By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

‘Imposing New Moral Litmus Tests on Books and Authors’

Among many stressors affecting publishers in world markets today, the impact of political pressure –often delivered on various social media–can be among the most potent.

PEN America‘s report, issued this morning in New York City (August 7), starts the week off with a stark “warning against canceling books because of outrage.”

PEN uses the term booklash, which isn’t a bad umbrella phrase for the type of demanding and frequently intimidating assaults that “are imposing new moral litmus tests on books and authors; chilling literary expression; and fueling a dangerous trend of self-censorship that’s shrinking writers’ creative freedom and imagination.”

The catch: many of these demands come from within the industry.

Booklash: Literary Freedom, Online Outrage, and the Language of Harm has an introduction from the current PEN president, Ayad Akhtar, and the organization is making it clear that this is not the book-banning issue being seen at play in so many parts of the post-Trump-administration United States. Instead, this is often about attempts at suppression from within the industry itself.

“Publishers,” Akhtar writes, “can feel obligated to address these criticisms, through apologetic statements, changes to author tours, or requests for edits. There have been several instances when publishers have responded by doing something far more drastic: canceling a book contract or pulling a book from circulation.”

In a list below, we’ll show you exactly what makes this concept difficult to grasp: the sheer multiplicity and variety of instances.

What makes something “offensive”? Whose prerogative is it to object? When do claims of something “hurtful” mean they’re simply not what someone wants to see in print? And at what point do publishing professionals need to learn to hold the line even against their own dismay (perhaps especially their own dismay) over various points of view, topics, policy positions, societal trends?

In some parlance, this is called “the ACLU moment.” The phrase refers to the work of the American Civil Liberties Union, one of the most formidable nonprofit legal advocacy organizations in the world. The “problem” in wry ACLU-savvy circles is that donors who support the ACLU’s efforts to support civil liberties often display noisy consternation when the ACLU, perforce, must stand up to support the civil liberties of everyone, not just “the people I like.” Freedom of speech, for example, is great—until it’s not what you want to hear.

In all likelihood, the sorts of “booklash” pressures covered in this potentially groundbreaking report, add up to “something for everybody to dislike.” This is a document, in other words, that addresses so multifaceted and nuanced a set of challenges that almost anyone will find an “ACLU moment” of her or his own in reading it.

Just to point to one: Are you one of the publishing-house staffers who didn’t want to see Woody Allen’s memoir published in the spring of 2020 by Hachette USA? You’ll find quite a bit of discussion about that case, including responses for and against the publisher’s self-reversal: a decision to drop the book. The PEN America position during the controversy warned against publishers “shying away from manuscripts that editors think are worthwhile but that are about, or even by, people who may be considered contemptible.”

‘Representation, Harm, and Identity in Literature’

What might surprise many world publishing professionals reading the new report is just how many forms of this bookish cancel culture there are.

On publication not equaling endorsement: “Increasingly, new generations of readers and publishing staff have called this foundational axiom into question.”PEN America, ‘Booklash’ report

None is new to a discerning book-business player. But each tends to arrive in media reports as distinct from others. That’s no one’s fault. They find their way into headlines, like all news, anecdotally and on their own time, flung across television screens and news-site homepages as proof of “divisive times” and “polar political positions.” Rarely are their interlocking parts and symbiotic connections brought to light as clearly as happens in this report.

This is the first time to our knowledge at Publishing Perspectives that such a comprehensive compendium of this morass of censorious impulses has been created. In that factor alone, the PEN America report on “booklash” is immediately a service to an industry that needs to examine the complete framework of its internal debate, unblinkingly and urgently.

In this report, you’ll find both definitional discussions and real-industry examples of what PEN calls “new debates over representation, harm, and identity in literature,” including:

• “Toxicity in online literary spaces”
• The “#OwnVoices” pressure over “who has the authority and credibility to tell what stories”
• Controversy over representation, as exemplified by the uproar, for example, around Jeanine Cummins’ American Dirt
• The “language of harm” and the presumption, hardly always correct, “that anything that causes offense results in harm”
• The “dangers of labeling books ‘dangerous’”
• How “authors may feel compelled to respond to their audiences in real time” with revisions, apologies, even “atonement”
• Voluntary withdrawals of books by authors, as in Elizabeth Gilbert’s “indefinite delay” of The Snow Forest because of contemporary wartime criticism that the book was set in Russia
• The controversy around revisions to deceased authors’ work that seems to some to be no longer “acceptable” in current perspectives, as in the relatively recent Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, Agatha Christie, and Seuss edits controversies
• Involuntary revision, sometimes insisted on by publishers
• Efforts at “removing ‘racism’”
• Publisher withdrawals
• Contract cancellations
• Allegations of an author’s “offensive speech”
• Post-publication withdrawal
• Book withdrawals “and the reader’s interest”

‘The Reputational Two-Step’

In the penultimate section of the report, “An Industry Divided,” the report looks at an interesting trend in recent years in which publishing is less aligned with a part of the 70-year-old Freedom to Read Statement recently renewed by PEN and its supporters. In that statement, you read, “Publishers, librarians, and booksellers do not need to endorse every idea or presentation they make available. It would conflict with the public interest for them to establish their own political, moral, or aesthetic views as a standard for determining what should be published or circulated.”

Today’s report, however, moves the ball farther down the field:

“Increasingly, new generations of readers and publishing staff have called this foundational axiom into question.

“The act of publishing involves more than ensuring that a particular author’s voice is heard; it represents a heavy investment of funds and labor, an expedited channel to wide audiences, and in many cases a corresponding implication that this writer’s perspective is one worth hearing.

“In recent years, the consolidation of the publishing industry has meant that most books published in the United States carry the imprimatur of respectability from being associated with one of the country’s Big Five publishers. As a result, the choice of whom a publisher contracts with can seem all the more loaded. Yet the people making such choices can be myopic.”

This is likely the most contentious part of the report. It’s Section IV, following the introduction from Akhtar, should you need to move quickly to some of the weightier components of the argument today.

Here, for instance, is a reminder of the line from a 2021 letter written by writers and others in the business: “We believe in the power of words and we are tired of the industry we love enriching the monsters among us, and we will do whatever is in our power to stop it.”

The flashbacks that follow in today’s report include Simon & Schuster’s decision to stand by its plan to publish two books by former Trump vice-president Mike Pence despite very public internal staff objections. It also notes that in January 2021, S&S rescinded its publication agreement with Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley, in light of Hawley’s “role in the events leading up to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and his actions on the day of the insurrection.”

A part of Section IV deals with what it calls “the reputational two-step” that publishers can find themselves performing when unsavory news attaches itself to a project, and PEN questions—respectfully—whether one house or another’s decisions in these thorny cases always represent “the reader’s interest” as well as the company’s.

‘The Publisher’s Balancing Act’

It comes down, in this section, to “The Publisher’s Balancing Act,” as a sub-headline has it.

“To hold to publishing’s historic commitment to offer a broad range of views and perspectives, both executives and staffers at all levels must buy into that vision.”PEN America, ‘Booklash’ report

“Today,” the text reads, “publishers are taking on a widening array of societal obligations—making broader commitments to advance justice and representation and to redress inequities within and outside the industry.”

The report advises, “Publishers must clearly and affirmatively communicate their positions and principles to their employees and the public alike. Where employees perceive a mismatch between a publisher’s words and its actions, it falls upon their leaders to explain how they reconcile their various obligations in their decision-making across all imprints.

“Foremost among these various obligations,’ PEN America’s report asserts, “is a strong commitment to the social utility of a diversity of voices and a maximalist approach to reader access. It is vital that publishers highlight how an expansive conception and protection of free expression is the bedrock for a more broadly free society. This is particularly the case given how, in recent years, free speech has increasingly been perceived—especially among a rising generation of progressive Americans—as inadequate for protecting certain marginalized groups.

“To hold to publishing’s historic commitment to offer a broad range of views and perspectives, both executives and staffers at all levels must buy into that vision. This does not negate the role of dissent and disagreement within the industry.  But it does call for a high standard of care for staff making such objections to a specific book or author. In our conversations with publishing executives and editors who had participated in the decision to withdraw a book in response to criticism, many expressed continuing uncertainty.”

‘Without Resorting to Denying Readers’

The report includes outright recommendations.

“As a society we need to be able to engage in free debate about books without resorting to denying readers the opportunity to read them and come to their own conclusions.”PEN America, ‘Booklash’ report

For publishers, for example, these include:

• “Publishers should make formal statements of principles, including their commitment to freedom of expression and the freedom to publish widely.
• “Publishing houses should rarely, if ever, withdraw books from circulation.
• “Publishers should include authors in conversations where pre- or post-publication withdrawals are being considered.”

There’s a recommendation here, as well, for the Amazon-owned Goodreads site that reads:

• “Goodreads should establish clear policies to encourage authentic reviews and curb practices, like review-bombing, that can have the effect of suppressing ideas and open discourse in the literary space.”

The new report from PEN is a big one, coming in at almost 30,000 words. And it basically is an extensive narrative about a “PEN America moment.” The organization is counseling caution in an era of ricocheting societal concerns and fervently invested civil liberty pronouncements. Causes today soar into view, percolate in the feeds of various social media, thunder across cultures, and—as represented in so many examples cited here—can send publishers, their staffers, and their authors scrambling. We’re seeing, as recorded here, many demonstrations of how hard it is to stay on-mission, to surface the voices of an era, even the ugly ones and maybe especially the ugly ones.

What any reader of the PEN America report needs to understand is concisely stated in this sentence from the report’s conclusion: “We are calling not just for institutional shifts but also for a broader tonal shift in the country’s literary discourse, one that seeks to prevent subjective notions of offense and even harm from serving as grounds to attack or deny the very availability of books.”

And here it is one more way, in a particularly well-turned line: “As a society we need to be able to engage in free debate about books without resorting to denying readers the opportunity to read them and come to their own conclusions.”

That’s difficult. And this report will no doubt trigger booklash against PEN from some who find it hard to quiet their own most fervently held positions enough to look, along with others, for the genuinely broadest forum the industry promises to its readers and their societies.

