Light Culture podcast I get interviewed by David Hershkovits

RIP Popular Photography, 1937-2017

from Boing Boing:



Eighty years after its founding as one of the first prosumer publications for the then-expensive hobby of photography, Popular Photography is ceasing both print and online operations following the next issue. Modeled after Popular Mechanics and similar periodicals, many factors did them in: the confluence of phone cameras, the shift to video, the demise of print, the ubiquity of free how-to guides and consumer reviews, and tepid attempts to stay relevant as media moved from print to web to mobile.

Jeff Wignall, a photo magazine contributor for 40 years, told PetaPixel that management at parent company Bonnier was also to blame, saying the magazine's cause of death "is partly that the parent company just did not see the value of a photography magazine." He added:

Cell phone cameras, you have to admit, played a big part in this, but if Bonnier wanted to save the photo magazine there were ways to do it. Their website was very lame, they started it up at one point, and seemed like they had a lot of energy flowing into it for a while but that was several years ago. Then they seemed to have abandoned the website and the only way, ironically, for a print magazine to survive is if it has a good partnership with an online edition of the magazine. Without that there is a sort of breakdown in communication between the print reader and the online person.

Here is the winner of their final readers' contest, shot by Aaron Feinberg. The news gives it additional symbolism.

• Popular Photography is Dead After 80 Years as a Top Photo Magazine (PetaPixel)

How the New York Public Library made ebooks open, and thus one trillion times better

from Boing Boing:

Leonard Richardson isn't just the author of Constellation Games, one of the best debut novels I ever read and certainly one of the best books I read in 2013; he's also an extremely talented free/open source server-software developer who has been working for the New York Public Library on a software project that liberates every part of the electronic book lending system from any kind of proprietary lock-in, and, in the process, made reading library ebooks one trillion times better.

Richardson explained his project in exciting detail at Restfest 2015 in Greenville, SC in a talk called "The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book," and has posted his talk slides along with notes to his site. I've been discussing Leonard's ideas in light of the proposal for an open library ebook platform that I made in Locus magazine this past spring. Both of us see a nonprofit, mission-oriented infrastructure for ebooks as critical to serving patrons best while protecting their privacy.

Richardson's talk makes the point that in the age of the web, we had hypertext that acted like, well, hypertext. Lots of people contributed to the web in lots of ways, and all those ways joined up, more or less painlessly. In the age of the app, that is virtually unheard of, and when it does occur -- as when Netflix and Twitter opened up APIs that turned into flourishing hothouses of third-party innovation -- it gets shut down without warning and with extreme prejudice.

Richardson's system actually works: they're using it in NYPL and many affiliated libraries. It makes reading ebooks from the library one trillion times better, and it lets anyone improve it, at anywhere in the stack -- it lets commercial suppliers play, too, but prevents them from locking libraries, publishers or readers in. It is a model of how mission-driven public agencies and nonprofits can be truly game-changing in online ecosystems that have been dominated by a single, monolithic corporation.

I'm going to start you off slow. Remember that there are three main vendors in the library ebook space. We did deals with two of them. Now that we've got the middleware in place, we can do a deal with the third vendor. We can license books from a third source without having to tell our patrons to install app #4 on their phones.

Okay, that's nothing to do with OPDS. Any kind of middleware would allow that sort of integration.

But then we decide we also want to offer Project Gutenberg books to our patrons. Unfortunately Project Gutenberg does not have an API. They have this ugly system where you have to use rsync to mirror the ebooks and then pull the metadata from a big RDF document.

So I write a simple content server, which rsyncs the ebooks and pulls the metadata and then offers a collection that is the equal, in quantity if not in quality, of the commercial collections. But instead of making up a custom API for my collection to talk to the middleware, the way the commercial vendors did, I use the API I already have—OPDS.

So now I'm using OPDS for machine-to-machine integration, not just to talk to the patrons. I can use this protocol whenever I am talking about books or collections of books.

Now other sources of free ebooks want to get in on the action. unglue.it is mostly an aggregator for Creative Commons books and other open-access books that aren't a hundred years old. Standard Ebooks is a little org that makes really nice editions of public domain ebooks, because Project Gutenberg ebooks have really horrible formatting.

So I told those people: you generate OPDS feeds, and I'll slurp them up into my content server, they'll show up in our collection and patrons will be able to download them. And that's what they did. I haven't set up my part of it yet, the part that slurps, because I haven't had time, but it's going to work.

