September 3, 2008
A lovely, new AUSTRALIAN publisher children’s book that we have added to our web site . Here is a brief blurb:
The farmer is startled from his sleep by the sound of the farm quad- bike revving outside his bedroom window. He races outside to be confronted by his Blue Heeler puppy delighting in the joys of the four wheeled fun machine. The excitement builds as Benny puts the machine through its paces, much to the surprise of all the farm animals. 4+.
August 29, 2008
I have been interested in children’s literature for about the last 18 years of my involvement in the field of early childhood education. I am always looking for enjoyable children’s fiction- a story for the sake of nothing else but pure enjoyment, not necessarily to convey a message, moral or lesson. However, occasionally a book emerges that does both- conveys a subtle message as well as providing sheer enjoyment & reading pleasure. I have found such a book to be “Fudgey Boy- World’s Largest Cat”.
Fudgey Boy is a fat & lazy cat, with something of an eating disorder. However, after engaging the reader in the trials & tribulations of his owner’s efforts to put him on a diet or get him to do exercise, the endearing cat decides that he is actually perfect the way he is- why should he change???
As well as bringing an awareness to children that all body types are lovable and acceptable, children will also delight in the antics of the amusing cat.
The illustrations are bright, colourful & filled with quirky humour that young children will adore.
During book week I was privy to some book readings by the author, & noticed that children from toddlers through to primary age were enthralled by the story & captivated by the bold pictures. Two-year-olds were as entranced by the book as were pre-schoolers, & I watched a year one class laugh, joke & make thought provoking comments. You are able to buy it here at http://www.emporiumbooks.com.au/product_info.php?products_id=1799082
August 28, 2008
An intensely moving and uncompromisingly honest story told in the words of a 16-year-old girl who is dying of leukaemia.
Tessa has just a few months to live.
Fighting back against hospital visits, endless tests, drugs with excruciating side-effects, Tessa compiles a list. It’s her To Do Before I Die list. And number one is sex.
Released from the constraints of ‘normal’ life, Tessa tastes new experiences to make her feel alive while her failing body struggles to keep up.
Tessa’s feelings, her relationships with her father and brother, her estranged mother, her best friend, her new boyfriend, all are painfully crystallized in the precious weeks before Tessa’s time finally runs out.
BEFORE I DIE is a brilliantly-crafted novel, heartbreaking yet astonishingly life-affirming. It will take you to the very edge.
July 24, 2008
D.H. Lawrence. Cormac McCarthy. Gabriel García Márquez. Ian McEwan. Books by all these authors and more are hitting screens this fall, in all genres: horror (Stephen King), suspense (Dennis Lehane), fantasy (Philip Pullman), sci-fi (Richard Matheson); western (Elmore Leonard)—even Beowulf is now a movie! More remarkable still, two books—Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Matheson’s I Am Legend—are each now in their third round of adaptation. Has Hollywood gone completely literary? Is this the year books do to movies what reality programming did to television? Odd, perplexing, inexplicable. Still, you won’t hear us complaining.
July 24, 2008
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on July 22, 2008 by Steve Bunche — Publishers Weekly, 7/21/2008 4:54:00 PM
This August, the U.K. comics publisher, Knockabout Comics will answer the prayers of classic underground comics aficionados with the publication of a massive 40th anniversary Freak Brothers Omnibus, a 624-page leviathan of laughs, straight from the mind of creator Gilbert Shelton. The book collects every adventure of the hirsute trio since their inception in 1968, as well as previously unpublished material.
The book’s first printing of 10,000 copies will feature an extra dust jacket and an insert detailing how the interested fan can donate funds and invest in Grass Roots, an upcoming animated film featuring the characters, and even get their names inserted into the corner of one of the film’s frames in a promotion called “Name That Frame.” (The investor purchases a frame and their name will be visible only when the film is slowed down on a DVD player). www.emporiumbooks.com.au is able to source it.
But exactly what is the Freak Brothers series and why does it warrant such red carpet treatment? Simply put, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers is the Rosetta Stone (no pun intended) of “stoner” humor as we now understand the genre, predating Cheech & Chong’s THC-based antics by a few years and offering narratives that are often hilarious without the aid of various illegal “party favors.” The series revolves around the eponymous characters, a trio related not by blood, but by a common interest—the need for weed—and loony adventures in a rollicking counter-culture universe. The trio includes Phineas (the leftist intellectual), Freewheelin’ Franklin (the baked cowboy), and Fat Freddy (the “Curly” of the bunch). Their lives are driven by marijuana and they spend virtually all of their time trying to get stoned while avoiding the police or getting ripped off by unscrupulous dealers.