More from Publishing Perspectives on the freedom of expression and freedom to publish is here, more on the United States market is here, more on politics is here, and more on censorship is here. More from us on the international PEN system of organizations is here and more on the PEN America program is here.

This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

The post Beyond Book Banning: PEN America Warns of ‘Booklash’ appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

Also in our latest Academic Publishing Edition at Publishing Perspectives:

• Wiley’s Jay Flynn on ‘Science Literacy’
• Springer Nature Strikes Egyptian Open Access Deal

‘We Can Help as Publishers’

Speaking from the Netherlands for our Publishing Perspectives interview, Michiel Kolman concedes that academia is “way ahead” of the publishing world—to a degree.

“New concepts come from academia,” he says, “whether academic concepts or maybe concepts that pop up in the next generation of students. But if you use another lens to look at how diverse and inclusive are the organizations themselves, like universities or research organizations, I would say there’s room for improvement.”

And “room for improvement,” as Kolman’s colleagues know, is this reliably diplomatic executive’s way of saying that nobody should be resting on their laurels.

“Here in the Netherlands,” he says, “only 25 percent of the full professors are female, while the population is half-and-half” female and male. “If you look at authors in physics across the European Union, they’re only 27-percent female. If you look at computer science worldwide, I think not even 10 percent are women. And that’s just with a gender lens.

“There’s room for improvement.”

In world publishing, Kolman is an accomplished and dedicated observer of issues in diversity, equality, and inclusion.

He’s a necktied activist whose professional titles place his work as co-chair of the Amsterdam-based LGBTIQ+ nonprofit Workplace Pride right alongside his 22-year career with Elsevier, now as senior vice-president of this major academic publisher’s research networks and its academic ambassador.

Having served a two-year term as the International Publishers Association‘s (IPA) president in 2017 and 2018, Kolman now is the IPA’s Inclusive Publishing and Literacy committee chair.

He’s also a board member of the Brussels-based Federation of European Publishers, and vice-chair of the Accessible Books Consortium (ABC), a public-private partnership led by the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO).

“And I think we can help as publishers” with challenges in diversity, Kolman says. “We have lots of data. We have studies, we have reports, and we can also help through our publications.”

Kolman advocates what might be called data-gathering persuasion. “Not only in our journals,” he says, “but also in what I call ‘inclusive research.’ For instance, nowadays, clinical trials are often conducted with white males. And if you think about it, you want inclusive research. That means you have a different lens around race and ethnicity, a different lens around gender, and that’s something we can support.

“One specific thing we’ve been doing at Elsevier, is that at our journals, we ask for a ‘diversity inclusion statement’ and their authors can identify themselves. ‘I belong to, say, the LGBTIQ+ community’ or ‘I’m a Black scientist.’

“The definitions depend a bit, of course, on the society you’re in,” Kolman says, “but this is how they identify as authors, and that’s very interesting because we don’t have much data in that area.

“We can also ask them,  ‘So did you think about inclusion and diversity while doing your research?’ That’s also super-interesting, especially when you talk about medical research.” The goal of this is to prompt scholarly authors to keep diversity in mind “when planning and executing research.”

There are things in publishing, of course, “that we can influence directly,” Kolman says. “Now, 21 percent of all our journal editors are female. Fifty-one percent of our [overall] staff is female. In trade publishing, the percentage is higher.”

Indeed, surveys in the two largest English-language markets, Britain and the States, show that the trade book workplace has surveyed in recent years as running between 70- and 80-percent female.

“In scholarly publishing, we also see a new development, female leadership,” Kolman says. “Not only our own CEO, Kumsal Bayazit, here at Elsevier, but also other companies in scholarly publishing. And that was not the case 10 years ago. It was a very male-dominated leadership then. I really find this a very positive development.”

The South African ‘Omicron’ Surprise

Kolman agrees that issues of “diversity” and “inclusivity” encompass a range of demographic features. In addition to gender balance, there are questions of race and ethnicity, sexuality, age, language, socio-economic status, class, and more.

In academic and scholarly publishing, Kolman says, “If you talk about the balance between the Global North and Global South” there are serious differences in the welcome held out to scholarly research. “At Elsevier, we did launch high-level, high-quality journals specifically for authors from Africa. It enables greater success–all open access, of course.”

He agrees that a very real-world drama put the problem of international bias into sharp relief in late November.

Eyebrows were raised when it was learned that the World Health Organization (WHO) had been alerted to detection of B.1.1.529 by genomics surveillance operations in South Africa. Many might not have expected such advanced scientific activity to come from the Global South. That lab work had defined and alerted the world to the danger of what soon would be dubbed the omicron variant of SARS-C0V-2.

As Tulio de Oliveira wrote for Klaus Schwab’s World Economic Forum, “Fortunately South Africa is well set up for this. This is thanks to a central repository of public-sector laboratory results at the National Health Laboratory Service, (NGS-SA), good linkages to private laboratories, the Provincial Health Data Centre of the Western Cape Province, and state-of-the-art modeling expertise.”

And after the November 24 alerts were transmitted from Durban to WHO scientists, Stephanie Nolen wrote up the story for The New York Times, datelined December 4 in Ntuzuma and confirming the efficacy of “a sophisticated South African effort to stanch the emergence of new variants of the coronavirus, which was identified here and shook the world this past week … [thanks to] a state-of-the-art laboratory … the KwaZulu-Natal Research and Innovation Sequencing Platform in Durban, [where] scientists sequence the genomes of thousands of coronavirus samples each week.

“The KRISP lab, as it is known,” Nolen wrote at the Times, is part of a national network of virus researchers that identified both the beta and omicron variants, drawing on expertise developed here during the region’s decades-long fight with HIV.” And de Oliveira is KRISP’s director.

What would become the most aggressively contagious variant yet detected in the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic had been correctly detected, identified, and flagged to the world scientific community from deep in the Global South.

In such cases, Kolman says, one of the biggest mistakes that the academic and scholarly communities can make is “helicopter research” in which, as he describes it, “Somebody from the Global North goes to do the research in the Global South without involving the local expertise and not having a broader conversation on the ground.”

‘Black Lives Matter was a Wakeup Call’

Funding bodies that support scientific research, Kolman says, can have serious impact on issues in diversity and inclusivity. “You put this in a positive way,” if you’re a foundation or other funding body’s representative. “You say, ‘We realize that we have very few researchers from ethnic minorities. We have a special fund available to stimulate this.’”

The key in such cases, Kolman says, is that positive approach. And an equally positive outcome awaits, Kolman says: “We know that if your research group is more diverse, you’ll be more creative, more innovative. So why not stimulate that, from a funder’s position? Absolutely.”

Kolman also points to how social and political events have contributed to progress.

“Black Lives Matter was a wakeup call for many of us,” he says. “We started supporting the Black colleges at Elsevier, a whole program to open up the dialogue around race and ethnicity. But there’s still much we should do. And we see from hard data in the UK and in the USA, that [attracting] Black talent and retaining them is very difficult. We really have to change that over time.

“Personally,” Kolman says, “as an out-and-proud gay man, if I look at what it was like when I started my career in publishing and today, things have improved dramatically.

“At Elsevier, we have pride chapters all over the world, in the Philippines and in India and Brazil. We benchmark how well we’re doing. We work with HRC [the Human Rights Campaign] in the US, and we’ve scored for the last year 100 out of 100 for Workplace Pride internationally. So if you look at how the LGBTQ+ communities support us in the workforce, I think that’s a great story to tell.

“We also started sharing more of what we can do on the content side,” Kolman says, “with Pride Hub,” which aggregates Elsevier’s research and commentary on topics that affect LGBTQ+ people.

In that range of diversity-relevant topics, Kolman adds, “I think we can also make much more progress for people with disabilities, both for our staffs but also externally.”

‘Vulnerable Minorities’

“From a diversity/inclusion perspective,” Kolman says, “we saw during the first two pandemic years, that organizations which were quite advanced and quite diverse and inclusive performed really well during the pandemic. The sense of employee engagement was a good illustration of this: It was at an all-time high, people felt included, they felt a sense of belonging, that sense of purpose.

“But at the same time, we also see that the pandemic has its most adverse effects on minorities. We see that, for instance, among female scientists, the burden on them has been higher than for male scientists during the pandemic.

“So I do worry that in the long run,” Michiel Kolman says, “vulnerable minorities will suffer more,” something for both research and publishing communities to keep in mind.

There’s room for improvement.

More from Publishing Perspectives on diversity and inclusion in publishing is here, more on academic publishing is here, and more from us on Elsevier is here.

Publishing Perspectives is the world media partner to the International Publishers Association.

More from us on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here.

The post Amsterdam’s Michiel Kolman on Diversity in STM appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

Also in our Books to Screen Edition at Publishing Perspectives

• Literary Agents’ and Rights Directors’ Film Deals
• Diogenes Verlag: Patricia Highsmith, New Film and Television – via Zurich

‘Congratulations on Your Courage’

The film Other People (Inni Ludzie) is produced by Madants for Warner Bros. Entertainment Polska’s distribution. It’s set to open March 18 in Warsaw.

The book, called a “rap-roman,” is by Dorota Masłowska and was published as sound and text by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Kraków in 2018.

And the film evocation of the book, having been completed in 2021 when it ran immediately into release-date issues because of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, is co-produced by Madants Beata Rzezniczek. She has joked that the film is “almost as old as my daughter.”

In talking with us about the work, Rzezniczek refers to the original book as “more like a stream of thoughts, sensations, and divagations than a narrative story line.” That’s either perfect or terrifying for screen adaptation, depending on your creative nerve.

Literary agent Monika Regulska at Syndykat Autorów (Authors’ Syndicate) Agencja Literacka i Scenariuszowa in Warsaw notes that Masłowska, one of Poland’s biggest names in contemporary Polish literature, has a translation to English by Benjamin Paloff of her earlier Honey, I Killed the Cats from Deep Vellum.