At that point the OPDS protocol is doing machine-to-machine integration across organizational boundaries. It's hypermedia API heaven!

The Enterprise Media Distribution Platform At The End Of This Book [Leonard Richardson/Crummy]

The twisted history of the Happy Birthday song—and the copyright shenanigans that keep it profitable

From Boing Boing:

BY GLENN FLEISHMAN
I've obtained the 1922 book that demonstrates this classic song should rest in the public domain.



Mildred and Patty Hill rank among the most interesting progressive thinkers in the 19th century, and yet they are popularly remembered only for a copyright debate. Why is a song they didn't precisely write still a corporate moneyspinner, at least 122 years after they published a similar ditty?

The Hills wrote and published "Good Morning To All," which morphed into a more popular rendition: "Happy Birthday To You." A lawsuit filed in 2013 by a documentary filmmaker, Jennifer Nelson, who was working on a movie about the song's history, sought to get a court to determine that the copyright to the song asserted by its current owners, Warner/Chappell, expired in the 1920s, if it ever properly existed.

This suit was nearing its conclusion when a thrilling last-minute piece of evidence emerged from Warner/Chappell: an excerpt of a 1927 title called The Everyday Song Book produced by the piano-making firm, The Cable Company. The song, numbered 16, is called "Good Morning and Birthday Song" with the main lyrics under the score, and "optional" words below for "Happy Birthday." The ostensible copyright notice was blurred in the version supplied by the music company.

songbookNelson's lawyer noted it was not the first edition, and were able to get a library to dig up the 1922 version. The same version appears there without a legally required statement of copyright. I have obtained a copy of this 1922 edition from an online bookseller. It's a fascinating thing to see in print what has been in dispute for so long.

This would seem to be the end of the line for "Happy Birthday." The filmmaker should prevail; fees collected starting in 2009, within the statute of limitations at the time the suit was filed, should be refunded; and a clear future would be established for public-domain use.

But copyright is a crooked path.



THE REMARKABLE HILL SISTERS

The intricacies of copyright related to "Happy Birthday" need to take a momentary back seat to the song's two creators, who haven't been fully forgotten, but who deserve some space of their own.

Patty and Mildred were two of the six children of Rev. William Wallace Hill and Martha Jane Smith, raised in Anchorage, Kentucky. Unusual for his day, he insisted his four daughters have a profession and encouraged their advanced education. "My father believed that every girl should grow up with a profession. This was a radical philosophy everywhere fifty or sixty years ago, particularly in the South," Patty Hill recalled in an 1925 interview.

Patty became one of the leading lights in the development of American early-childhood education, a continuation and expansion of work done in Germany by kindergarten inventor Friedrich Froebel. Her development of what were known reasonably as the Hill Floor Blocks led a student, Caroline Pratt, to develop "unit blocks," which recently celebrated their 100th anniversary and are widely used in childcare today.

Mildred was an ethnomusicologist who was an expert in African-American music, as well as a musician and composer. She's considered the likely author of a remarkable essay published under the name Johann Tonsor in 1893 that predicted that African-American music would essentially become the music of America. (The work is of its time, titled "Negro Music," and is patronizing but admiring.)

When our American musical Messiah sees fit to be born he will then find ready to his hand a mass of lyrical and dramatic themes with which to construct a distinctively American music.

In 1887, the 19-year-old Patty joined the Louisville Training School for Kindergartners, a new enterprise in Kentucky that aimed to establish demonstration kindergartens and spread the practice of pre-school education for the poor. "The special desire was to reach little children who attended [an industrial school attached to a mission] although too young to sew," according to a 1907–1908 issue of The Kindergarten-Primary Magazine. Older children were taught the sewing and carpet-making trade.

Patty Hill graduated in 1889 and became principal of one of the kindergartens, and then in 1893, the head of the entire Louisville Free Kindergarten Association. In a measure of how progressive Hill's organization was, in addition to serving what would otherwise have been child laborers, in 1899 it began training "colored" teachers, who would teach black children. Only a handful of such kindergartens existed at that time.