But unlike many of its underground contemporaries that wallowed in explicit sex, ultra-violence, and sometimes outright misogyny, the Freak Brothers strips concentrated on solid laughs and earned them and their creator an enduring following among the underground comix cogniscenti and beyond. When asked about how he settled upon his approach to the material Shelton reminisced, “I used to sell strips to weekly leftist newspapers. I was in sympathy with them but they were deadly dull, so I felt they could use a comic strip modeled on old comics.”
Shelton said at the time that he was “more into traditional comic strips like Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy, which seemed outrageously weird when seen from a grownup perspective. Other strips I enjoyed included Bob Montana’s Archie, Peanuts, B.C., The Wizard of Id, Miss Peach, and the old E.C. stuff, especially the original run of Mad when it was still a comic book.” That last influence must have been particularly strong since Shelton’s work on the Freak Brothers seemed like the next logical step from its 1950’s antecedent. The Freak Brothers comics were infused with the same anarchic energy and endearing silliness, only now unleashed in an era of free love and psychedelic mind-expansion. As for the inspiration behind the trio’s comedic adventures, Shelton said, “I took the ambience from real life and used gags that used to be based around alcohol and substituted marijuana for the booze. Take the one about the hippy getting busted on a possession charge and being told by the arresting officer that he had one phone call. The guy uses that call to get a pizza delivery.” And when not focusing on the Brothers themselves, Shelton turns his humorous eye to the antics of Fat Freddy’s Cat, a side-strip also featured in the omnibus that’s every bit as entertaining as the book’s main event.
The enduring popularity of the Freak Brothers has led to the production of Grass Roots, a stop-motion animated feature, but the project has not had smooth sailing; according to Shelton. “Grass Roots has been in progress for five years and Bolex Brothers, a hugely talented studio in Bristol, England, is handling it while actively raising money to fund it,” Shelton explained. He said this was the “6th or 8th time” the rights to a Freak Brothers film have been sold, “including once having been in the hands of Universal some thirty years ago. Obviously nothing came of that.”
Hopefully the combined efforts of the Bolex Brothers and the series’ rabid fan base will result in a happy ending for Shelton and Freak Brothers enthusiasts everywhere and the trio will finally make their bong-hitting way onto the silver screen alongside such stoner descendants as Cheech & Chong and Harold and Kumar. But until then, there are always Shelton’s stories to get us through these Freak-less times. In fact, the book serves as an echo of Shelton’s timeless credo: “Dope will get you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no dope.” Words to live by, especially in the waning days of Dubya’s America.
July 24, 2008
TRANSWORLD IS WITHDRAWING Raj Persaud’s From the Edge of the Couch from sale following a recent hearing at the General Medical Council. Persaud was suspended for three months by the GMC following charges of plagiarism. One of the charges concerned passages in From the Edge of the Couch, first published in 2003 by Bantam Press, with the author accused of using a professional colleague’s work without attribution.
Another book, Charm Offensive: Power, Persuasion and Popularity, the Psychology of Social Success was on the Nielsen BookData database for a December publication, but a Transworld spokesperson emphasised that “The book is unscheduled at the moment.”
July 24, 2008
Back-to-back rulings by federal appellate courts in Atlanta and New York favoring the National Geographic Society will allow magazine and newspaper publishers to transfer their published archives to computer discs and sell them commercially without infringing on freelance contributors’ copyrights.
National Geographic won its dual victories after more than a decade of litigation in two federal circuits. The publisher of National Geographic has battled freelance writers and photographers over whether it must pay them additional royalties associated with the sale of “The Complete National Geographic” — a digital version of the magazine’s published archive.
On Monday, Judge Rosemary Barkett, writing the majority opinion for a sharply divided en banc court of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals rejected the claims of a freelance Florida photographer whose work has been published in National Geographic.
Barkett was joined in the majority by fellow circuit judges Joel F. Dubina, Susan H. Black, Edward E. Carnes, Stanley Marcus, William H. Pryor Jr. and Senior U.S. Circuit Judge Phyllis A. Kravitch. Judge Frank M. Hull recused.
The ruling turned on the extent to which publishers may reprint and distribute previously published photos without infringing on individual photographers’ copyrights. Central to that ruling is the definition of a “collective work” to which a freelancer has contributed.