Her debut novel, Snow White and Russian Red, is to be published in China by Shanghai University Press. In Berlin, Rowohlt is to publish Olaf Kuehl’s translation to German of Other People as Andere Leute. And Books From Poland has referred to Masłowska as “an uncompromising commentator on social life.”

‘Thrashing in the Maze’

Set in contemporary Warsaw, Other People is about Kamil and Iwona. “She is a bored and desperate wife, living in luxury. He’s 32 and still lives with his mother in a block of flats, while projecting visions of his hip-hop career and landing random jobs.

“Their relationship is seemingly meaningless. Yet it’s thanks to this relationship that they’ll see their life choices and the people around them in a different light.”

Warner’s distribution material calls it “a story of people caught up in a love triangle in a time of breakup, lifetime loans, box diets, cheap wine, and the constant hype of social media. People thrashing in the maze of boulevards and alleys of the city of Warsaw, pulsating to the rhythm of the rap. In everyday life, the heroes are accompanied by a closely watching narrator,” who is played by Sebastian Fabiański. Also in the cast are Jacek Beler, Magdalena Koleśnik, Sonia Bohosiewicz, Marek Kalita, and Beata Kawka.

The Polish Film Institute and Mazovian and Warsaw Film Funds helped support the film development let by Beata Rzezniczek and Klaudia Śmieja-Rostworowska of Madants (read it as “Mad Ants”) with Aleksandra Terpińska directing. Terpińska’s work on the film has won both a Passport Polityka and the Polish Gdynia Film Award. A tie-in edition of the book is forthcoming, and the show is being praised for its difficult balancing act of putting across Masłowska’s “perverse way of speaking about mutual dislike … and attractions.”

A part of what’s drawing so much attention to the film is its raft of early honors.

At September’s 2021 Polish Film Festival, for example, the show won:

• The “Onets” award as the “Discovery of the Festival”
• The Best Debut Director honor in a feature film for Terpińska
• The award of the Studio and Local Cinema Network for Best Film
• The Best Actor award for Jacek Beler

In addition, both producers and the show’s director shared in a Golden Lions nomination for Best Film. And Magdalena Chowanska won the Best Editing honor.

The film was also seen in November at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival.

Beata Rzezniczek: A ‘Frantic, Poetic Love Story’

In our exchange with Madants producer Beata Rzezniczek, we start by asking what attracted her and her co-producer Klaudia  Śmieja-Rostworowska–and their director, Aleksandra Terpińska–to Masłowska’s book.

Beata Rzezniczek: Actually, it all started with Dorota who met Aleksandra at a film festival. They liked each other and after a while Dorota contacted Aleksandra about her (then upcoming) project Other People.

At first, Aleksandra said no to the idea of adapting the book into a film. It was a great and powerful piece, but Dorota’s writing is very special–it’s more like a stream of thoughts, sensations, and divagations than a narrative story line.

But then, when Aleksandra was helping Dorota to make a book trailer for a Polish edition, she started to see a way to tell this frantic, poetic story and translate it into images. This is when we entered as a production company.

I was working with Aleksandra on her short films before, and my business partner Klaudia Smieja-Rostworowska had experience collaborating with Warner Bros. Poland. They showed us great trust and believed in the film from the very beginning. Other People is not a crowd-pleaser but we felt that it touches so many social and actual issues that the audience can relate to it.  Since the dialogues are almost entirely rapped, Other People is very different, fresh, blunt, and original.”

Publishing Perspectives: Can you specify the biggest challenge in making a film of this kind?

Beata Rzezniczek: We faced challenges at literally every stage of production.

It’s an extremely ambitious undertaking and, as I said, nobody has ever done anything like this before. There were no ready-made models and we often learned from our mistakes.

Of course, musicals have been made, but our film doesn’t quite fall into that category. Rap and beats are the organic fabric of the film in which our characters move, but we’re far from the classics of the genre.

Musical and technological issues were certainly one of the biggest challenges, but also risks. Fortunately, the first festival screenings brought us fantastic reviews and awards. My favorite comment from the audience that I heard several times was, “Congratulations on your courage.”

Publishing Perspectives: Speaking of the awards and acclaim in early festival screenings, do you think the success you’re seeing has to do with Aleksandra Terpińska having both written the adaptation and directed it? It seems this has to make it closer to her, making it “her own,” in a way.

Beata Rzezniczek: It was natural that Aleksandra would do both writing and directing. Aleksandra, although she considers herself first and foremost a director, also thinks very much about the structure of the text–which was crucial in the case of this book adaptation.

Other People is also auteur-cinema. It is Masłowska but filtered through Aleksandra. It’s interesting that the book itself was adapted three times by different theatrical directors, in fact, and it’s  very interesting how different these interpretations are.

Publishing Perspectives: How hard is it to find the right book for adaptation to film or television? Do you and the team at Madants find what you’re looking for in today’s literary output from the publishing industry?

Beata Rzezniczek: We’re mostly into auteur-cinema, but we still look for inspiration in reading books.

Lately we’ve become more and more interested in nonfiction literature. It’s amazing how stories based on facts transcend reality and become more incredible than the fiction. It’s scary and fascinating at the same time.

There’s so much going on right now, it’s impossible to take your eyes off it.

Other people’s co-production credits include Alcatraz Films, Moderator Inwestycje, Film Produkcja, Warner Bros. Poland, Mazovia Warsaw Film Fund, Abstraction Plan, Canal+Polska, and Aneta Graff-Dąbrowska.

More from Publishing Perspectives on adaptations of books to film and television is here and here. More on rights and licensing is here, and more on the Polish publishing scene and book market is here.

More from us on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here.

The post Producer Beata Rzezniczek’s Rap on ‘Other People’ appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

Will Canada’s Educational Texts Come From the States?

The second decade of what might be the world’s most flagrant copyright fiasco well open on January 31 and February 1, 2022.

That’s when Pablo Rodriguez, minister of Canadian Heritage, will lead a two-day national summit of the nation’s arts, culture, and heritage sectors at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. If you spot a delegation there that looks especially—and deservedly—impatient, fed up, and put out, it might just be book publishers, their authors, and other copyright advocates.

“It just feels like we very politely have waited, to be ignored. For 10 years.” That’s John Degen talking. He’s the executive director of the Writers’ Union of  Canada and chair of the International Authors Forum for writerly organizations, based in the UK.

When Degen refers to waiting for 10 years, our regular readers know exactly what he’s talking about. It’s Canada’s Copyright Modernization Act of 2012. And here at Publishing Perspectives, it’s one of the most intensely followed challenges we’ve covered in our specialization on the international publishing industry.

Degen is one of six specialists convened by Publishing Perspectives in a round-table interview to look today (December 8) at where things stand in the controversy that for 10 years has made Canada the unintended global poster child for badly crafted copyright legislation. The optimistically named Copyright Modernization Act has been crippling to English-language Canadian publishers and authors, representing a figure approaching C$200 million (US$158 million) in lost licensing revenues.

Joining us in our round table, in addition to Degen, were:

• Kate Edwards, executive director of the Association of Canadian Publishers
• Claire Gillis, chief business affairs officer at Access Copyright, the collective management organization established by creators and publishers for English-language Canada
• Samantha Holman, a board member of IFRRO and CEO of the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency, the collective management organization for Ireland
• Hugo Setzer, immediate past president of the International Publishers Association and CEO of the Mexico City-based publisher Manual Moderna
• José Borghino, secretary-general of the International Publishers Association

The Canadian English-Language Copyright Crisis

“There’s a real sense of resignation and even betrayal in the writing community in Canada,” Degen says. “There were tons of evidence brought forward by Access Copyright,” evidence of the damage being done to the sector, “and that was studiously ignored by the Canadian Supreme Court” when it failed last year to say that Access Copyright has the right to enforce royalty payments for copyrighted work.

“The removal of our collective rights was just devastating. It has to be Parliament at this point. It just has to be.” – John Degen, Writers’ Union of Canada

“The removal of our collective rights through this decision was just devastating. So it has to be Parliament at this point. It just has to be.”

Not only is the Canadian copyright crisis now called “the Canadian flu” in international book publishing circles but—for those who love silver linings—it’s believed to be working as a vaccination-by-example to help ward off similarly disastrous legislation in markets far from Canadian shores. For example, some observers surmise that when Cyril Ramaphosa, South Africa’s president, returned a copyright “reform” bill unsigned to Parliament in July 2020, he likely was influenced by the catastrophic effects of Canada’s 2012 Copyright Modernization Act.

Setzer was one of the International Publishers Association officers to testify in 2018 parliamentary standing committee hearings—as did Boghino, Degen, and Edwards. They and many others attested to the ruinous effects, however unintended, of the Copyright Modernization Act’s interpretation of “fair dealing,” also referred to as “fair use” in some markets.

This is the copyright exception, familiar in many publishing markets, that should allow for a controlled amount of copying of copyrighted pages for legitimate and closely defined educational purposes. It’s covered by a small per-student copyright licensing fee paid by a school or university system. It’s that per-student fee that becomes part of Access Copyright’s job to collect.

And while the French-language part of the country was able to find its way to an accommodation in 2018 between its own copyright management collective, Copibec, and Laval University, the much larger English-language part of the country has seen its crisis only deepen, with Access Copyright caught in the crossfire.

The ‘Fair Dealing’ Per-Student Fee

As the most of the Copyright Modernization Act’s amendments in late 2012–including the education exception to fair dealing–the per-student fee for elementary and secondary schools outside of Quebec was C$4.81 in the lower bracket for younger students. And it’s that fee that suddenly wasn’t being paid. As the new act was implemented, major educational institutions in Canada began interpreting the new law to mean that they could simply stop paying that fee and start Xeroxing and sharing content digitally without charge.

“It’s turned around completely. It’s as if we need to prove that they do need to pay something.” – Claire Gillis, Access Copyright

What publishers describe as some 600 million pages of content (based on court filings) were being copied—and still are—without a penny going to authors or publishing houses for them.