As part of her work at the school, Patty enlisted her sister Mildred—who wasn't otherwise associated with the school—to compose songs that could be used to guide children through different tasks and phases of the days. Any parent is familiar with such songs today from daycare, and the Hills are a good part of their American origin. (Patty and her sister Mary, who was a teacher at the school, also worked together to develop "Typical Lessons for Mothers and Kindergartners," serialized in The Kindergarten for Teachers and Parents, such as "Rain—Part II" in an 1890 issue.)

Starting in 1889, Mildred and Patty essentially workshopped songs with kids. Mildred wrote the music and Patty the lyrics. (Some researchers maintain Mildred adapted an African spiritual for the music, but there's no trace of the syncopation or the unique scale.) They experimented with finding songs that children could memorize and sing easily at this young age; Mary also helped out. Patty said in a deposition in 1934:

[A draft of the song] would be written and I would take it into the school the next morning and test it with the little children. If the register was beyond the children we went back home at night and altered it and I would go back the next morning and try it again and again until we secured a song that even the youngest children could learn with perfect ease.

"Good Morning to All" was one of their first efforts, and it appeared as part of Song Stories for the Kindergarten published in 1893. In the deposition noted above, Patty said that they used many variants to the lyrics, including "Happy Birthday To You," but never wrote these out or published these. Patty was savvy about copyrights: she and her sisters told trainees to never write down the music or lyrics to the songs before the 1893 book appeared.

In 2015, unit blocks remain in wide use and "Happy Birthday To All" is a tune that perhaps billions of people know. Patty, who died in 1946, helped create and foster a change in thinking about teaching young children that benefitted hundreds of millions worldwide.

The Hill sisters had an impact. But the fact that an 1893 melody coupled with words sung but not put into print has remained in copyright without an effective challenge may finally be on the verge of changing.

A smoking gun in ostensibly overlooked files

When I was a young man studying graphic design at college, one of my professors, Alvin Eisenman, then the dean of the American approach to design, would mix art and practice with anecdotes about his career. One story stuck with me: Never sign off on a client's proof, he told us. Those who have seen Elf know what that means. Before a book or other item is printed, a pre-production version is created—a "proof"—that shows any flaws or problems.

When I had an offset printed book last year, I received a laser-printed copy produced by the same rendered output that would be used to create printing plates for the book. I signed each page and express shipped the bundle back. In Alvin's youth, it would have almost certainly been a proof pulled from a letterpress or similar plate using a "proofing press." Graphic designers typically examine these proofs, but it's also typical to put the onus on the client (or one's boss) to sign the sheets—whoever signs has responsibility, and the printer bears no expense for errors found that aren't marked.

Alvin told us he had once signed off on a book in the 1940s, and it was printed, and only then was it discovered that the copyright notice had been left off. Since March 1, 1989, any original work of creative expression in America receives the benefit of copyright protection as part of the act of creation. But before then, there's a long and complicated history as to what was needed. Until 1977 (and with some exceptions until 1989), "If the work did not include the word 'Copyright' or a © (a 'c' in a circle) and the name of the copyright owner, the work would enter the public domain," according to the Stanford University Libraries Copyright & Fair Use guide.

As a result, Alvin and a colleague spent a memorable number of hours with rubber stamps and a "boxcar full of books," ensuring that each received a manually applied notice before they were shipped to booksellers. This was a cautionary tale, and one that might play into the current state of the "Happy Birthday" lawsuit.

I won't recapitulate all the details, as they were discussed at length in 2013 across the media and again recently. The lawsuit is quite comprehensible for laypeople, and describes dozens of ways in which the copyright should be considered either invalidly claimed or lapsed besides the newly discovered work.

The brief recap is that although the music and lyrics to "Good Morning" have a clear copyrightable moment in 1893, the same music coupled with the "Happy Birthday" words does not. The lawsuit notes the appearance in print in the early 1900s in various sources of alternate words, but without being authorized specifically by the Hills—who ostensibly retained copyright to "Good Morning," not the Song Stories publisher—that doesn't necessarily diminish their claim.

In 1934, Jessica Hill sued over the performance of "Happy Birthday" as part of a 1933 Irving Berlin stage musical, but without referencing the lyrics—only earlier copyrights to "Good Morning." (Jessica inherited part of the rights from Mildred, who died in 1916.) In 1934 and 1935, Jessica sold rights to certain piano arrangements of "Good Morning" to the publisher of Song Stories, the Clayton F. Summy Company. Summy in turn filed a series of "republished musical composition" copyright registrations for "Happy Birthday," although only the last of which included the lyrics, and the lyrics weren't cited as part of the revisions that would justify a new registration.

