On September 30, the Authors Alliance Rights Reversion team hosted a webinar on Understanding Rights Reversion for ASERL (the Association of Southeastern Research Libraries). The webinar, led by Nicole Cabrera, Jordyn Ostroff, and Brianna Schofield of the Samuelson Law, Technology, and Public Policy Clinic at UC Berkeley, offers a step-by-step look at how authors can regain rights from publishers in order to make their work more available. Interested authors can watch the full video above, check out our team’s slide deck, or grab a copy of the guide, which is available both online and in print.
Category Archives: Reaching Readers
Robert Darnton and Authors Alliance:
A Rights Reversion Success Story
Posted September 11, 2015
We are very pleased to announce that two books by Robert Darnton, The Business of Enlightenment and Mesmerism and the End of Enlightenment in France, are now freely available in their entirety online. Darnton, an Authors Alliance Advisory Board member and an emeritus Professor of History and outgoing University Librarian at Harvard, has, with Authors Alliance assistance, secured the necessary rights to release two of his books under Creative Commons licenses.
What will you do after recovering your rights?
Stephen Sugarman’s success story
Posted August 18, 2015 Authors Alliance is encouraging its members to consider reverting rights to their out-of-print or commercially dormant titles in order to see those works made more widely available. Stephen D. Sugarman, the Roger J. Traynor Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law and an Authors Alliance founding member, writes below about his recent experience in making one of his books available online.
John E. Coons, William H. Clune, and I published Private Wealth and Public Education with Harvard University Press (Belknap) in 1970. In the book we showed how wealthy public school districts around the nation spent considerably more money per pupil (while imposing lower tax rates on their property owners) than did low wealth school districts; and we advanced a legal argument as to why this regime should be declared unconstitutional by our courts. The book had a big impact in many states and on the education law literature – an impact that continues to the present as lawsuits challenging school finance inequalities remain vibrant around the nation. But, although the book is not technically out of print, Harvard is understandably not promoting it, and new copies have not been sold in some time. It is available in many libraries, but we suspect that many potential readers would be much more interested in having online digital access (with searchable text).
To ensure that the book will be able to reach these readers, we asked Harvard University Press for assistance, and the Press kindly returned all of the publishing rights to the book to us (although Harvard technically retains the formal copyright and told us we would have to pay to have that assigned to us). While we did not have a digital copy of the book to release, we were pleased to find that it had already been scanned from the library of the University of Michigan, and that it has long been discoverable (though not readable) via both HathiTrust and Google Books. The letter that Harvard provided to us sufficed for HathiTrust to provide us with digital copies for our own records, and to unlock the full version of the book for the public at large to read and share under a Creative Commons license. We are hoping next to get Google Books to also unlock access to the full text.
We believe that Private Wealth and Public Education still has much to offer and are glad that it has this new opportunity to reach more readers online.
Share your own success story! If you’ve already used our Understanding Rights Reversions guide to make your work more available, please contact us at reversions@authorsalliance.org. We’d love to hear about it.
Caged Masterpieces: Chris Hoofnagle Reviews Arthur Leff’s Swindling and Selling
Posted July 20, 2015
One example among many such works is Swindling and Selling, by the late Arthur Leff. Despite its continued utility and relevance to the study of consumer protection, the book remains inaccessible to readers who lack access to a major research library, or to the funds necessary to purchase a relatively rare used copy. In the review below, Authors Alliance founding member Chris Jay Hoofnagle, director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology’s information privacy programs and senior fellow to the Samuelson Law, Technology & Public Policy Clinic, reviews this out-of-print book that is, for all intents and purposes, unavailable to scholars, lawyers, students, and the public: a caged masterpiece.
Arthur Leff’s Swindling and Selling is a classic, wry analysis of the blurry lines between what we consider honest salesmanship and illegal fraud. Not all selling is swindling, but all swindling is selling, Leff explains. He shows how both sellers and swindlers have to overcome similar forms of buyer resistance. Leff explains these dynamics in the language of Erving Goffman and through some use of behavioral economics.