Probably the most acrimonious moment of the entire saga arrived in February 2018 when 94 Canadian school boards and education ministries sued Access Copyright. The lawsuits were an attempt to recoup per-student fees paid for three years prior to the implementation of the new act, never mind the newly halted streams of educational publishing revenue.

Anyone in world publishing circles who had ignored the growing crisis until then could no longer look away. Claire Gillis of Access Copyright talks about how the conversation suddenly “was turned upside down. It used to be about getting permission to copy things and to have access to content. Now, it’s turned around completely. It’s as if rights holders need to prove that they do need to pay something.”

Here were the English-language state-ordained educational systems of Canada suing a nonprofit copyright collective representing the creators and publishers for the legally established copyright fees required to pay the publishers and authors of the curriculum content used to educate Canada’s students.

And, Gillis points out, that per-student fee has been reduced to C$2.41 per pupil, almost half what it was in 2012. It’s still not being paid.

Canada’s Diminished Educational Content

Setzer, a publisher of educational material, himself, spoke of this in his testimony during parliamentary hearings in Canada. “One of the things I mentioned during those hearings,” he says, is that the misguided denigration of true “fair dealing” and payment in copyright “actually means that students won’t have the materials they need.

“Perhaps you’ll have children in Canada studying with books made in the USA or in the UK, but not by Canadian authors and publishers.”  – Hugo Setzer, Manual Moderno

“Canadian authors won’t have the incentives to write and Canadian publishers won’t have the incentives to publish those titles.  So perhaps you’ll have children in Canada studying with books made in the USA or in the UK, but not by Canadian authors and publishers. Which is really, really sad. They’re damaging the community they intended to help in the first place.”

Setzer speaks in one of the International Publishers Association’s 125th anniversary podcasts about the kind of covenant that’s represented by copyright. “It’s how value is returned to authors and publishers.”

But he points out that during the still ongoing coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic, the generosity of publishers who temporarily made materials available without additional licenses for educators to use online prompted some in the “information should be free” community to assume, “You see, it doesn’t cost anything anyway’—another way to attack copyright.

“Many people believe, ‘It’s easy to be an author, you just write something down in a book,’ he says.” But writing is in no way so easy, of course, and the authors “have to make a living from that. The same for publishers. We make a lot of investments, employ a lot of people. And copyright is the system that allows us to do this.”

Borghino, Setzer’s association colleague, underlines that one effect of the Canadian crisis is attrition: Educational publishers are having to leave the field entirely or switch to producing trade content.

The Association of Canadian Publishers’ Edwards says, “It’s not so much that they’ve packed up and left. There’s nowhere to go, right? These are Canadian publishing companies. They’re rooted in local communities. They previously were publishing for the school market and have shifted their focus to serve the trade.”

That means that what once was one of the most prestigious educational content-producing systems in the world is being, as Degen puts it, “frittered away.”

Famed for its “singular plurality,” as the Guest of Honor Canada program proudly proclaimed the national ethos at Frankfurter Buchmesse in October, the concept of an educational-content context being created for Canadians by Canadians in all their rich diversity is endangered.

And there are, of course, many sources of educational material all too happy to ship in their non-Canadian content, particularly from the States.

The Supreme Court Disappointment

Finally, in October 2020, there was hope that a Canadian Supreme Court decision on what the Association of Canadian Publishers calls this “broken copyright framework” would redirect the crisis, turn around the nonpayment of copying royalties on appeal to a 2017 federal court ruling in Access Copyright v. York University that had gone in favor of the established copyright regime.

“There are very few curriculum resources being published by independent Canadian publishers today and that wasn’t the case 10 years ago.” – Kate Edwards, Association of Canadian Publishers

Instead, as the publishers’ association’s Edwards put it in August of this year, “After nearly a decade of litigation, we find ourselves facing even greater uncertainty than when the copyright act was amended in 2012, and cannot repair the marketplace on our own. Bold leadership on the part of government is needed to clarify fair-dealing provisions, and to ensure that effective mechanisms for copyright enforcement are available to all rightsholders.”

As she describes it now, when the Supreme Court declined even to speak to the “fair dealing” element, the bottom basically fell right out of the scenario for publishers. Without the assurance that remuneration is forthcoming, the creative industry behind education simply cannot function.

“There are very few curriculum resources being published by independent Canadian publishers today and that wasn’t the case 10 years ago,” she says. “There’s just not the business case to invest. It’s really costly and labor-intensive to develop robust materials that will meet curriculum objectives. And without a return, the publishers have said, ‘We can’t publish for the K-12 market anymore. We’re going to focus our energy elsewhere.’”

Copyright Clearance Center‘s Michael Healy, one of the most influential voices in copyright today, told Publishing Perspectives in his annual year-end interview with us on copyright issues, “It’s clearly the end of the judicial road” in Canada.

“So, what are you left with but a legislative and parliamentary solution? That’s all that can be done now. I certainly remember in the years immediately following the 2012 act,” Healy said, “independent reports showing that smaller publishers were forced to close their doors. And I remember US publishers reported to be closing their north-of-the-border operations in the wake of the 2012 legislation.

“There clearly are both local and international casualties of that legislation.”

The Critical Role of Domestic Content

The Canadians we’ve spoken with for today’s story say they’re convinced, as Healy is, that the only way forward is toward a legislative fix.

They’ve been heartened to hear the copyright situation mentioned in campaign commentary by politicians in both the conservative and liberal camps prior to the September 20 election. There seems to be an understanding on the part of the newly forming government that something’s direly wrong in Canada’s copyright construct as it pertains to education.

“The schools’ licenses fund a considerable amount of investment in schools.” – Samantha Holman, Irish Copyright Licensing Agency

Holman, from her experience in Ireland, is especially clear on the sheer expense of trying to move forward any further on a judicial track.

“The money,” she says, “the cost of continued court cases would be far better off in the hands of the publishing business, creating new materials for K-12, than in the hands of the lawyers going to court. An extraordinary amount of money has been spent on this.”

“All around the world,” Borghino says, “people are talking about the Canadian situation. We have to stress to the Canadian legislators that they’ve got to do something about this. It’s no good dillydallying for another 10 years. They’ve got to do it now.”

There’s certainly no paucity of examples for what needs to be done, Holman in Ireland says.

“The fact that the Canadian Supreme Court didn’t talk about ‘fair dealing’ in the end—and didn’t actually proclaim the situation unfair—does prove that it works,” she says.

Such a “fair use” concept is something the court couldn’t counter “because it works in other countries, in all of the other Anglo-Saxon countries, in common-law systems.” It’s telling, then, she says, that the justices “didn’t go there.” She reflects on how in Ireland, “The schools’ licenses fund a considerable amount of investment in schools. Publishing creates domestic content for our young people, particularly the K-12 age group, who are inundated with international content all the time,” just as Canadian young people are.

“The importance of having local and domestic content for this is very important.”

Looking for the Legislative Launchpad

There’s no immediately apparent pathway, no mechanism by which the publishers and/or authors can forcibly trigger legislative action, themselves, but Heritage’s cultural sector summit at the end of January looks like a setting in which to get the ball rolling.

“We’re not asking legislators to ‘go backward.’ There are plenty of examples around the world. Examples of legislation that allows for some kind of ‘fair dealing’ within limits.”  – José Borghino, International Publishers Association

Now, clearly, is the time for the Canadian publishers’ and authors’ communities to work together and formulate—in advance—a push for attention to the issue at the summit, particularly if that event is meant to create an agenda for arts and cultural issues under the newly formed minority government led by the Liberals.

Prior to the summit, Rodriquez, the minister, is to hold meetings with arts, culture, and heritage workers in Vancouver, Edmonton, Winnipeg, Toronto, Montréal, and Halifax. If publishing’s people can organize effectively, Rodriguez might see “those copyright people” turning up at each stop to signal to him the urgency of the situation. Among the descriptors Rodriquez’s office has offered for the summit is that it’s to include “solutions for a sustainable recovery.” And it’s clear to anyone willing to look that the educational publishing sector in Canada cannot be sustained as things stand now.

“Both main parties,” Degen says, “appear to be on-side, so right now it’s a question of us focusing the Parliament on this issue, and bringing it to a vote.”

One part of the role of the International Publishers Association, going forward, is to reflect back into Canada the fact that the worldwide community is watching, aghast, at the growing catastrophe underway–and to offer ready guidelines which, as Holman says, are in place in many parts of the world.

“We’re not asking legislators to ‘go backward,’” Borghino says, remembering his conversations in Canada with legislators during the parliamentary standing-committee hearings.

“There are plenty of examples around the world. Examples of legislation that allows for some kind of ‘fair dealing’ within limits. We pointed them to places where this exists and functions and where authors get a hot meal at the table.”

What he and his associates heard back from legislators at the time, Borghino says, was, “But there’s a law case right now.” They stepped around the issue, evidently hoping the courts would solve it for them. That, of course, didn’t happen.

And even then, Borghino says, “We kept saying, ‘Well, why don’t you just change the law? Why don’t you do what legislators are supposed to do? Change the law so that everybody gets something from this. So it’s taken another five years, and I’m really glad to hear from Kate and John and others that we may be heading in that direction.

“But we just want it to happen as quickly as possible—before another snap election happens and we have to start all over again.”

More from Publishing Perspectives on the Canadian market is here, more from us on the Copyright Modernization Act is here, and more on other copyright issues in world publishing is here.

Publishing Perspectives is the world media partner of the International Publishers Association.

More from us on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here.

This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

The post Canada’s 10-Year Crisis: ‘This Broken Copyright Framework’ appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

‘There’s Only Words Like Acceleration’

As the announcement was made in January and affirmed in May that Canada’s Wattpad was being acquired by South Korea’s Naver in a US$600 million deal—our interview with Wattpad co-founding CEO Allen Lau is here—it wasn’t fully clear how the two companies studio divisions would be handled.

Both Webtoon Studios and Wattpad Studios have accelerating profiles, Wattpad based, of course, on the serial fiction created on its platform and Webtoon on the digital comics that lead its brand with international audiences.

