Maggs wins Kobzar... though not in a shutout

Congratulations to Ontario poetry publisher Brick Books and to its author, Randall Maggs who last night won the $25,000 Kobzar Literary Award for his book Night Work: The Sawchuk Poems.

I have to admit a fondness for this particular book, as I reviewed it for the Globe & Mail in a previous life, but being a public servant now I kept out of all betting pools around the award result.

It was a fine shortlist, including:

- God of Missed Connections by Elizabeth Bachinsky (Nightwood Edition);

- Redemption and Ritual: The Eastern-Rite Redemptorists of North America, 1906-2006 (Redeemer’s Voice Press); and

- Zo by Murray Andrew Pura (Windhover Marsh)

Congratulations as well to the Ukrainian Canadian Foundation of Taras Shevchenko who administer the award. They put on an award ceremony and dinner to rival any literary party in the country.

"information" may just be changing its mind about that whole "free" thing

I have been having discussions about the future of writing and publishing since the future was 1990, and for about the last decade I've been tilting my head and asking quizzically of a lot of very good-hearted people, "Yes, free content is great, but how exactly will the artists and producers be paid?"

So, with apologies to all my wonderful friends from Toronto's Centre for Social Innovation, with whom I've had so many good-natured discussions about culture and the free-conomy, I just really need to link to this article:

The Future Won’t Be Free

In his op-ed for Newsweek, former "information wants to be free" advocate Andrew Zolli presents a remarkable mea culpa to culture and media:

Unfortunately, as we've seen since, for companies whose core product is content — like every newspaper and magazine you read, including this one — the idea that we Internet visionaries sold is a total load of crap.

... Following our lead, companies have now trained a generation of young people to never, ever, ever expect to pay for content on a laptop or desktop.

... In the long run, the first decade of the Web could come to be seen as a momentary aberration—an echo of '60s free culture when we all took the bad, digital acid. So, media companies, on behalf of all misdirected Internet visionaries, I'm sorry. We like you—we really do—and we don't want a world without you.

To be clear -- I love libraries, I love lending and sharing, I clearly love linking to free content and creating my own free content, and I love generosity of spirit. But I also value the professional work of the cultural sector, and have been too worried about it for too long. Here's hoping Zolli's brave and principled declaration signals a new tone of realism in this now old and somewhat tired conversation.

Thanks to IP lawyer Barry Sookman for the tip on this article.

synopsis of googy news

I haven't posted much about the Google Books settlement lately, since it seems the details of the story change on a daily basis, and it is near impossible to keep up. Riding the subway this morning, I listened to a great synopsis of the Google Books settlement epic on the New York Times Books podcast.

If you have information overload about the settlement, and just want a big picture reminder, listen to the February 19th podcast at the link above. Motoko Rich's Notes from the Field focuses on the settlement as it stands to date. Great snapshot of the past and present, with real people talking about it in real-people language. If you have iTunes, it is easily accessible through that service as well.

Being admittedly author- and publisher-biased on a story like this, I must note that Rich does not mention the fair use defence Google continues to insist upon, even while settling a class-action claiming copyright infringement on a massive scale. The day unpermitted copying of entire texts for commercial use becomes "fair" will be a strange day indeed in the world of copyright, but again, that is my bias. Make up your own mind.

In related news, at least 6,500 other authors have decided the use (and settlement) was not fair, and have opted out.

those cheques?... they're in the mail

I have noticed quite a bit of Twitter and Facebook chatter from Canadian book authors wondering when the Public Lending Right cheques are being released.

Today, PLR has sent a news release announcing this year's payment:

Over 17,000 Canadian authors share $9.9 million in public lending right payments

Ottawa, February 24, 2010 – The Public Lending Right Commission announced today that it issued $9.9 million in public lending right (PLR) payments to 17,058 Canadian authors. These payments are issued to writers, translators and illustrators every February for the presence of their books in Canadian libraries during the previous year.

According to the full release on the Canada Council for the Arts website, Ontario writers received $2,978,061.35 in PLR payments for the previous year.

Excellent Canadian writers in excellent Canadian libraries -- and how appropriate that the cheques are released during Freedom to Read Week.

letterpress meet iPhone -- I hope you can be friends

(image courtesy Coach House)

Just installed my Coach House Books Coffee Room iPhone app.

Quit bugging me... I'm reading.

plagiarism or remix? -- here we go

Those familiar with the intriguing NFB documentary RiP: A Remix Manifesto will know the music industry has been trying to find the line between the homage and the rip-off for just about as long as there has been a music industry. Bring out your tired pronouncements about nothing being original and a culture dependant on copying. Nevertheless, I think most people can instinctively tell when new artists are actually building on the past and when they're just faking it.

So, how about the book world? Where is the line between what kids these days seem to think is a brand new concept -- remixing, mashing up, etc. -- and good old fashioned plagiarism?

17 year-old German novelist Helene Hegemann is insistent she is practicing a new creativity when she reprints entire sections of other people's writing (without attribution). Her book, Axolotl Roadkill, is even up for an award despite plagiarism accusations. In her piece in Salon, writer Laura Miller may have just found that elusive line:

The daughter of an avant-garde dramatist, [Hegemann] says she practices "intertextuality" and explains, "Very many artists use this technique ... by organically including parts in my text, I am entering into a dialogue with the author."

This would be more plausible if Hegemann had acknowledged from the beginning that she'd included work from other writers in "Axolotl Roadkill," but by all indications, she did not.

...If Hegemann intended to enter into a dialogue with Airen, she took pains to make it look like a monologue. If she viewed the writing itself as collaborative, she suppressed any urge to share those handsome royalty checks.

Oh, brave new world...