In the case of swindling, con artists weave a dramaturgy where they hold a monopoly over some valuable asset, and the mark is set up as monopsonist, an exclusive buyer with access to a special deal. The scheme is premised on mutual need, and policing of these schemes is difficult because for part of the transaction, the mark is a willing participant. Here, Leff describes scams such as the “Spanish Prisoner,” where a mark is promised great riches if he will only bribe some minor official to free the holder of the treasure (the modern version of this includes the “419” scheme). Leff then pans out to show how the elements of swindling are present in some political and religious movements (although these may not be scams). The “ancient estate” scam, where marks are convinced that a fantastic old property was improperly distributed, making many modern-day people claimants to it, is similar to political movements to repatriate lands. “Godcons” are con games where the “conman…induces one or more marks to trade money…of this world value in exchange for the promised delivery of quantities of exceedingly valuable divinely manufactured goods.” Pyramid schemes operate by distracting marks from the opportunity costs of their labor, and by getting them emotionally attached to a swindle instead of more viable employment.
Leff’s analysis shines when he switches from an entertaining series of examples of “bunco” to legal selling. In a perfect market, bargains should not exist. Thus, sellers must create a plausible dramaturgy to explain why a buyer gets a bargain. This could be a clearance sale, with praises the buyer as parsimonious while implying that less careful consumers are getting the anti-bargain. Leff then turns to mass advertising, which relies upon several predicable cons: the “sufficiency switch” and the “Calvinist causation.” The former refers to the many products that suggest some cause and effect between the purchase of a product and some goal—clear up one’s complexion with a skin cream and get the girl. The latter is Leff’s term for positional objects: the Cadillac or the Mercedes. These things operate from an opposite logic. They do not make one successful, they license a script (and a prop) to the mark: “Buy this symbol with which you can advertise, powerfully and convincingly, that you are what you, and those about whose opinions you care, devoutly wish to be.”
This wonderful book is out of print, and practically unavailable to new generations of lawyers and thinkers who focus on consumer protection. As of this writing, the least expensive used copy of it is $74 on Amazon.com. The entire University of California library system has only two copies of this work. According to Google Scholar, despite Leff’s brilliance and masterful discussion, the book has only attracted 27 citations.
Countless works of enduring value and significance fall out of print and remain essentially off-limits, which not only denies their creators an intellectual legacy, but also stymies researchers, libraries, artists, and others whose work could be enriched by access. A treasure trove of creative, historical, and cultural output languishes in this informational no man’s land, and the power of these works to inform, educate, and enlighten is greatly diminished.
Authors Alliance is deeply committed to the belief that these “caged masterpieces” deserve to be widely read. To that end, we are creating a series of examples to highlight them. We want to hear from you about works that are valuable, interesting, relevant—and out of reach. We invite you to contact us at info@authorsalliance.org and nominate more “caged masterpieces” to be featured in this space. And to all authors whose own books might be locked away out of sight, we encourage you to take action and you recover the rights to your work in order to give it new life.
Books and the Valley of the Unassignable
Posted April 22, 2015Authors Alliance Co-Founder Tom Leonard
In our day of networked information, scholars in North America need not worry about finding a book that bears on a crucial issue. Interlibrary loan has never been more efficient and Amazon and similar sites display single used books for sale. But here the good news ends, for there is often no way to assign this reading. A single volume cannot serve even the smallest seminar, because it cannot be shared in time for the day or week when it is the center of attention. Classes are planned months in advance and without the certainty of a book being available, it will not make the common reading list.
At Authors Alliance we had the impression that many important books in the humanities and qualitative social sciences were falling into the Valley of the Unassignable. But proceeding by anecdote would only take us so far, and so we ran a survey to see if older books that we knew were in demand, could be ordered from a publisher or otherwise were available as an e-book.