A publisher, according to the en banc majority, may reproduce a freelance photographer’s work in a reprint of the original collective work (such as a magazine, newspaper or encyclopedia) to which that photographer contributed; or a revision of that collective work; or a later collective work “in the same series.” Reproduction of copyrighted photos in a new work without permission would constitute copyright infringement.
The ruling turns on what constitutes an acceptable revision and what constitutes a new work in light of a 2001 landmark copyright ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court. In that ruling, New York Times v. Tasini, the high court determined reprinting freelance writers’ articles without permission in large computer databases such as Lexis-Nexis infringed freelancers’ copyrights.
This week, the 11th Circuit relied on the language of that ruling in deciding that although photographs could not be reprinted in computer databases without permission, they could be republished on CD-ROM or DVD in a reprint of the original work, (in this case, issues of National Geographic) without infringing freelance contributors’ copyrights.
The Atlanta court split 7-5. Judge Stanley F. Birch Jr. authored one of two dissenting opinions, with Judge R. Lanier Anderson III, authoring the second. Judge Charles R. Wilson joined Birch in his dissent, while Anderson and Chief Judge J.L. Edmondson joined in part. Birch, Judge Gerald B. Tjoflat, Edmondson and Wilson joined with Anderson in his opinion.
Two opinions handed down last Friday in the 2nd U.S. Circuit, involving breach-of-contract claims against the National Geographic Society by its former freelance authors and photographers, that also were tied to “The Complete National Geographic,” reached similar conclusions. The federal appellate panels in New York affirmed summary judgments by the trial courts upholding the National Geographic Society’s assertion that it owed no additional royalties to its published freelancers for reprinting their copyrighted works in “The Complete National Geographic.”
“These opinions obviously have been a long time coming and have been considered quite thoroughly, briefed quite thoroughly, and argued quite thoroughly,” former Atlanta lawyer Terry Adamson, now executive vice president of the National Geographic Society, said Tuesday. “We are very gratified by the opinion of the 11th Circuit and most recent opinions by the 2nd Circuit on contract issues.”
The decade-long litigation, he said, “has been all about preserving 120 years electronically, so it would be preserved for all time,” whereas the actual print publications “will be lost.”
Norman Davis of Squire, Sanders & Dempsey, a Miami attorney who represented plaintiff photographer Jerry Greenberg in the Atlanta appeal, could not be reached for comment. Greenberg’s photographs were published in National Geographic in January 1962, February 1968, May 1971 and July 1990. Greenberg regained ownership of each photo’s copyrights.
Greenberg first sued the National Geographic in 1997, shortly after it began selling “The Complete National Geographic.”
A district court in Florida found in favor of National Geographic. But in 2001, an 11th Circuit judicial panel that included Birch, Tjoflat and Anderson reversed and remanded the case. A jury later awarded Greenberg $400,000, which the National Geographic appealed.
That second appeal was reviewed by a new appellate panel, composed of Barkett, Senior Judge Kravitch and Judge Lewis A. Kaplan, sitting by designation from the Southern District of New York. That appellate panel rejected the 2001 opinion Birch had authored and, instead, found that National Geographic could reprint its magazines in whole on computer disks without running afoul of federal copyright laws. In doing so, the second panel resolved a conflict with the 2nd Circuit, which had been ruling for National Geographic in a string of companion cases.
After the reversal, the 11th Circuit issued an order to consider the Greenberg case a second time, this time en banc.
The Tasini case prompted the reversal of the earlier appellate ruling. But National Geographic‘s attorneys, including former Whitewater independent counsel and Kirkland & Ellis of counsel Kenneth W. Starr, sought to use the Tasini ruling to limit freelance photographers’ copyrights.
In Monday’s appellate court’s majority opinion, Barkett said “each individual National Geographic magazine issue — including the January 1962, February 1968, May 1971 and July 1990 print issues in which Greenberg’s photographs first appeared — is a ‘particular collective work,’ and each of Greenberg’s photographs is ‘part of’ one of those collective works.
“National Geographic has the privilege of reproducing these individual magazine issues in print as often as it wishes, and Greenberg retains his copyrights in his individual photographs. At the same time, National Geographic has a copyright in the collective work as a whole — to wit, the individual magazine issues.”
