This week I’ve been watching with interest the plagiarism case involving How Opal Mehta Got Kissed, Got Wild, and Got a Life by Kaavya Viswanathan. She is accused of using material from two books by Megan McCafferty. Yesterday’s New York Times (registration required) shed light on an interesting aspect of the case: Viswanathan’s book was developed with the help of a book packager, Alloy Entertainment. I’d never heard of Alloy before, but they appear to be a large and prosperous company that has thrived by packaging books for the teen-lit market in the past few years. They are not a member of the American Book Producers Association, as we are. But they work in the same way as all packagers: creating story and series ideas/characters, pitching them at publishers, and developing the manuscript to at least some degree before handing the ideas over to a writer. In the case of large packagers like Alloy that work in trade publishing, they share in royalty advances and profits, and they own or share the copyright with their authors. Alloy must be doing very well, indeed. As the NYT article notes, “This Sunday, books created by Alloy will be ranked at Nos. 1, 5 and 9 on The New York Times’s children’s paperback best-seller list.”
Last night on HBO I watched a fascinating documentary about Billie Jean King. As a lifelong tennis fanatic, I thought I knew everything there was to know about Billie, but I was wrong. For instance, I didn’t know that one of the first major supporters of women’s professional tennis and women’s sports in general was Charles Schultz, the creator of the “Peanuts” cartoon series. He and Billie became close friends. Another celebrity who became a close friend was Elton John. That part I knew, but I didn’t know that he titled his song “Philadelphia Freedom” after Billie’s team in World Team Tennis, a league that Billie founded.
My first memories of Billie Jean King are of watching her on TV at Wimbledon, the tournament with which she will always be most closely associated. She eventually won a record 20 titles there in singles, doubles, and mixed doubles. Then, when I was in high school in the early 1980s, I was fortunate to see her play an exhibition in the tennis hotbed of Enid, Oklahoma, which was only a few hours’ drive from my home in Kansas. She played a young teenage tennis starlet, Carling Bassett. Billie was well past her prime, and Bassett was up-and-coming, but Billie easily won the exhibition match. More than the tennis, however, I remember how professional Billie was and how she literally carried the whole event with her energy and enthusiasm. She interacted with the crowd, gave a long and very gracious speech afterward, and stayed later to sign autographs for all who wanted them. Playing an exhibition in the middle of hot, dusty, small-town Oklahoma was hardly a glamorous gig for her, but you would never have known it from her demeanor.
After I left Gale to start Schlager Group in 1997, the first title I edited was the St. James Press Gay and Lesbian Almanac. It includes a brief biography of King. Later, after my partner and I moved to Chicago in the late 1990s, we actually lived across the street from Billie and her partner. (They lived in a high-rise, so it wasn’t as though we ever saw them or even met them.) I occasionally saw her at tennis clubs around the city–teaching clinics to kids, usually. Perhaps I’ll see her again this summer in Chicago at the Gay Games, in which I’ll be competing in the tennis event. Billie is associated with the Games as an “Ambassador.” I imagine she’ll make an appearance at the opening ceremonies.
Lots of reference publishers are now offering their content in e-book format. And in some cases, publishers are offering some interesting features with these titles. Take ABC-CLIO, for instance. They are offering many of their history encyclopedias in e-book format now. Among the features they offer with their e-book titles are a citation feature that automatically lists any bibliography citation in four different formats (Chicago, MLA, APA, and Harvard), and a password-protected notes feature that allows the user to insert notes/comments about any portion of the e-book. Pretty nifty.
Tomorrow is Earth Day, thus the scads of environment-related stories in the media this week. One night this week I happened to catch a fascinating program on PBS’s “Nova” series about global dimming. Essentially, global dimming is caused by particle polution, and it results in reduced sunlight reaching Earth and thus lower temperatures. It’s been fairly recently that scientists have begun to recognize and record this phenomonen. Unfortunately, our efforts to clean up particle pollution and reduce global dimming–which have been going on for a couple of decades and are showing success in Europe and North America–are going to serve to excacerbate global warming, which has been made worse by all the greenhouse gases we’ve been pumping into the atmosphere these last 200 years. Without the “brake” on temperatures caused by global dimming, global warming will be even more severe. Ominously, scientific models about global warming in the next century have mostly failed to take global dimming into account. That means that the models are too conservative, and that global warming is probably going to be worse than we thought. Several of the scientists interviewed on the program said that we needed to drastically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions, and quickly, or else the effects of global warming would be catastrophic. One way to do this, of course, is to develop alternative energy fuels. This is a subject we explore at length in our new three-volume work for Gale’s UXL imprint, aimed at middle school and high school students. Alternative Energy will be out in August (click here for the publisher’s information page).