The University Library at Berkeley (which holds more than 12 million volumes and has 65,000 borrower cards) gave us a list of the 500 titles that were most frequently checked out in 2013-2014. Circulation figures of this type are imperfect, since some titles are on reserve and have to be checked out or renewed more frequently. But by looking at such a large number, we have corrected for this distortion. We cast a close eye on the nearly 200 titles that were heavily requested and fell into the humanities and qualitative social science.
Much credit should be given to publishers who have largely kept these valued titles in print and to others who have seen that there is at least a pdf of works published in the 20th century. But we could also see that Berkeley borrowers were checking out books that could not be assigned in a class. Market forces and rights issues limit what can be done for groups of readers. If we look at 20th century imprints and, rely on Amazon.com, many titles are out of reach. Consider for example:
Vladimir Putin Book Group
- Paul W. Schroeder, Austria, Great Britain, and the Crimean War: the destruction of the European Concert (1973) [$110 on Kindle, $116 if Amazon restocks]
- Winfried Baumgart, Imperialism: the idea and reality of British and French Colonial Expansion, 1880-1914 (1982)
- Norman Rich, Why the Crimean War? A Cautionary Tale (1985)
- David Wetzel, The Crimean War: A Diplomatic History (1985)
- Rosemary Foot, The Wrong War: American Policy and the Dimensions of the Korean Conflict, 1950-1953 (1985)
- James Cracraft, Major problems in the history of imperial Russia (1993-94) [some $100 paperbacks from Amazon]
Berkeley readers are checking these titles out, but Mr. Putin would struggle to put them on his reading list.
We can probably find a book group for you in our data, and that is unfortunate. Authors Alliance offers a way for many authors and their heirs to take works out of the Valley of the Unassignable. One path to higher ground was offered earlier this month, when we released a guide that helps authors regain rights to their books in order to make them more available.
Download Understanding Rights Reversions (PDF) from Authors Alliance
Download Understanding Rights Reversions from Unglue.it
Keeping Your Books Available
Posted April 9, 2015Nicole Cabrera and Jordyn Ostroff
That book you published a few years ago is no longer selling like it used to, but it still contains useful information. Why don’t you ask your publisher for your rights back? You may be surprised to know that your publisher might be quite willing to give you back your rights if you ask. In fact, your publisher might also be quite willing to work with you to increase your book’s availability.
Don’t worry if you are unsure about how to approach your publisher. A new guide created by Authors Alliance will help you through the process, each step of the way.
Today, Authors Alliance releases Understanding Rights Reversion: When, Why, & How to Regain Copyright and Make Your Book More Available, a guide that arms authors with the information and strategies they need to revive their books. This guide is the product of extensive outreach to the publishing industry. In the process, we interviewed authors, publishers, and literary agents, ranging from a CEO of a major publishing house to contracts and rights managers of trade and academic presses, editorial assistants, novelists, and academic authors.
We were happily surprised by the consistency of publishers’ responses: across the board, publishers told us that they want to work together with their authors and that they are often willing to give authors their rights back if its in the books’ best interests. Publishers share the desire to “do the right thing” by books that would otherwise languish out of print. Time and again, we received a warm reception from the publishers, authors, and agents that we spoke with during our outreach, all of whom saw the value in a guide that would help authors keep their works available to readers.
Today’s technologies offer tremendous opportunities for authors to make their out-of-print or otherwise unavailable books more widely available. Some authors want to revive their books by creating e-books, while others may want to use print-on-demand technology or deposit their books in openly accessible repositories. We hope that the guide empowers authors to advocate on their own behalf to make their works more widely available, and we believe that many authors can work with their publishers to increase their books’ availability by following the strategies articulated in the guide: Be Reasonable, Be Flexible, Be Persistent, and Be Creative.
Page through Understanding Rights Reversion, and consider the ways you might make your book more available to your readers. This new guide will help you take an active role in your book’s future.