The Warner/Chappell defense of the copyright that remains is that somehow, the 1893 music combined with lyrics that were already in wide use and published extensively, once put together in 1935 represent a new work. That idea may be indefensible enough, but there are many other flaws in how the song traveled from 1893 to 1935. (The original 1893 work and a revised 1896 version should have remained under copyright until 1921 and 1924; the lawsuit says a proper renewal wasn't filed. Even if it were, the last possible date of protection would have been 1924 plus 28 years: 1952.)

Warner/Chappell, part of Warner Music Group, has owned the rights (if any exist) since acquiring the previous owner in 1985. It has reaped on the order of $2 million per year since, and if it were to maintain that 1935 registration date, its ownership wouldn't expire until 2030—137 years after the first publication of the song's melody.

There's much, much more in the lawsuit, but the last-minute discovery may allow all of the other arguments to be ignored. Late in the process Warner/Chappell produced new documents from a variety of sources after receiving some new material from other parties and re-evaluating what it had already turned over. One of the pages was from the aforementioned The Everyday Song Book's 1927 edition.

Nelson's lawyers didn't immediately identify this as an issue because of a conveniently blurred bit of text where the copyright notice should have been. Warner/Chappell sputters about this in a recent filing: "And, to be clear, we did not notice the blurred text on the sheet music printed." Hey, nobody's accusing you!

The attorneys found a university library with a 1922 edition of the book—the same edition I now have a surprisingly crisp copy of sitting beside me—and the credit line was readable. Instead of including as it did on other copyrighted songs throughout the book a notice like, "Copyright, 1899, by A. Flanagan, Publisher," it says merely, "Special permission through courtesy of The Clayton F. Summy Co." It contains both the "Good Morning To All" and "Happy Birthday To You" lyrics.

Mark Rifkin of Wolf Haldenstein Adler Freeman & Herz, one of Nelson's lawyers, says, "The publication in 1922 without a copyright notice forfeits the copyright; it's just that simple."

Even if it had had a copyright notice, because it was published in 1922, the work would fall before the 1923 cutoff point at which a variety of absurd revisions and extensions were added to copyright duration. Works published in the U.S. before 1923 are all in the public domain; works published in 1923, if they had a proper notice and were renewed after an initial 28-year term, don't expire until 2019.

Warner/Chappell's filing says that Summy lacked permission in 1922 to grant such copyright, only obtaining it until 1935. However, Rifkin tells me that this is "not the only instance we found where the song was reprinted with permission from Summy"; they found many instances from 1901 through 1924.

If Summy lacked the right, even if it had granted it to The Cable Company, then the song's appearance in the book wouldn't harm the Hills' ownership. And yet lacking the right, it's difficult to imagine this and other books were distributed without complaint, as Patty Hill was likely to see them or be told of them as they were used in her field. And she and Jessica were ready to sue the moment the song was performed in a musical.

It all seems rather tendentious when you read the current lawsuit and source documents, including a lengthy deposition in the 1935 suit. The Hills regularly sang "Happy Birthday" to Mildred's music, the lyrics were widely reproduced in print, and Sammy had and exercised various rights on behalf of the Hills at various times.

The entire case rests on the notion that Patty and Mildred never allowed the "Happy Birthday" lyrics to be combined with Mildred's music in any published form until 1935, and that those lyrics were original to them.

THE SONG MAY HAVE FEET, BUT THE GAME'S UP

"Happy Birthday" is fortunately an outlier in the copyright world. There isn't another popular song like it with as long and murky a history, nor any other work. The closest situation are the persistent efforts by a group called the Conan Doyle Estate to extract licensing fees for use of the Sherlock Holmes characters in new fiction. (The estate represents Conan Doyles who didn't descend from Arthur directly—his children were without issue—and who repurchased the rights from a charity to which his last child donated them.)

All but 10 later Holmes stories were published in America before 1923, but the estate aggressively pursued fees for any representation of Holmes or other characters under the notion that even if specific facts or character traits exhibited in the final 10 works aren't present, Holmes as a literary figure depends on the full corpus. (The Holmes' stories are in the public domain in the UK and many other countries under a different copyright regime that counted 50 years from Conan Doyle's death.)

