers have to furnish copies of all books, ledgers, accounts, records, data, any documents relating to the settlement upon request.”

Also from Washington comes An American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama. PW reviews editor Rose Fox calls it, “a layered, scrupulously researched, and wrenching chronicle of First Lady Michelle Obama’s ancestry. New York Times reporter Rachel L. Swarns takes readers to South Carolina rice plantations, small Georgia farms, and the industrial magnets of Birmingham and Chicago.”

Other books of note from the upcoming PW reviews section include Kingdom of Strangers, Zoë Ferraris’s third novel starring Saudi forensic technician Katya Hijazi, who struggles with the conflicts between her professional life and her culture’s view of the proper role of women; and in children’s nonfiction, The Letter Q, a “thoughtful, humorous, and moving” collection of works (edited by Sarah Moon and James Lecesne) in which 64 queer authors and artists share hope and advice with their younger selves.

Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.

“First and foremost, we are advocates for the authors,” Robert Gottlieb, chairman of Trident Media Group, recently told CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “These are challenging times. Agents need not only to know material, and help their authors with their manuscripts, but also they have to understand the dynamics of the business in a way that most likely has not happened in the past.”

During a recent interview in his Manhattan office, Gottlieb painted an admiring picture of a new entrant to publishing, though the same player is hardly new to the book business. “I enjoy working with Amazon. They’re innovative,” he said. “They are giving authors a very, very good deal on the e-book rights to their books as part of the overall publishing matrix that you arrange with them.”

Bowker Market Research’s Global eBook Monitor has taken a close look at the international market for e-books, notes PW’s Andrew Albanese. The latest “GEM” survey finds a not very surprising center for potential growth. “India is especially interesting, because it is English, highly tech-focused, and it has a massive population—about 1.2 billion. And, they like e-books,” he tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Holding them back, for now, is the lack of Web access in many regions of the country—with only about 10% online nationwide.”

For the weekly review of PW reviews, Mike Harvkey, PW’s Deputy Reviews editor, has details on Paul Tobin’s sci-fi/fantasy novel, Prepare to Die!, a deconstruction of the superhero story, full of “fierce action, sexy romance, warm nostalgia, and wry observations on being a superhero in the age of YouTube,” according to the reviewer. Harvkey also covers It Worked For Me: In Life and Leadership, by Colin Powell, with Tony Koltz. “There’s much inspirational sense here drawn from Powell’s matchless range of managerial and political experiences,” he says, though, “there is also a frustrating reticence on the great leadership crisis of his time, the Iraq war.”

Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.

“With our deep knowledge of content, we’re able to tailor the content and products and services to exceed consumers’ expectations,” F+W President Sara Domville explains to CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “We have a curated, guided approach,” she continues. “It’s like having a personal shopper at your right hand, telling you what you need to buy next in order to go from a beginner to an intermediate to an advanced, whether it’s an artist, whether it’s someone interested in craft, whether it’s antiques, numismatics, whichever of our verticals you’re in.”

Since 2008, when Domville became President at F+W Media, the definition of a book, not to mention that for bookstores, has evolved dramatically. Last week, for example, Chris Kenneally spoke with Ben LeRoy, who heads up F+W imprint Tyrus Books, which is publishing a series of pulp fiction classics in e-book form.

“You know that [the Pottermore launch] is big news for fans—but it’s also proving to be very interesting news for the publishing community,” Andrew Albanese, PW’s Features Editor, tells CCC’s Chris Kenneally. “Pottermore is publishing its e-books in DRM-free editions – or, so they say; they are apparently watermarked. By and large, customers can download the Pottermore e-books and read them on virtually any device they choose—including the Kindle.”

In her review of the latest Publishers Weekly reviews, Rose Fox notes the arrival of Paul Goldstein’s Harlem Requiem, in which an intellectual property specialist helps an elderly Cuban musician seek rights to music he and friends wrote in the 1940s and ’50s. A law professor, Goldstein, “excels at making the dry subject matter of his professional expertise both accessible and fascinating,” she reports.

Every Friday, CCC’s “Beyond the Book” speaks with the editors and reporters of “Publishers Weekly” for an early look at the news that publishers, editors, authors, agents and librarians will be talking about when they return to work on Monday.