The Greenberg case differed from Tasini in that, in Tasini, articles were “isolated from the context of the original print publications in which they first appeared,” Barkett wrote in the majority opinion. “Because the freelance authors’ articles were ‘presented to, and retrievable by, the user in isolation, clear of the context of the original print publication,” publishers were wrong in claiming they had not infringed freelancers’ copyrights, the majority opinion stated.
Relying on dicta, found in Tasini holding that digital databases were not the same as microfilm or microfiche reproductions (for which royalties have generally not been paid), the 11th Circuit majority determined that because National Geographic‘s digital library reproduced complete magazine issues “exactly as they are presented in the print version,” publishers retained the privilege of reproducing them under federal copyright laws without renegotiating contracts with their writers and photographers.
The majority also decided that new elements such as the operating software and search engines that were added to the CD-ROM library — even if they carry copyrights — were not enough to make “The Complete National Geographic” a new collective work subject to copyright.
“The addition of new material to a collective work will not, by itself, take the revised collective work outside the privilege,” the majority opinion stated.
“The conversion of magazine issues from print to digital form — as opposed to their conversion from print to print, or print to microform — does not create a different balance of copyright protection … between individual authors and publishers. … [T]he revision of a magazine by reproducing it in its original context in a new ‘distinct form’ — i.e. a digital version — is not a difference that would undo a publisher’s [copyright] privilege …”
Birch disagreed. “The authors, artists and creators should share in the publisher’s profits,” he wrote, adding that “the publishers are bereft of logic, legal merit and are totally disingenuous.”
National Geographic and its co-plaintiffs, he said, “have changed their legal position in this case more than a politician running for election. … Just as the chameleon politician changes position with the most recent poll, our appellants have changed their legal position and rationales as the Tasini case worked its way through the courts.”
Birch also dismissed the majority opinion as “histrionic speculation and contention that a decision in favor of Greenberg would lead to the wholesale purging of their electronic archives (information-destroying purges, loss of recorded history, massive destruction of constitutionally protected information, etc.).”
“This often-repeated but seldom-analyzed threat is totally specious,” Birch wrote, adding that one must distinguish “between history being available to the public in archives, and history as a consumer product sold to the public in mass-merchandised CD-ROMs or databases. If publication isn’t limited to the former, history need not be lost (or even inconveniently stored),” he said. “It will just not be a profitable commodity — as the publishers here have endeavored to make it.”
Birch also took pains to point out what he said was the driving force behind the decade-long litigation.
“The reader should understand the pecuniary or commercial positions of the parties and their constituencies in this dispute,” he wrote. “On one side there are the artists, authors, and other creators of copyrightable works who argue that their creative contributions to collective works already exploited by publishers should not be further exploited by those publishers without sharing the profits realized by that further commercial exploitation.
“On the opposite side, the publishers are seeking to generate new revenues by repackaging an old product — the ‘old wine in new bottles’ paradigm; updated in this instance with an easier access twist-off metal cap rather than a cork. Here the new packaging of the old content, replicated but unrevised, in electronic medium is both cost-efficient, profitable, and attractive to a new, computer-savvy generation of consumers. Moreover, the profits are enhanced exponentially when the publisher can exclude the contributing artists, authors, and creators of the content from sharing in those profits. At the end of the day, this case is not about education, access by the masses, or efficient storage and preservation — it is about who gets the money.”
The 11th Circuit case is Greenberg v. National Geographic Society, No. 05-16964.
July 24, 2008
Simply Audiobooks has announced plans to make a full range of Random House audiobook titles available for purchase and download in a DRM-free format. The deal with the Toronto audiobook outfit covers more than 5,000 RH audio titles. Downloads will initially be limited to Simply Audiobooks Download Club members, but a la carte download sales will be available later in the summer.
The audiobook downloads can be played on a wide variety of MP3 players, thanks to the lack of Digital Rights Managment security software designed to limit usage. Simply Audiobooks will make about 1,000 titles available immediately and plans to add more than 4,000 titles by the end of the summer. Among the Random House DRM-free titles available are Barack Obama’s The Audacity of Hope, James Rollins’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of the Crystal Skull and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.
Consumers have long complained that DRM embeded in CDs, discs and downloads restrict the use of and devices that can play their content. Last fall Simply Audiobooks joined the digital entertainment retailer eMusic in announcing that it would make its audiobook downloads DRM-free, and has since been in negotiations with publishers fearful that their content will be unprotected and freely distributed after purchase.