The "estate" lost at trial, lost in appeal (with a wonderful opinion by Judge Richard Posner), and the Supreme Court opted to not hear further arguments. And yet it persists.

The final determination about when "Happy Birthday" lost its copyright protection will be made by the judge in the case, who, after some back and forth filings and possibly an in-court hearing in the next week, will probably issue his opinion between the end of August and the end of September, says Rifkin.

It would be nice to close the book on "Happy Birthday," but it doesn't close the book on copyright absurdity. An abundance of material from 1923 is poised to enter the public domain in 2019 unless a further taking of the public interest occurs, as the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act did in 1998, adding an unnecessary 20 years to the existing 50 years' protection past an authors' death.

Rather than sing "Happy Birthday" on January 1, 2019, we should sing another variation of the song: "Good-bye to you."

SOURCES

Google Books and university libraries are wonderful sources of contemporary information on this topic, because so much material related to education was published in the time periods affected and nearly all of the pre-1923 material (and some beyond) that's been scanned is freely available for viewing and download. Many are linked in the article above.

Robert Brauneis wrote a magisterial account of the Hill family and the song's history, as well as tracing the roots and winding path of its copyright in "Copyright and the World's Most Popular Song" (October 2010). I relied on some of his primary research (particularly for the 1925 quotation from an unpublished interview), although much of it can also be confirmed through contemporary accounts in journals, newspapers, and books. Some of his work has since been further elaborated on in the "Happy Birthday" lawsuit filing.

PUBLISHED 8:49 AM FRI, AUG 7, 2015
COPYRIGHT, COPYRIGHT EXTENSION, HAPPY BIRTHDAY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Glenn is a veteran technology journalist based in Seattle who contributes heavily to Macworld, including as a columnist and co-host of its podcast. He writes about science and technology regularly for Economist, Boing Boing, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, and other publications. He's been blogging since 2001 at his Glog. In October 2012, Glenn won Jeopardy! twice. He tweets — a lot — @glennf.



please click through to the original article for more "links" etc.

It's a Mad Mad Mad Mad world! The origin of counterculture icon Alfred E. Neuman

from Dangerous Minds:

While going through a box of old papers, an article I cut out of the New York Times when I was 14 (January 10, 1975) fell out. Just as important to me now as it was then, it is about a subject dear to my heart, Mad Magazine mascot Alfred E. Neuman (not Newman). This face of total idiocy spent at least 50 years as an icon for cool rebellious youth (only in recent years does the 62-year-old publication seem to have become homogenized, sadly), a signpost to the training ground for smartypants the world over from the ‘50s to the ‘80s, and recognizable to just about anyone on earth, whether they liked it or not. A generation of heavy counterculture leaders can be identified as having read Mad Magazine, as it was like an underground press for pre-teens waiting to be old enough for initiation into the real underground. Anyone from Abbie Hoffman to R. Crumb to Jimi Hendrix was trained in “fuck you, haha” by the true geniuses at Mad. Alfred E. Neuman was entered into the presidential race for many decades until “that was a bigger joke than ours,” said Al Feldstein, longtime Mad editor (R.I.P.) who gave Alfred his name.

But where did Alfred come from? Any Mad fans or weirdo collector types will tell you he was around long before Mad existed. Here’s a nice piece of history, this Times article I found, about the history of our beloved grinning idiot, written by Mad co-founder (with William M. Gaines) Harvey Kurtzman.

  MOUNT VERNON, N.Y.-There’s a question that nags wherever I go. Again and again I am asked, Where did Alfred Neuman come from? For those of you who didn’t hear a bell ring at the mention of Alfred N., he is the face you see on the covers of Mad Magazine. And for those of you who ring, let me put the eternal question to rest, once and for all.

The face first came to my attention when i was doing the comic book Mad for publisher William Gaines in the middle fifties—I think it was 1954. We were working with Ballantine paperback books on the first of a series of Mad reprint collections.

Since I was Mad’s chief cook and bottle washer at the time, there wasn’t a moment of my waking life that wasn’t devoted to the search for more and more Mad material.

In this condition, and while passing the time of day in the office of an editor, Bernard Shir-Cliff, I noticed on the Ballantine Book bulletin board, a postcard with this face. The card had some ad message-I don’t recall what.