Today (June 24), it’s been announced that Aron Levitz, who had led the fast-growing Wattpad Studios division since its inception in 2016, will lead what’s being called the Wattpad Webtoon Studios. Naver, the new parent company, has committed US$100 million to the studios division, which—if Levitz’ success with Wattpad Studios is any indication—could eventually become the main engine of the combined company’s earning punch.

Levitz’ background includes being director of entertainment and content acquisition for BlackBerry and senior director of strategic alliances with Xtreme Labs. At Wattpad before forming the studios division, he launched the Wattpad Stars program, which aligned the platform’s writers with commercial clients’ needs and promotion, and he was head of business development for a time.

In a quick interview with Publishing Perspectives, Levitz says best aspect of the new studio merger is the fact that the two studios—Webtoon only roughly two years old—tend to speak the same language in how they approach content development.

“We speak about our creators and content in the same way. We speak about the importance of being creator-centric,” he says. “We speak about the importance of engagement between creator and fandom. We talk about the importance of listening to fandom, to the creative process, and the adaptation process whether editorial for books or you know film or TV.

“And so, what could have been the biggest challenge—if we’d both thought about our content differently and had completely different methods, completely different ways—just wasn’t there.”

The challenge, however, is getting more content to screen faster, especially with two platforms now feeding into the studio hub.

“How do we scale that globally, in more and more languages?” he asks. Wattpad is the more experienced partner “in developing and publishing in different languages,” while Webtoon has had its concentration in English-language production.

“We have this whole new amazing library of content,” he says, “a whole new set of creators. How are we going to work to scale that? And one of the nice things that we’re starting with is what makes sense for us to use together—this amazing network of partners we have around the world. They’re going to help us do that right, give us local ideas” for content development pertinent to various audiences. “We can talk to Penguin Random House in the UK or in Spain.”

Publishing Perspectives readers know that what Levitz is referring to is Wattpad’s deals with production, distribution, and development partners—years in the making—that now include Sony Pictures Television, Erik Feig’s Picturestart, Germany’s Bavaria Fiction, Italy’s Leone Film Group, Turner Latin America’s Particular Crowd, Brazil’s Wise Entertainment, Canada’s CBC, France’s Mediawan, and Singapore’s MediaCorp.

Webtoons brings partners into the picture, too, including the Jim Henson Company, Vertigo Entertainment, Crunchyroll, and Bound Entertainment.

“So there are only words here now,” Levitz says, “like acceleration. We need these incredible partners we’ve been working with for years to continue to play their part, and we’re here to invest in them.’

Also on the Wattpad Webtoon Studios Team

Taylor Grant, heading up the Webtoon entertainment portfolio, will report to Levitz, as will Eric Lehrman, who handles Wattpad’s entertainment suite.

Particularly familiar to the world publishing community, Ashleigh Gardner remains the chief of publishing efforts (including the growing Wattpad Books line she created), and Dexter Ong—who joined Wattpad as its Hong Kong lead—will be the lead on international business for the studios.

Much as in the concept of complementary creative energy that makes the merger coherent for Wattpad and Webtoon, the studios are expected to bring their respective strengths and emphases to a common table of development.

Messaging for the news media today indicates that the Canadian and Korean elements of the new studio combine have “more than 100 projects in development or production” as well, of course, as “expertise in YA and comic adaptations.”

The publishing program built by Gardner is intended to stand in the studios division, the company says, “allowing for fully verticalized intellectual property across television, film, and books.” In fact, there are a dozen Wattpad Webtoon Studios projects slated for publication in book form or already produced as such.

The first volume of Rachel Smythe’s Eisner Award-nominated Webtoon graphic novel series Lore Olympus is to be published by Penguin Random House in October, for example, and Wattpad has worked with Hachette in France, Penguin Random House UK, Mondadori in Italy, Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial in Spain, AST in Russia, and Anvil Publishing in the Philippines.

Wattpad has published hundreds of books with partners around the world and 30 titles from Gardner’s own Wattpad Books imprint since it launched in 2019.

Currently in screen development, the Wattpad Webtoon Studios list includes:

• Float, which will star and be produced by Robbie Amell
• What Happened That Night, currently being adapted by Academy Award-nominated screenwriter David Arata
• The Hound, with a script by Angela LaManna (Netflix’ The Haunting of Bly Manor)
• Perfect Addiction with Constantin Film and JB Pictures
• And one sporting the quintessential Wattpad title: The Bad Boy’s Girl, with Leone Film Group

Rights: Wattpad Books Partners With Russia’s AST

A quick update on Wattpad Books, led by Gardner. On Wednesday (June 23), the company announced a first-look collaborative deal (like that struck with several major international publishers) with Russia’s publishing house AST.

The program is structured in four sections all under a “Wattpad TOP” branding device and featuring fantasy, mystery, thrillers, and romance. The “TOP” designation appears to refer to the basic source of many of the stories, Wattpad’s top-drawing serial fiction in Russian on the platform (which operates in more than 50 languages.

And AST is to publish Chasing Red by Isabel Ronin, identified as “a steamy romance,” of course, with 257 million reads on the platform.

It’s one of the titles that was published by Dominique Raccah’s Sourcebooks in 2017.

Its Russian title translates to In Pursuit of Scarlet. A red dress is important to the story. So is a wealthy heartthrob.

More from Publishing Perspectives on Wattpad is here, more on mergers and acquisitions is here, more on the Canadian market is here, and more from us on books to film is here.

More from us on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here.

This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

The post Canada and Korea: The Newly Merged Wattpad Webtoon Studios appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

Growth Trend: ‘Social Science and Discrimination’

<strong>This year through May, adult nonfiction topics in social justice and race</strong> have sold 700,000 more units than in 2020 year-to-date in the United States’ book market.

That’s one of the figures released today (June 22) by NPD Group books industry analyst Kristen McLean, who sees that as a 160-percent level of growth over titles sold in the same thematic focal area from January through May last year. And the news arrives as HarperCollins releases the news that it now has world rights to publish from the archives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.  More on that is below.

“Notably,” McLean says, the titles she’s watching are “all frontlist, published in the last year. In 2020, there was an incredible surge in interest in these topics, and book buyers continue to seek out books that help them understand and address racism. New voices on these subjects continue to find an audience.”

In terms of conceptualizing the trend, McLean says that the highest growth rate was seen in titles related to “social science and discrimination.”

Unit sales in that category grew nearly 200 percent, she says, year-over-year, and in the lead this year is Heather McGhee’s  The Sum of Us: What Racism Costs Everyone and How We Can Prosper Together (Penguin Random House / One World).

More titles driving growth in this subject area:

• Uncomfortable Conversations With a Black Man by Emmanuel Acho (Macmillan / Flatiron Books, 2020)
•  This Is the Fire: What I Say to My Friends About Racism by CNN’s Don Lemon  (Hachette/Little, Brown, 2021)
• You Are Your Best Thing: Vulnerability, Shame Resilience, and the Black Experience edited by Tarana Burke and Brené Brown (Penguin Random House, 2021) 

McLean, in messaging the media this morning, says, “Last year, Amistad Press, an imprint of HarperCollins, started the #BlackoutBestsellerList hashtag campaign on social media to help support Black writers and demonstrate their power and clout in the publishing industry.

“The campaign encouraged readers to purchase any two books by Black writers between June 14 and June 20. The week ending June 20 marked the first week that print unit sales volume exceeded 15 million in 2020, aided in part by the success of the campaign and ongoing interest in books related to this cultural conversation.”

HarperCollins: Official MLK Publisher

Also in news today on the subject: HarperOne Group president and publisher Judith Curr has announced that the HarperCollins is now the official publisher of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s archives, the publisher having achieved world rights to publish in all formats including children’s books, digital formats, journals, and graphic novels, in all languages.

HarperOne Group will appoint an archivist to handle access to the material, making it available to HarperCollins’ international corps of editors. The company says it will engage Black scholars, actors, artists, performers, and social activists “to help bring King’s works to life.”

In a prepared statement, Curr is quoted, saying, “We view this as a unique global publishing program, leveraging the company’s collective creative efforts to develop region-specific yet universally appealing publications that illustrate how extensive and inclusive Dr. King’s work is.

“We see this as an opportunity to further solidify Dr. King’s legacy as one of the world’s essential figures in the fight for justice and equality.”

And HarperCollins president and CEO Brian Murray says, “Dr. King has been  an inspiration to generations of people throughout the world.

“We’re proud to have been the  original publisher of Dr. King’s first books and are excited by the prospect of expanding his  reach in new ways.

“We look forward to the opportunity to remind readers everywhere just how  timeless Dr. King’s words are, and how their themes continue to resonate worldwide.”

First publication of titles in the United States from the agreement with the King estate, which is managed by Eric D. Tidwell, is anticipated to coincide with Martin Luther King Jr. Day in the States in January.

New in Political Books

Out today from Melville House, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything is journalist Mike Rothschild’s book on the conspiracy theory and its peculiar hold on the Trumpist elements of the American electorate. 

A concept of social justice that rests on the idea that Democratic Party leaders are cannibalizing children has reached a level of attention that casts Trump in a messianic light.

While many in the news media use language that indicates QAnon followers “believe” the many outlandish tenets that lie under the movement’s big tent—to the disgruntled right wing, it may be more a theory-of-convenience than a genuine belief system—Rothschild’s release comes at a moment of fast-rising concern about QAnon’s warping of the Republican base.

In a recent interview, Rothschild advised that those who have friends and/or family members aligned with QAnon not try to contradict or criticize the cult’s ideas, for fear of driving adherents farther away. Instead, he recommended, simply let devotees “know you’re there,” still friendly, so that at the moment an element of the program’s preposterous illogic surfaces, that person might be able to reach out to talk about it.

And releasing on July 6, former federal prosecutor Elie Honig’s Hatchet Man: How Bill Barr Broke the Prosecutor’s Code and Corrupted the Justice Department (HarperCollins) has gained new interest amid the revelations of the Justice Department’s subpoenas in a classified leak inquiry to obtain communications of sitting House Intelligence Committee members and those of journalists at major news media including The New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN.