Vitaly Petritchkovitch, director of digital technology at Simply Audiobooks, said, “Consumers should have the choice of whatever audiobook title they prefer, as well as their choice of a playback device that suits their listening pleasure.”
July 23, 2008
SF author, critic, and poet Thomas M. Disch, born 1940, died July 4, 2008, of suicide in his New York City apartment. Ellen Datlow reports that Disch had been depressed for several years, especially by the death of long-time partner Charles Naylor, and worries of eviction from his rent-controlled apartment. 
Disch was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and published first story “The Double-Timer” in 1962. Notable early stories included “Descending” (1964), “Come to Venus Melancholy” (1965), “The Roaches” (1965), “Casablanca” (1967), and “The Asian Shore” (1970). First novel The Genocides (1965) was followed by two others before publication of classic Camp Concentration (1968), about an inmate in a US concentration camp who’s treated with experimental drugs. 334 (1974, a Nebula finalist) was a set of linked stories set in a New York city apartment complex, while On Wings of Song (1980, a Hugo and Nebula finalist and John W. Campbell Memorial Award winner), was a near-future satire about a device enabling talented singers to transcend their bodies. Disch also wrote TV series adaptation The Prisoner (1967). Story collections included Fun with Your New Head (1970), Getting Into Death (1975), Fundamental Disch (1980), and The Man Who Had No Idea (1982), which included notable stories “Getting Into Death” (1974), “The Man Who Had No Idea” (1978, Hugo nominee), and “Understanding Human Behavior” (1982, Nebula nominee).
Novella The Brave Little Toaster, first published in F&SF in 1980 and later issued in book form, won the Locus, Seiun, and British SF Association awards, and was adapted into a 1987 animated film. Disch published sequel The Brave Little Toaster Goes to Mars in 1988. Disch wrote two plays, Ben Hur (1989) and The Cardinal Detoxes (1990), as well as 1986 interactive software adventure Amnesia.
After 1980 collaboration Neighboring Lives with Charles Naylor, he wrote a quartet of contemporary horror novels: The Businessman: A Tale of Terror (1984), The M.D.: A Horror Story (1991, a Bram Stoker Award finalist), The Priest: A Gothic Romance (1994), and The Sub: A Study in Witchcraft (1999).
Disch was an acerbic, demanding SF critic, famous for defining science fiction as a branch of children’s literature (in “The Embarrassments of Science Fiction”, Science Fiction at Large, Peter Nicholls, ed., 1976) . His The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of, subtitled “How Science Fiction Conquered the World”, won Hugo and Locus awards as nonfiction book of the year. Essay collection On SF was published 2005.
He wrote poetry, bylined “Tom Disch” — his long poem “On Science Fiction” won the Rhysling Award in 1981 — with several collections included Yes, Let’s: New and Selected Poems (1989) and A Child’s Garden of Grammar (1997), and edited several notable anthologies, from The Ruins of Earth (1971), Bad Moon Rising (1973), The New Improved Sun (1975), and two with Charles Naylor, New Constellations (1976) and Strangeness (1977).
Disch had recently been writing more actively, with three books scheduled for publication within a year: novella The Voyage of the Proteus, published last December; short novel The Word of God, published this month by Tachyon Publications; and collection The Wall of America due from Tachyon in October.
The 1993 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction wrote “Because of his intellectual audacity, the chillingly distanced mannerism of his narrative art, the austerity of the pleasures he affords, and the fine cruelty of his wit, [Disch] has been perhaps the most respected, least trusted, most envied and least read of all modern first-rank sf writers.”
July 23, 2008
Documents that scholars hope will shed more light on the enigmatic writings of Franz Kafka have been unearthed in Israel 84 years after his death.
The papers written by Kafka have been gathering dust in a Tel Aviv flat since being smuggled out of Prague before the German invasion in 1939.
Kafka’s literary executor, Max Brod, kept Kafka’s papers and manuscripts, despite the author’s request that they be burned.
After Brod’s death in 1968, the notes were kept in Tel Aviv by Brod’s secretary, Esther Hoffe, who refused to let the public see them.
Ms Hoffe died recently, aged 101, so the papers can now be accessed.
However authorities say the damp state of Ms Hoffe’s flat and her numerous pets may have damaged the papers.
Academics are waiting to find out if the notes can provide the key to Kafka’s tales of alienation and despair.
Kafka’s stories include The Metamorphosis (1915), The Trial (1925) and The Castle (1926).