And the face itself was printed alongside in a space, maybe an inch by an inch and a half. The face was not unfamiliar. I associated it with the funny-picture postcards in Times Square penny arcades and tourist traps, this one with the caption “What, Me Worry?” under the bumpkin portrait-part leering wiseacre, part happy-go-lucky kid.

But what interested me about this Ballantine version was that of all the reproductions I remembered, this one looked like the authentic, original-source portrait—the real goods.

While everything I’d seen before was cartoon, this seemed to be a photograph of the actual face! So I pocketed the card and rushed back to the workshop where I inserted the “What Me Worry?” face on and in subsequent issues of Mad magazine.

I was very fond of plastering Mad with inanities-Items like Potrzebie, Melvin Cowznofski, Alfred E. Neuman. The readers apparently liked them. Potrzebie was a word clipped at random from a Polish-language newspaper. Melvin was borrowed from the old Ernie Kovacs Show, as Alfred E. was borrowed from Hollywood by way of the old, old Henry Morgan show.

Alfred Newman (the late) was in reality a movie-music man whose credits were legion on the silver screen.

Morgan would use the name for various innocuous characters that passed through his show, and I did it in Mad, after Morgan’s fashion. And even though the face was, and ever would be, to me, a What, Me Worry? kid, our fan mail insisted on calling him Melvin Cowznofski and Alfred E. Neuman.

As a matter of fact, in the ensuing fan enthusiasm over the face, we ourselves became curious as to his genealogy, and in our letters page we asked the readers for whatever source information they might have.

The answers were astonishing. The face dated back to the 19th century. It was supposed to have been used for selling patent medicine, shoes and soft drinks. the kid was depicted as a salesman, a cowboy, a doughboy, and was rendered in dozens of slight to grossly altered variations.

But the answer I have always liked to believe was that the face came from an old high school biology text—an example of a person who lacked iodine.

Whatever the truth might be, Mad adopted the face as its mascot, and we used it like a trademark on all of our covers.

With the success of Mad, disputations arose. Readers laid copyright claims to the face, and eventually the issue went to court—not to just any court, but the Supreme Court of the Land. In this lofty council, Mad won, once and for all, the right to use the face. The What, Me Worry? kid was permanently baptized Alfred E. Neuman by Albert Feldstein, the editor who came after me.

So that’s the story, once and for all. Don’t ask me anymore.

There you have it, from the horse’s mouth, the closest yet description of the origins of our boy Alfred.

By the 1960s Alfred E. Neuman and Mad Magazine were so massive worldwide that this record would be made by crazy teens in Sweden in 1965. The band is called The Madmen, the song, “Alfred E. Goes Surfin’”.



So identifiable was Alfred E. Neuman’s face that by the late 50’s on his huge TV special Another Evening With Fred Astaire, Mr. Astaire could, without uttering one word, do an entire act revolving around him having been expertly made up exactly as Alfred E. Neuman. Notice the surely, mostly adult reaction. (Starts at 1:55)



And, last but not least, this incredible song (performed by The Dellwoods), originally released on a cardboard record in a Mad special issue, then included on the LP Fink Along With Mad (the follow up to Mad Twists Rock ‘N’ Roll) and officially released on a 45 with a great picture sleeve in Germany (as “Alf Newman”!). Lux Interior of The Cramps and many others cite this as the greatest rock n roll record ever made, I have used it as my closing song in every DJ gig I have done for decades. Here he is “vocalising” for your dis/pleasure, Alfred E. Neuman himself, with his greatest hit…“It’s A Gas!”

Indie bookstores on the rise

good news...

from Boing Boing:

The number of members of the American Booksellers' Association is slowly creeping up, a welcome sign after a steep decline from 5500 members in 1995 to 2191 in 2002. ABA is comprised of indie booksellers, and though the dominant narrative has it that the indies were slaughtered by Amazon, the numbers suggest that the decline had more to do with the rise of the big-box chain-stores (ironically, these are dead [Borders] or dying [B&N] and were almost certainly killed by Amazon).

More interesting is why the number of indie bookstores is growing:

Amazon doesn’t do author events or signings, their discoverability is still atrocious compared to a physical location, and their promotions with smaller publishers are nearly nonexistent. If Amazon is successful in driving physical bookstores out of business (which is their ultimate goal, let’s be realistic), it is highly likely that a smaller-name author would see a drastic drop in sales.