As many are pointing out, Barr’s eventual public disagreement with Trump’s “Big Lie”—that he was robbed of an election victory in 2020—came much too late to exonerate him for distorting the Mueller report’s key findings, sentencing decisions that favored Trump, and more.

In a Q&A with Rutgers Today, Honig—who teaches at Rutgers University and is a CNN senior legal analyst—said, “The new revelation that the Department of Justice [DOJ] under Barr took intrusive steps to secretly obtain private phone records of journalists and members of Congress shows us that we still don’t know the full depths of his corruption and abuse of power.

“It appears he was willing to use DOJ not only to protect Trump but also to pursue perceived political enemies, which is even more dangerous. It’s even worse than we knew when Barr left office.”

Lastly, here’s something you don’t see often: a book for children on authoritarian rule.

This Is a Dictatorship (Book Island, September) was originally published in 1977 after the 1975 death of Francisco Franco of Spain.

With translations already on the market in 10 languages, the book—with Mikel Casal’s new illustrations—was freshly published by Spain’s Media Vaca for its (sad) relevance today, to help children understand what dictatorship means.

The United Kingdom’s Book Island has adjusted the new publication outlook from what was to have been this spring to September, and pre-orders are being taken here.

More from Publishing Perspectives on nonfiction is here, more on political books is here, and more on Donald Trump is here. More from us on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here.

This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

The post Sales of Social Justice and Race Books Soar in the States appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

‘I Knew the Words’

Literary fiction readers know this problem well.  As soon as they start to recommend to colleagues and friends a new book or television series like Amazon Original’s Tales from the Loop, there’s someone lurking behind a nearby tree yelling “sci-fi!”

This time it might be the lonely robot in Simon Stålenhag’s Loop: Each time you catch sight of this forlorn, cowering tech-artifact, Philip Glass’ first-ever score for television comes in with the inevitability of Glass’ signature arpeggios.

If you’re not a science fiction fan, then you need to know that Stålenhag’s tales aren’t about the particle accelerator that hums underneath a Swedish town in his books.

In the show that premiered on April 3, shot in Canada, that town has become Mercer, Ohio. And the CERN-like accelerator, “the Loop” that employs the townspeople, is much less important than the embrace you feel in this exploration of relatedness, the need to find one’s place. What’s looping here is lives and their connections with each other. Family, loyalty, isolation amid love. They keep coming back. Like an old robot.

“When they started going viral,” Stålenhag says about the images he’d created, “I realized there were so many different interpretations being made from these pictures.”

Gracious and candid in an interview with Publishing Perspectives from his home in rural Sweden, Stålenhag speaks in a strong, searching English. His conversation is a headlong drive to explain quickly: “It’s not their fault,” he says about fans of his work who were misinterpreting the great hulking remnants of technological apparatus on the snowy slopes of his art. “Maybe there’s an artist out there who could tell these stories with only pictures. But I can’t do this. I needed words.

“And I knew the words. And the words, themselves—the art-form of the words—they matter,” he says.

“Words were part of my research. Technical words, jargon from engineering,” words he’s used now to describe an energy out of sight and its impact on a village.

One effect of this is captured by the actor Jonathan Pryce in talking about the show. He’s likened the effect of Tales on Mercer, Ohio–or on the original Mälarö, Sweden–to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. Interlocking storylines lie under frosted, grassy fields, each townsperson approaching another, then retreating. Nostalgia baked in. The way forward unreliable.

What’s more, words had been part of his life, Stålenhag says, as long as images had—from that boyhood he remembers in his visions, a suburban place of fabulous techno-relics standing as casual backdrop pieces around which kids hunkered and chatted. From his book:

“We walked in long lines through winter nights, and you could see little points of light go on and off in the darkness–cigarettes smoked by teenagers who had gathered around their wrecked memories, like a requiem. We made our nights our days, squinted at the horizon, and sighed. Way over there, the morning dawned.”

‘He’s Mastered Both Parts’

Happily for Julia Angelin, CEO of Stockholm’s Salomonsson Agency and Stålenhag’s agent, her client turns out to be not only a visual artist of growing impact but also a writer. “It’s really fun to work with someone who’s so diverse in their talents,” she says.

“We’ve had interest from sci-fi imprints as well as literary ones and those specializing in art books. I always push publishers to try to pitch Simon’s books to booksellers so that they end up in both the art and sci-fi sections.

“But I also have friends who read neither genre and yet they adore these books.

“I’ve been contacted by publishers who want Simon to write a full novel, one without illustrations, which feels like a sure sign that he’s mastered both parts.”

‘A Dream in Life’

There’s another way you can assess the value of Stålenhag’s writing: In Nathaniel Halpern’s screenplay. This cinematic interpretation of Stålenhag’s work is the recognition of one writer’s genius by another.

Halpern shapes Stålenhag’s stories and vignettes and images into something O. Henry would understand. There’s a cottony, queasy silence that keeps settling like snow on the work. It’s generated by affections’ ironies, and by time’s darkness.

In a well-made video with the show’s creative team (above), you hear directors, actors, and Halpern talk about how out-of-the ordinary the work is.

“I tried to be incredibly faithful to Simon’s artwork,” Halpern says, which is why those who know Stålenhag’s command of his “normal-abnormal” tech-scapes are finding the show so arresting. It works on the screen. Seeing these mysterious relics of the Loop, identical to Stålenhag’s canny creations, is like driving by landmarks you’ve seen in postcards.

“I’m so glad they didn’t try to go down an explanatory path,” Stålenhag’ says.

He had a meeting of the minds with Halpern five years ago when Halpern “pitched it to me.” Halpern, Stålenhag says, has stayed remarkably true to how he promised it could look and be in this production. “Now,” Stålenhag says, sounding almost overwhelmed, “it’s just amazing to see.

“I would say this is like a waking dream, to see these sets being built, to see photos of people building things that I’d painted five years before. And I say it’s like a waking dream because I can’t say it’s a dream-come-true: I never could have dreamt this happening. It’s so unlikely.”

Stålenhag now has seen deeply turned fables spun up from his words in Halpern’s screenplay, eloquent lines for Pryce, Jane Alexander, Daniel Zolghadri, Rebecca Hall, and the gifted young actor Duncan Joiner.  Stålenhag served as a consultant, attached to the show as an executive producer. One of its directors, Jodie Foster (Episode 8), says that the work is “like a film lover’s television show.”

And for Stålenhag, it’s authentic. The show got it right, he says.

“It’s all becoming part of my collective seashell. It sounds like that.”

‘Why the World Looks Like It Does’

Stålenhag’s published books are produced by the relatively small Swedish house Fria Ligan:

• Tales from the Loop (128 pages, 2014)—film rights went to Fox (US)
• Things From the Flood (129 pages, 2016)—film rights went to Fox (US)
• The Electric State (144 pages, 2017)—film rights went to AGBO (US) for a film, rather than series

As Publishing Perspectives readers will recall, agent Julia Angelin has had enormous success in rights sales to date, each book going into 15 or more translations, the deals including film, and most of these transactions were closed before the new Amazon Original production was out.

The fact that The Electric State—which Stålenhag says is his favorite—has been sold for a film rather than a series, he says, is right. Loop and Flood fit well into a series’ structure, “that anthology thing,” as he puts it.  The Electric State, on the other hand, “has a beginning, a middle, and an end,” and its story of a road trip to the edge of a continent rocked by cultural upheaval should adapt well as a single film.

‘It Looked Just the Same’

There’s a fourth book coming, Stålenhag says, again with Stockholm’s Fria Ligan—Free League—as lead publisher. Stålenhag expects it to be out later this year, and he notes that Fria Ligan is far less prone than many major houses to be cowed by the market pressures of the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic. They’re likely, he says, “to just publish it when it’s ready. We’re aiming for the winter, hopefully for Christmas.

“Today, I’ve been working on final touches for that book,” he says. “I’m going through the text with my editor.”

His first new release in three years, The Labyrinth is “what I would say is a domestic horror story,” he says, clearly proud of this new set of words and pictures. “I wanted to make a cosmic horror. So it’s weird extraterrestrial things we don’t understand, but everything is set in a cozy little bunker. There’s a family, two adults and kids. And we learn why the world looks like it does.”

Stålenhag says that unlike many authors, he has had little trouble working through the restrictions of the pandemic. He lives removed from an urban hub in Sweden. And there, an effort to build herd immunity has guided the market to much lighter mitigation efforts than those of many other nations.

He laughs when talking about the new series’ Ohio setting and how it’s captured on the screen. Transferring the original content to a US setting was important both to him and the filmmakers, and the selection of the Canadian locations was critical.

“You know what?” Simon Stålenhag says. “It was so weird going to Canada” for the shoots “because it looks exactly like here in Sweden where I live and grew up.

“I’d get on a plane for 14 hours, get off–and it looked just the same.”

The series is made by 6th & Idaho Productions and distributed by Prime Video.

More from Publishing Perspectives on international rights is here, and more on words to screen is here. More of Publishing Perspectives‘ rights roundups are here. And more from us on the coronavirus COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on international book publishing is here and at the CORONAVIRUS tab at the top of each page of our site.

This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

The post Tales From Simon Stålenhag: His Amazon Original Series appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

‘A Winner-Take-All Cultural Economy’

During the Berlinale–the Berlin International Film Festival (February 20 to March 1)–the European Film Market’s Horizon program will include an address by author, documentary filmmaker, and technology critic Andrew Keen. His keynote is presented by Frankfurter Buchmesse‘s The Arts+ program in cooperation with DLD—the Digital Life Design network.

The event is part of the fair’s Create Your Revolution campaign, which, as you may recall, was opened at last year’s Buchmesse in support of the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals and in association with the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels, Germany’s publishers and booksellers association.

Keen speaks on February 25 at 10 a.m. at the Berliner Freiheit on Potsdamer Platz, in the final day of the European Film Market’s (EFM) five-day Horizon series of events. Frankfurt has worked with the Film Market to create a special €120 price for non-film specialists who’d like to see Keen’s talk and other events in the series. Information and ticketing is available here.