Download Understanding Rights Reversions (PDF)
Download from Unglue.it
University of Michigan Press to build digital scholarship platform
Posted March 31, 2015A much-needed boost to digital scholarship is in the works at University of Michigan Press, which announced this week that it will be receiving a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support a durable, open-source platform for digital companions to printed publications. From the Michigan press release:
The grant will fund an effort to meet the growing needs of authors to durably connect their publications to related datasets, interactive information, video and other non-text based online content. The ultimate goal is to create a shareable, open-source solution for born-digital complementary monograph materials as well as a working model that maximizes the publishing strengths of university presses and the preservation expertise of libraries.
Authors Alliance applauds this effort and its promise for preserving the kinds of digitally-enabled scholarship many of our members create.
Scholarship should be lasting, but the web can be all too transient. To take one common example, citations to web-based resources run the risk of pointing to pages that have moved, changed, or are simply no longer there. Perma.cc is one approach to solving the citation problem, but it’s only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the long-term preservation of “born-digital” scholarship.
Companion sites allow authors to provide complementary resources that work best off the page. Where datasets and “non-text based online content” are integral to a text, we need to make sure that they too are preserved and kept accessible. This newest effort from the University of Michigan Press is an admirable step in that direction.
Source: Michigan News
Christopher Sprigman on Pricing to Be Read
Posted November 14, 2014
Authors Alliance founding member Christopher Sprigman, a law professor at NYU, discusses how he negotiated for a lower price for his book, The Knockoff Economy, and why he felt that the price was important to reaching readers.
Lydia Loren on Semaphore Press
Posted
Authors Alliance Founding Member Lydia Loren from Lewis and Clark Law School explains how her publishing company, Semaphore Press, is working to produce affordable, high-quality casebooks for use in law school classrooms. She discusses how the Semaphore Press business model is designed to both adequately remunerate casebook authors and ensure that students have access to the educational materials they need.
Making copyright work for authors
Posted November 3, 2014Authors Alliance Co-Founder Molly Van Houweling
On Oct. 10 I traveled to Columbia Law School to attend and speak at a symposium hosted by the Kernochan Center for Law, Media, and the Arts entitled “Creation is Not Its Own Reward: Making Copyright Work for Authors and Performers.” It was a fascinating day featuring perspectives from creators in a variety of fields—including drama, non-fiction authorship, photography, song-writing, graphic art, and even video game design. Video from the event has now been posted and the proceedings will be published in an upcoming issue of the Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts.
I spoke on a panel entitled “Academic Perspectives.” This topic had multiple meanings for me. I am a legal academic with a scholarly interest in the relationship between copyright law and creativity. So I have an “academic perspective” on the creative environment in general. But I also have an individual creator’s perspective as the author of academic articles on my scholarly topic (and of course as a founder of Authors Alliance). In my remarks I emphasized the legal and practical obstacles that academic authors often face when they want to ensure that their books and articles are accessible to readers even after those works have outlived what in many cases is a fleeting commercial life.
I explained that academic authors sometimes transfer their copyrights or grant exclusive licenses to publishers without much forethought. Years later they may find that they want to revive out-of-print books, write new editions, anthologize their own works, or simply post them on the Internet so they can be accessible to readers around the world. But these authors no longer have the right to do what they want with their own works without permission from their publishers. Renegotiation may be theoretically possible but practically difficult–especially for absent-minded professors who may have trouble even finding their original contracts (to say nothing of the sometimes difficult task of figuring out who owns rights that may have been transferred from the original publisher to someone else).
Academic authors are not alone in facing this type of dilemma. Over the course of the day, other creators described a wide variety of individual and industry practices regarding copyright, including many that contribute to problems for authors who want to reuse their own work. Most interesting of all, Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Douglas Wright described retaining and managing the copyrights in his stage plays but not in his movie screenplays. In one case he worked on a screenplay adaptation of a stage play he had written. When he later revived the play he did not include new-and-improved material he had developed for the screenplay, because that revision of his own work was a work-for-hire that he did not own. Wright expressed a strong preference for retaining his copyrights when possible and thus serving as “the CEO of my own imagination.”