Amazon Slayed a Negative 77 Indie Bookstores in 2012 [Nate Hoffelder/The Digital Reader]

It's Official: MY RULES - My Next Book Will Be Published in Association with Rizzoli International.

I know it's a bit early, but I'm very excited to announce this news here, with some of the details for the first time since starting work on this book project over a year ago, and finally agreeing to the deal with Rizzoli just last week.

The book will be released on the 20th anniversary of FUCK YOU HEROES original publication, in September of 2014.

The new book is going to me called MY RULES. Taking much inspiration from the same title I used for my 1st ever solo publication, I did by myself in 1982 - (MY RULES Photozine, the one and only issue). It's going to be a monster and you are going to LOVE IT! I am sure.

324 pages - 11.5" tall by 13" wide - It will contain the best of both my books FUCK YOU HEROES (out of print for over a year now) and FUCK YOU TOO (out of print for over two years now).

But it won't just be a rehash, because the images will be larger than ever, many as full bleed, and up to 300% of the there originally published size, with scans better than ever, for more detail than ever, for many of the most classic photographs I've ever created. PLUS over 30% of the book will be never before published work (around 100 never seen pic's)!

here's my rough mock up of the cover and spine...



There will also be essays from many of my favorite and most respected and interesting subjects over the years, speaking truths that will blow your mind and inspire you, without a doubt.

Let's leave it at that. I just wanted to make the announcement here and official!

Overseas folks, now you can start hitting up your international arms of books stores and distributors that carry Rizzoli books and see if they will be carrying editions of the book in your country and native language!

The prospects of real international distribution for this monster is very exciting for me, because I know. at times, over the years, my books over seas have been difficult to come by, if not priced higher than what I would have liked due to import and shipping costs.

All my friends and supporters in Italia, Japan, Germany, France, Brazil, Poland, Sweden, Spain, get on on it, I'd love to see it in Italian, Japanese, French, German, Portuguese, Polish, Swedish, Spanish and MORE!

Any more exciting news I will let you know when it becomes official.

Next thing I plan on sharing will be the actual cover we should have done soon, and before the end of the year we should have some ideas on which territories will have their own editions...

Bloggers and magazine editors please help me spread the word, THANK YOU.

The Little Red Book That Swept France

from The Independent (UK):

The latest call to (non-violent) arms has turned a 93-year-old war hero into a publishing phenomenon.

Take a book of just 13 pages, written by a relatively obscure 93-year-old man, which contains no sex, no
jokes, no fine writing and no startlingly original message. A publishing disaster? No, a publishing
phenomenon.

Indignez vous! (Cry out!), a slim pamphlet by a wartime French resistance hero, Stéphane Hessel, is
smashing all publishing records in France. The book urges the French, and everyone else, to recapture the
wartime spirit of resistance to the Nazis by rejecting the "insolent, selfish" power of money and markets and
by defending the social "values of modern democracy".

The book, which costs €3, has sold 600,000 copies in three months and another 200,000 have just been
printed. Its original print run was 8,000. In the run-up to Christmas, Mr Hessel's call for a "peaceful
insurrection" not only topped the French bestsellers list, it sold eight times more copies than the second
most popular book, a Goncourt prize-winning novel by Michel Houellebecq.

The extraordinary success of the book can be interpreted in several ways. Its low price and slender size –
29 pages including blurbs and notes but just 13 pages of text – has made it a popular stocking-filler among
left-wing members of the French chattering classes. Bookshops report many instances of people buying a dozen copies for family and friends.

But Mr Hessel and his small left-wing publisher (which is used to print runs in the hundreds) say that he has evidently struck a national, and international nerve, at a time of market tyranny, bankers' bonuses and budget threats to the survival of the post-war welfare state. They also suggest that the success of the book could be an important straw in the wind as France enters a political cycle leading to the presidential elections of May 2012.

In a New Year message Mr Hessel, who survived Nazi concentration camps to become a French diplomat, said he was "profoundly touched" by the success of his book. Just as he "cried out" against Nazism in the 1940s, he said, young people today should "cry out against the complicity between politicians and economic and financial powers" and "defend our democratic rights acquired over two centuries".

In a party-political aside which might or might not undermine his new status as political prophet, Mr Hessel went on to imply that "resistance" should begin with a rejection of President Nicolas Sarkozy and a vote for the Parti Socialiste.

