More on Orphan Works

Yesterday's LJ features a short piece on the forthcoming Orphan Works legislation.

I understand why libraries interested in digitizing and making available books are for it, and I understand the enthusiasm of big corporations interested in digitizing and using so-called "orphan" works to pad their lists without paying the creators. I'm not sure how this legislation enforces the constitutional protections of the rights of the creators to their works of science and art.

Who makes a book?

Late last week Book Business announced that a "Community-Sourced Book Publisher Launched" called WEbook, kind of a fiction-focused Wikipedia for-profit. As I scrolled through the proposals, I was reminded of another article in CTIAdvertising, When Did It Bekome Acxeptable to Spell Incuhrrectly? WEbook admits that they want to do for book publishing what "American Idol did for music." So, the WEbook "active projects"/proposals section is obviously the humiliation part of the program, where people who should be learning how to use their spell check are instead learning how to use WEbook, convinced they can write a book without knowing how to write a sentence.

There is something of an "ivy-league" and cliquish mentality in publishing, whether it is academic publishing or, from what I have read and heard from published fiction authors, literature, or even mass-market. There has also been a process to getting published which isn't completely dependent on breaking in to the clique. It's largely dependent on learning to write so that someone wants to read it.

Which brings me to this NYTimes article, "He Wrote 200,000 Books (but Computers Did Some of the Work). Did he "write" the books? I don't think so. He wrote the code that wrote the books. Because Google writes the algorithms that compile the data about websites doesn't mean that they wrote the data. He compiled the books. So, he's an author without being a writer.

Both these publishing models produce commodified books. Books-by-the-pound, at some point probably worth less than the value of the recyclable paper they are printed on. I don't think the models are inherently bad, but there is something shifty about their implementation. I think if P.T. Barnum were alive, he would approve.

RE: "Death of the Corporation"

The Bits blog at the NYT sees the increase of consumer-generated content and the willingness of companies to incorporate "amateur" content into their marketing as the harbinger of the "Death of the individual corporation." I can't agree. Companies might need to be increasingly flexible in their marketing and sales strategies in order to sell their media (content), software, and hardware, but I don't think this empowers the individual. Rather, their conglomerations just continue to feed in to the accumulation of wealth, and of taste, into the hands of a few. In order to get control into citizens hands, people will have to have control of their media without corporations acting as the gatekeepers. I'm not sure that's possible.