And if your eyes are glazing over at our mention here of so many co-sponsoring partners to the event, that, in fact, is a reflection of how integrated many of the most complex elements of technology, innovation, creativity, and commentary have become.

It’s one of Keen’s biggest points these days.

In an interview from his home in California, he tells Publishing Perspectives that he’s “working aggressively across platforms to bring my messages and my ideas and conversations to a number of different media.

“That’s what I’ve learned over the last few years, you can’t rely on a single medium. It’s unwise.”

To that end, Keen has a book scheduled for release on March 5 from Will Atkinson’s London-based independent house Atlantic Books. Tomorrows versus Yesterdays: Conversations in Defense of the Future is itself a project produced in cooperation with the Munich-based Digital Life Design network. And after Keen’s initial comments on February 25, he’ll be joined by DLD co-chair Steffi Czerny and The Arts+ founder Holger Volland for a conversation on the issues.

Tomorrows versus Yesterdays, the book, is a set of conversations that Keen has had with thought leaders, some of those exchanges based on his Keen on Democracy podcast series. You’ll find his podcasts, the Keen On series, at Literary Hub.

That in turn has given rise to a Bertelsmann Foundation documentary film about the contemporary crisis of liberal democracy. How To Fix Democracy has its debut on Wednesday (February 19) at New York’s Betaworks Studios (6 to 8 p.m. ET) and after the screening, Keen will be in conversation with Mete Coban, CEO of the UK’s My Life My Say youth-empowerment program. Information on seeing the film’s debut is here.

And when he gets to the Berlinale, Keen’s address will be titled, like his forthcoming book, “Tomorrows vs. Yesterdays,” but its subtitle will be adjusted to his topic: “How Creatives Can Fix the Future.”

You see the sort of layered, multi-platform, interlocking array of distribution Keen’s talking about.

The word media still is plural, after all–especially in the case of a leading analyst on technology’s impact in contemporary culture.

The context in which we all first discovered Andrew Keen’s work still lies in the fact that he’s an expert. That was–and is–the point.

But today, he’s talking about how the specificity of an expert lives in the most generalist approach to the media.

The Core Is Holding

Keen’s publication of The Cult of the Amateur in 2007 established what he says now is still “my calling card.” The core of his message then, as now, was that the vast enabling capacities of the digital dynamic would quickly erode fundamental social values as they fueled the user-generated spree that today chokes media channels with amateurs’ productivity.

“The unfettered nature of user-generated media,” he wrote, “is … misinforming our young people, corroding our tradition of physical civic participation, endangering our individual rights to privacy, and corrupting our sense of personal responsibility and accountability.”

Other titles for which you might know Keen are Digital Vertigo, The Internet Is Not the Answer, and How To Fix the Future, each pressing new alarm buttons as the adoration of technology led to deeper digital penetration of daily life and fewer questions about what protections and principles were being violated along the way.

By the time he spoke to The Bookseller’s FutureBook conference in London in 2016, Keen had caught his stride as “the antichrist of Silicon Valley,” a descriptor given him by a French news outlet. You could hear the bravura in what he was telling the UK’s trade book publishing industry at the conference: “My advice to you would be to be un-bookish and show off. The analog truthful response will resonate. What you have is enormously valuable.”

And Keen has remained an advocate for the books business, mentioning in our conversation, “There are parts of the publishing industry that are incredibly innovative,” having reminded London three years ago, “You have a long-lasting medium. You have the book.”

Indeed, Keen at FutureBook was thinking about the “fake news” nightmare of factual manipulation, calling on the publishing world to live up to its responsibility to hold the line on truth: “More and more of what we read on the Internet,” he said, “isn’t true. This is having a huge impact on our culture and politics.”

In Berlin: Creativity and Human Agency

Where Frankfurter Buchmesse’s The Arts+ ethos dovetails most readily with Keen’s conceptualization of the digital dynamic lies in the importance of the creative industries’ mission.

“Creativity,” he says, “and also the other theme I’ve really been focused on in my work–especially in How To Fix The Future (Morgan Entrekin’s Grove Atlantic). That’s the issue of human agency.

“It’s what we can do, in juxtaposition with the algorithm, with Smart Cars, and smart bodies, smartphones, and smart homes.

“This is, I think, the issue of creativity, and it’s central to the 21st century and to the fact that we have to distinguish ourselves from the smart machine. The smart machine can’t be creative, it can only do when it’s told.

“We humans are very good at not doing what we’re told,” Keen says, the “antichrist” nickname showing up in the energy with which he speaks: “Not doing what I’m told is one thing I pride myself on.

“Throughout my life, I’ve always done exactly what I thought is right. It’s got me thrown out of universities, of course, and sent into various kinds of wildernesses at certain times,” particularly by corporate tech powers that would rather not have their intentions and effects questioned.

“But I’ve never been willing to just toe the line. Being creative means thinking for yourself, it means not just doing what other people say or what algorithms say. And I think that’s absolutely right.

“This is the danger,” Keen says, his British dialect reeling up into the urgency he feels on the subject.

“I mean, you’ve obviously got the challenge of technology, of algorithm and all that, which is very dangerous. But I also think that in our time and in our age of political bifurcation and echo chambers, we have a really rigid orthodoxy both on the left and the right. It’s not just the Trump people, who are obviously very guilty of this, but I also think you have orthodoxy on the left which is not encouraging or allowing people to think for themselves.”

Where Keen finds his own salvation–in this multi-tracked delivery of himself and his viewpoints through books, film, podcasting, and stage appearances–mirrors the wide-channeled infusion of human agency and creativity that he will argue in Berlin is our best hope of handling the digitization of our era and our embrace of technology’s force.

And ironically, this means that Keen has become a generalist’s expert.

“This is a great time,” he says “And, in essence, there’s potentially a creative renaissance coming. It’s a winner-take-all cultural economy, but you can’t just be pumping a camera or pounding a keyboard. You’ve got to be innovative in terms of building platforms, real platforms, crossing boundaries, taking risks, and also figuring out the money side, asking, ‘Who’s going to pay for this? Why is it worth my time?'”

“You need synergies,” Keen says. ” If you just sit in a room and write a book, it’s not enough. You can have 200 million followers on YouTube, but you still have to produce cultural content.”

Andrew Keen listens to be sure he’s made his point before signing off. “You have to be a generalist,” he says it again.

More from Publishing Perspectives on The Arts+ is here, more on Frankfurter Buchmesse is here, more on Holger Volland’s work is here, and more on the Berlinale and Books at Berlinale is here, and more on words to screen and books to film is here.

This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

The post Andrew Keen at Berlinale: ‘Don’t Rely on a Single Medium’ appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

Charles: Political Books as Badges

On a particularly political day in the United States (January 21), the market’s weekly Tuesday book-release activity is especially indicative of what the Washington Post’s Ron Charles described last month as a trend in nonfiction consumerism. During the last decade, he wrote, political books have become “political badges.”

During the Obama administration, Charles wrote, “conservative writers Edward Klein, Dinesh D’Souza, David Limbaugh, and others served up one denunciation after another. By the time Donald Trump came into office, that marketplace, supported by cable newstainment, was running hot on the left and the right.

“Trump’s perceived glories or evils drove sales of exposés, hagiographies and memoirs, almost all designed to confirm rather than inform or challenge one’s fealty.”

As the Senate prepares to convene for its first session today in the Trump impeachment trial, Trump continues to serve as bookseller-in-chief for many such releases—even when he’d like not to be. Today’s releases have formed a political trifecta, with political books at Nos. 1, 2, and 3 in Amazon’s new releases. One is from the left, two from the right.

And here’s how the president greeted on Monday (January 20) Penguin Press’ release today of A Very Stable Genius: Donald J. Trump’s Testing of America by Washington Post reporters Philip Rucker and Carol Leonnig:

Two stone cold losers from Amazon WP. Almost every story is a made up lie, just like corrupt pol Shifty Schiff, who fraudulently made up my call with Ukraine. Fiction! https://t.co/0Oad0738NG

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 20, 2020

Those two “stone cold losers,” Rucker and Leonnig, in fact today on have the No. 1 new release on Amazon.com. And that ranking caps all new releases, updated hourly, not just politically related content.

In all three formats of A Very Stable Genius released today—hardcover, Kindle, and audiobook (narrated by the authors and by Hillary Huber, from Penguin Audio)—the title holds the top spot in Politics & Government, Politics & Current Events, and (to the core question of today’s opening impeachment trial proceedings) Political Corruption & Misconduct.

The interest in Rucker and Leonnig’s new book, of course, has been fueled by the Post’s release of an excerpt that describes Trump’s dressing down of the American military leadership at the Pentagon. Trump, in this 2017 incident, is quoted by Leonnig and Rucker as saying to the joint chiefs, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and others, “You’re all losers. You don’t know how to win anymore … I wouldn’t go to war with you people. You’re a bunch of dopes and babies.”

A point being made in early coverage of the book is that Leonnig and Rucker have written it as a straight-ahead reportorial effort, without the snark of a kiss-and-tell from inside the administration or the society-circuit tone of a Michael Woolf.

Schweizer: ‘A Rogue;’s Gallery’

Needless to say, it doesn’t take a rare US presidential impeachment to push political nonfiction forward. As we reported Thursday (January 16), the UK’s publishers’ and booksellers’ associations have had their own events to contend with, having held back their shortlist announcement for the annual Parliamentary Book Awards so that the country’s general election of December could play through.

But one of the key takeaways in the American market is the strength of interest on both sides of the political spectrum. If you look at spot No. 2 today, you can tell that there’s a kind of commercial egalitarianism in sway: Peter Schweizer’s Profiles in Corruption: Abuse of Power by America’s Progressive Elite, released by HarperCollins.

Schweizer is the author of Harper’s 2015 Clinton Cash: The Untold Story of How and Why Foreign Governments and Businesses Helped Make Bill and Hillary Rich, and in his new work, a lot of ink goes heavily to Democratic primary candidates Joe Biden, Cory Booker (now out of the race), Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, and Amy Klobuchar.