The book has not pleased everyone. It also contains a lengthy denunciation of Israeli government policies, especially in the Gaza Strip. Although the final chapter calls vaguely for a "non-violent" solution to the world's problems, the book also suggests that "non-violence" is not "sufficient" in the Middle East. Mr Hessel, whose father was a German jew who emigrated to France, has been accused by French jewish organisations of "anti-semitism".

Mr Hessel was born in Berlin in 1917. He emigrated to France with his family when he was seven. He joined General Charles de Gaulle in London in 1941 and was sent back to France to help organise the resistance. He was captured, tortured and sent to concentration camps in Germany. After the war, he helped to draft the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948.

Jean-Pierre Barou, the joint head of the small Montpellier-based publishing house Indigène, which commissioned the book, said Mr Hessel had revealed a "deep sense of indignation in France".

As a political tract, the book contains no especially original analysis of the world's problems.

"They dare to tell us that the State can no longer afford policies to support its citizens," Mr Hessel says. "But how can money be lacking ... when the production of wealth has enormously increased since the Liberation (of France), at a time when Europe was ruined? The only explanation is that the power of money ... has never been so great or so insolent or so selfish and that its servants are placed in the highest reaches of the State."

The originality of the book is the suggestion that an organised "Resistance" is now called for, just like in 1940. "We, veterans of the resistance ... call on young people to revive and pass on the heritage and ideals of the Resistance," the book says.
How people should resist the power of money and the markets – by peaceful means, the book insists – is not made entirely clear.

A message of resistance

* "I would like everyone – everyone of us – to find his or her own reason to cry out. That is a precious gift. When something makes you want to cry out, as I cried out against Nazism, you become a militant, tough and committed. You become part of the great stream of history ... and this stream leads us towards more justice and more freedom but not the uncontrolled freedom of the fox in the hen-house."

* "It's true that reasons to cry out can seem less obvious today. The world appears too complex. But in this world, there are things we should not tolerate... I say to the young, look around you a little and you will find them. The worst of all attitudes is indifference..."

* "The productivist obsession of the West has plunged the world into a crisis which can only be resolved by a radical shift away from the 'ever more', in the world of finance but also in science and technology. It is high time that ethics, justice and a sustainable balance prevailed..."

read the original article comments here.

A book that started a lot of this, Finally coming to the big screen...

Pimp: The Story of My Life by Iceberg Slim (Robert Beck)

from Reuters

"Pimp" saga moves closer to film adaptation

By Borys Kit

LOS ANGELES (Hollywood Reporter) - Robert "Iceberg Slim" Beck's 1969 autobiography, "Pimp: The Story of My Life," is on its way to the big screen.

Rob Weiss, an executive producer of HBO's "Entourage," along with producers Mitch Davis, Ryan Drexler and Andrew Left have acquired film rights to the best-seller.

Born into poverty, Beck became a pimp at 18 and rose to kingpin status in the Chicago underworld. He served several stints in prison, making one escape. After retiring from the business he became an insecticide salesman in Los Angeles. During a call to a college professor, Beck mentioned that he had been a pimp, and the professor encouraged him to write an autobiography. Three months later, Beck had penned "Pimp."

The book has sold more than 5 million copies and is the second-best-selling book by a black man, after Alex Haley's "Roots."

"The story is really the birth of the American inner city, and it's an incredible tale of overcoming oppression," said Weiss. "It speaks of a very specific time in America and its street culture. The book is filled with broken souls but shows how, in the end, Iceberg found a way to heal himself."

The quartet is looking for actors, writers and a director before bringing the project to a studio.

Over the years, many parties have tried to get a movie adaptation of the book under way, without much luck. One iteration was set up at Fine Line as a starring vehicle for Ice Cube with Bill Duke directing. Pras of the Fugees was trying to mount a film version as recently as 2004.

One stumbling block has been an ongoing lawsuit between the author's estate and the publisher (Beck died in 1992). With the suit recently settled, Weiss and Davis, who had been involved with the project earlier, partnered with investors Drexler and Left to pounce on the rights, acquiring them outright.

(Editing by SheriLinden at Reuters)

Ice-T gave me his own copy of this book way back in '87...
Not as important or as well written, but certainly as much as of eye opener as "The Autobiography of Malcolm X" (one of my all time favorite books).

(Thanks, Doug)