A few days ago I was finally able to watch Capote on DVD. Judson Knight had recently blogged about the movie, reminding me that I hadn’t yet seen it. I thought it was very well done, and Philip Seymour Hoffman’s performance was rightly praised. For me, though, the movie had a personal edge. I grew up in the town in which these events happened: Garden City, Kansas. (The murders took place at the Clutter home outside of Holcomb, a tiny hamlet about 5 miles from Garden City.) My family moved to Garden City after the murders took place, but growing up there in the 1970s and early 1980s, there was still plenty of local lore about it. I went to the same church (First United Methodist Church) as the Clutters, and I would occasionally hear my father–an FBI agent who was friendly with local law enforcement, including Al Dewey, the prosecutor in the case–relay snippets of stories he had heard about it. Unfortunately, we didn’t study In Cold Blood in school, and virtually nothing was ever said about Capote and Harper Lee coming to town to research the case. In fact, it wasn’t until I was older and had moved away that I learned about their research trip to our town. Once, for about 5 minutes, I thought about how interesting it would be to write a novel about Capote and Lee in G.C. We can all be thankful that the mood passed and that the story was still told–and by people who knew what they were doing. Alas, the movie was not shot in G.C. but apparently someplace in Canada.
A few weeks ago I blogged about the “65 percent solution” that has been adopted by some states and is being considered elsewhere. The program mandates that school districts spend 65 percent of their budgets on “classroom instruction.” The problem, from librarians’ perspectives, is that libraries are not included in the definition of “classroom” activities as outlined by the organization that created the program. There is some good news on this front, however, and from a big state. In Texas, where Governor Rick Perry signed an executuve order adopting the problem, the Texas Education Agency has just announced that they will include libraries under “classroom instruction.” This will be a relief to school librarians throughout the state. Let’s hope that other states follow Texas’s lead on this issue.
Like so many others in the business world, I’m fascinated by the emergence of India and China as financial powerhouses and anxious about what their growing clout will mean to the U.S. economy in general and to our industry in particular. While traveling to Dallas this weekend, I read a long Financial Times report about India and China. Actually, it was mostly about India, with a smattering of China-related stories thrown in. Much of the report analyzed why China had shown so much more growth in the past three decades than India. One important fact: Did you know that India will likely overtake China in population at some point in the next several decades? After I finished that report, I began Ted Fishman’s book, China Inc. Although I’m only about halfway through the book, so far I’m most struck by the tremendous dislocation going on in China during this period of incredible growth. Tens of millions of peasants are journeying from rural to urban areas to find better work. Entrepreneurs start businesses and then watch thousands of copycat businesses crop up around them. Rural villagers left behind find themselves with no way to earn a living and no prospects for a better life. And that’s to say nothing of the impact on industries in other nations that find themselves decimated by cheaper Chinese imports. In terms of the information industry, I’m less concerned about losing our business to India and China and more focused on whether and how India and China might offer ways to grow our business. I certainly plan to keep reading and thinking about this topic.
A side note about Dallas: The city played host to an enormous immigration rally on Sunday–as many as 500,000 people showed up. And more marches are being held around the country today. Interesting stuff.
Syd Jones, one of our longtime contributors and a coauthor (along with Mike O’Neal) of the Crusades Reference Library, just informed me that CRL was named one of Booklist’s “Twenty Best Bets for Student Researchers.” Hooray!
One of our contributors to Grzimek’s Animal Life Encyclopedia: Reptiles, Erik Pianka at the University of Texas, has found himself under seige by certain members of the politico-blogging community for comments he made about the Earth’s overpopulation (click here for article). He made the comments in speeches to scientists last month, and somehow they made their way to the Drudge Report. From there the controversy spread to talk radio and various blogs. I haven’t read any of the blog postings, nor have I seen the true context of his remark, but it seems like folks are ganging up on Erik to make cheap political points. (I know–that never happens in America.) In other words, I’m fairly skeptical about the motivations of those who claim to be up in arms over Erik’s remarks.
I’ve previously blogged about how Thomson Gale sells its large database of business information direct to consumers via its Goliath website. Here, users can download individual encyclopedia articles for about $5 and business plans for about $20, to name just two product offerings available on the site. Or users can subscribe to the site using any of several different pricing plans. Gale also makes lots of other information, including literature and history offerings, available online in direct-to-consumer formats. One site I was checking out recently is www.enotes.com. This site is directed at students and offers study guides, reports, etc. in many different subject areas. A lot of their history and literature information, at least, comes from Thomson Gale, although they apparently license data from other publishers as well. Users can buy access to the complete site for $29.99/month or $99/year, or they can buy access to specific categories (e.g., Literature) for perhaps $10 or $15 per month and $30 per year. The site gains additional revenue via advertising (Google’s Adwords program). It’s curious to me why more publishers don’t follow Gale’s lead marketing their data directly to consumers.