The New York Post’s excerpt from the book says, in part, “With the election of his father as vice-president, Hunter Biden launched businesses fused to his father’s power that led him to lucrative deals with a rogue’s gallery of governments and oligarchs around the world.

“Sometimes he would hitch a prominent ride with his father aboard Air Force Two to visit a country where he was courting business. Other times, the deals would be done more discreetly. Always they involved foreign entities that appeared to be seeking something from his father.”

And in this case, too, Amazon’s data shows the book lining up its own No. 1 positions in sales on the platform, in this case in Political Commentary & Opinion, Political Science, and United States Local Government.

Caldwell: ‘Elite Power’

At No. 3 on today’s overall top-selling new releases? Politics again, and it’s the conservative camp’s second salvo: Christopher Caldwell’s The Age of Entitlement: America Since the Sixties is out today from Simon & Schuster, with its argument that well-intended mid-century reforms have led many Americans into the straits of the alienation and denigration that has made them willing to vote a Trump into office.

In his treatment of the issue, Caldwell—who contributes opinion pieces to The New York Times and was a senior editor at the Weekly Standard and columnist for the Financial Times—writes, “The reforms of the ’60s, even the ones Americans loved best and came to draw part of their national identity from, came with costs that proved staggeringly high—in money, freedom, rights, and social stability.

“These costs were spread most unevenly among social classes and generations. Many Americans were left worse off by the changes. Economic inequality reached levels not seen since the age of the 19th-century monopolists.

“The scope for action conferred on society’s leaders allowed elite power to multiply steadily and, we now see, dangerously, sweeping aside not just obstacles but also dissent.”

Wittes: ‘A Flood of Scandalous Material’

One of the most interesting dynamics in the market vitality of political books in the current climate is referenced by the author Isabel Allende. In a First Draft interview excerpt at Literary Hub, Allende puts her finger on an anomaly of the age: “Literature can maybe change minds, but few people read,” she says.

“Few people allow themselves to be influenced or changed by books. It takes a book sometimes decades, sometimes centuries, to have an effect, while journalism is very immediate and very powerful. You have minutes of something on TV, and you can create much more impact than a book can do in many, many years.”

And that’s resonant in another signal release today in which astute analysis is being buoyed prominently into marketplace view by media visibility.

Unmaking the Presidency: Donald Trump’s War on the World’s Most Powerful Office by Susan Hennessey and Benjamin Wittes from Macmillan / Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, takes as its study the remarkable panoply of changes in how Donald Trump handles—or manhandles—the Oval Office, reshaping the role to a set of impulses that seem far from the civic-virtue approach of so many who have held the post in the past.

In a sense, Wittes and Hennessey are saying, the United States has depended on a kind of honor system, expecting its presidents to respect and appreciate and aspire to the best goals described by the office of the presidency in its domestic and international duties. Without regard for such tradition, Trump appears to be making what may be permanent changes to the character and potentials of the office.

As Wittes has said in his and Hennessey’s Brookings Institute discussion of the book in Washington, “We don’t really know the scope of the problem because we’re in such a flood of scandalous material. … What am I missing now that’s super-salient? We don’t know what’s important all the time,” under the deluge of unprecedented incidents and trashed expectations that defines the current administration.

He and Hennessey are both senior fellows at Brookings. She’s also the executive editor and he’s the editor-in-chief of Lawfare. Hennessey is a former National Security Agency attorney.

And as Hennessey has said in her comments today about the Ukraine affair that’s at the heart of the impeachment of Trump and the trial of that impeachment starting today, “One of the things that continues to astonish me is how close” Trump and his aides “came to getting away with it. But for one person, willing to go through the system, not leaking to the press but being a whistleblower in the true legal sense of the term, we’d never have been able to untangle what came first or what the motivation was.”

In that mode—and to Allende’s point—but for one thing in the current nonfiction trend lines, it can be assumed that Hennessey and Wittes book might not be doing as well as it is on release today, coming in at single digits in Amazon’s sales, including in its audio rendition from Macmillan Audio narrated by the authors. And that singular factor is Hennessey’s arresting work as an expert commentator in daily news coverage.

She’s a frequent contributor to the nonstop political conversation on CNN. A mainstay of Wolf Blitzer’s Situation Room and frequently on the panels of other flagship shows, her animated, rapidly delivered points sail across the glass tables of the network nightly and, like Wittes, she has a knack for clarity without sacrificing the erudition of her criticisms.

If Allende is right that books normally don’t have the change-power that journalism does, the intensity of Hennessey’s delivery may be demonstrating what happens in the contemporary market when books are buoyed on a journalistic tide, much like the effect of Ruckers’ and Leonnig’s highly regarded work at the Post, where the display of an explosive excerpt has helped boost their success to the top of this week’s new releases.

<em>More from Publishing Perspectives on political books is here and more on nonfiction is here. More on the US book market is here.</em>

<em>This story was originally published at <a href=”https://publishingperspectives.com/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener noreferrer”>PublishingPerspectives.com</a></em>

The post On Both Sides of the Political Divide, Books Are Soaring appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.

By Porter Anderson, Editor-in-Chief | @Porter_Anderson
This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com

As Much as 23 Percent of the Market Impacted

Calling for a government intervention, the Association of Italian Publishers  (Associazione Italiana Editori, AIE) and the Federation of Italian Newspaper Publishers (Federazione Italiana Editori Giornali, FIEG) have presented results of newly commissioned study on the impact of piracy in the Italian market.

“This is dramatic data that goes beyond any expectations” in describing the extent to which piracy is present in the market, according to AIE president Ricardo Franco Levi in his address to a joint meeting this morning (January 22) seated in Rome at the ministry of cultural heritage and activities in the Via del Collegio.

“This data reveals the need for the imposition of strong law enforcement and the education of users who are not always fully aware of the effects of their behavior.”

AIE and FIEG are reporting an annual loss of some €528 million (US$585 million) to the books industry and an aggregate of €1.3 billion when news publishing is added in, accounting for as much as 23 percent of the market, exclusive of exports and educational content.

The two organizations jointly commissioned this research from IPSOS. The project was executed in November with a sample of 4,000 respondents selected for factors including gender, age, geographical location, educational and professional status, and other elements.

Some of the key highlights of the study’s assertions, briefly:

• €216 million is the estimated level of annual loss to Italy in taxes on pirated content
• €324 million is being lost to various elements of the publishing industry, reflective of 29 million legitimate sales being squandered
• €105 million is the estimated level of economic loss yearly to university publishing, which is thought to be losing the sales of 4 million units annually
• €99 million is the estimated level of loss to professional publishing and data banks, a sector that’s thought to be losing 2.9 million unit sales yearly

In terms of employment, as many as 3,600 jobs in the book world may be lost to publishing, the associations said. When that figure is extrapolated to related goods and services, piracy

AIE’s Levi: ‘The Need for Law Enforcement’

Some of the most interesting revelations in the report have to do with who the researchers can identify are the pirati, the pirates.

As is often the case—and a part of what makes combatting the problem so difficult—the culprits are everyday users, many of them unaware of how damaging their fondness for free or cheap content can be.

Some 36 percent of users—more than one in three Italians older than 15, the researchers found—carried out at least one act of piracy with a work of published content in the last year.

• One in four users are estimated to have downloaded an illegal ebook or audiobook free of charge at least once
• Seventeen percent of those surveyed said they’ve received at least one ebook from a friend or family member
• Eight percent said they’d been given at least one photocopied book by a friend or acquaintance
• Seven percent of respondents said they’d bought at least one photocopied book in the last year

In the university setting, the issue is more dramatic, with some 80 percent of university students committing at least one act of piracy—involving either physical or digital content—in the last year. And 81 percent of professional respondents—including attorneys, notaries, accountants, engineers, and architects—said they’d committed at least on act of piracy in the past year.

Speaking in the morning’s session for the research effort, however, IPSOS president Nando Pagnoncelli said the general public, for the most part is not unaware that piracy is illegal.

Some 84 percent of those older than 15 told researchers this, he said. But 66 percent said that piracy is unlikely to be discovered and punished by authorities, and 39 percent said that they don’t consider piracy to be serious enough to prosecute.

FIEG’s Monti: ‘Parasitic Forms of Copyright Infringement’

FIEG president Andrea Riffeser Monti spoke to vulnerabilities that have come into the marketing along with the advantages of digital publishing.

Some of the ways Monti’s association experience the problem is in online reviews that are copied and distributed without authorization, PDF editions of newspapers passed among users often on various social media and smartphone apps.

“It’s necessary,” Monti said, “to improve our safeguards against all these parasitic forms of copyright infringement.”

He called for a public campaign targeting readers of books and newspapers, noting that the study’s proof of the interest in the written word, both in news and literature, is positive.

And he also made the point, frequently heard now in piracy discussions, that ensuring easy legitimate access to content is important, the “abundance over scarcity” context in which it’s believed that piracy is less attractive because users don’t have to resort to illicit means to attain content they want.

Speaking for the government, Andrea Martella, an undersecretary for the president’s council, said, “As a government we cannot ignore the data that has emerged from this research and the request for help that comes to us from the publishing sector.”

Martella said that the government is “studying new tools to support news publishing at the direction of Piracy must be combated by the repression of illegal behavior, promoting legal education but also with support for the entire supply chain, which has been so badly affected. Through publishing 5.0 we are studying new tools to support periodic and daily publishing because, as Italian president Sergio Mattarella said when visiting the news agency ANSA last week, news content “constitutes a decisive element for democracy in our country.”

And that, Martella said, dovetails with ministry directives for a parallel effort in book publishing.

More of Publishing Perspectives’ coverage of the Italian market is here. And more from us on international issues in piracy is here while more on copyright is here.

This story was originally published at PublishingPerspectives.com  

The post Italian Book Publishers Reveal €528M Lost to Piracy Yearly appeared first on Porter Anderson Media.