Happy Public Domain Day 2023, the end of copyright for 1927 works

January 1st is Public Domain Day, my favorite day of the year. Today marks the end of copyright for books, movies, and music first published in the U.S. in 1927. Now that these works are in the public domain, everyone is free to use, reprint, quote, remix, and adapt them without permission or payment.

For many years, only works published in the U.S. through 1922 were in the public domain because of retroactive copyright extensions like the 1998 Sony Bono Copyright Term Extension Act, which extended copyright terms of works published before 1978 from 75 to 95 years and works created on or after that date to the life of the author plus 70 years. Without that extension, these 1927 works would have entered the public domain twenty years ago, in 2003. It wasn’t until January 1, 2019 that copyright protection finally ended for 1923 works, and every New Year’s Day the public domain gains another year’s worth of treasures.

Some notable 1927 literary works now in the public domain include: Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Case Book of Sherlock Holmes (containing the last two original Sherlock Holmes stories), Ernest Hemingway’s Men Without Women, William Faulkner’s Mosquitoes, A. A. Milne’s Now We Are Six, Willa Cather’s Death Comes for the Archbishop, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Sinclair Lewis’ Elmer Gantry, to name just a few.

The full texts of the 1927 books that have been scanned by the Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, Google Books, and other digital archives should soon be publicly available on their websites.

I highly recommend that you visit the Public Domain Day 2023 website created by Jennifer Jenkins from Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain to read important news and information about copyright and the public domain and to explore some of the 1927 works that you can now use as you like. But as Jenkins notes, the celebration is bittersweet because of what could have been:

“This site celebrates works from 1927 that are in the public domain after a 95-year copyright term. However, under the laws that were in effect until 1978, thousands of works from 1966 would be entering the public domain this year. Under current copyright terms we will have to wait until 2062. In fact, since copyright used to come in renewable terms of 28 years, and 85% of authors did not renew, 85% of the works from 1994 might be entering the public domain! Imagine what the great libraries of the world—or just internet hobbyists—could do: digitizing those holdings, making them available for education and research, for pleasure and for creative reuse.”

Happy Public Domain Day 2021, the end of copyright for 1925 works!

Today is Public Domain Day 2021, the end of copyright for works first published in the U.S. in 1925. Yes, this means that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has finally entered the public domain (nearly 96 years after its first publication), though you’ll still have to wait another 9 years for Tender is the Night.

Other works entering the public domain in the U.S. today include Ernest Hemingway’s In Our Time, Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, Sinclair Lewis’s Arrowsmith, and Alain Locke’s important Harlem Renaissance anthology The New Negro, as well as 25 Dorothy Parker poems. The full texts of the 1925 books that have been scanned by the Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, Google Books, and other digital archives will soon be made publicly available on their websites.

Visit the Public Domain Day 2021 website from Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain to explore some of the books, music, and films that are now free to use, reprint, quote, remix, and adapt without permission or payment. For background and further reading about copyright and the public domain, see my earlier posts on Public Domain Day 2019 and The Great Gatsby.

I’ll leave you with a few of Maxfield Parrish’s beautiful illustrations from the 1925 first edition of The Knave of Hearts, now in the public domain. (Photographs courtesy of Bauman Rare Books. Click on an image to make it larger.)

 

 

 

 

Lovecraft Country HBO series, based on the novel by Matt Ruff, begins Sunday, August 16th

I’m thrilled to announce that the Lovecraft Country tv show, based on the 2016 novel by my husband Matt Ruff, will begin airing on HBO and HBO Max on Sunday, August 16th.

The 10-episode first season was produced by showrunner Misha Green, Jordan Peele, and J.J. Abrams, and the amazing cast includes Jonathan Majors, Jurnee Smollett, Courtney B. Vance, Michael K. Williams, Aunjanue Ellis, Wunmi Mosaku, and Abbey Lee.

Watch the HBO trailer:

See reviews of the show on Rotten Tomatoes (100% fresh!). Rolling Stone called it “one of the best shows HBO has made in a long, long time.”

Read about Matt’s novel.

Happy Public Domain Day 2019!

Today is Public Domain Day 2019, which means (finally!) the end of copyright for works first published in the U.S. in 1923. You are now free to use, reprint, quote, remix, or create your own derivative works from 1923 works without permission from or payment to the copyright holders, who would be the descendants or estates of the long-dead creators.

Specific works from a wide range of authors entered the public domain today, including Robert Frost, Winston Churchill, Agatha Christie, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Kahlil Gibran, Aldous Huxley, D.H. Lawrence, Edith Wharton, P.G. Wodehouse, Ernest Hemingway, Sigmund Freud, Willa Cather, Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Virginia Woolf, George Bernard Shaw, Wallace Stevens, William Carlos Williams, Rudyard Kipling, e.e. cummings, E.M. Forster, Zane Grey, Arthur Conan Doyle, and many others.

The full texts of the 1923 books that have already been scanned by the Internet Archive, Hathi Trust, and Google Books will be made publicly available on their websites, and I’m sure many more 1923 works will soon be scanned by these and other institutions. And every January 1st the public domain will gain another year’s treasures, which will be especially important to authors, scholars, artists, and researchers.

For decades, only works published in the U.S. through 1922 have been in the public domain, as Congress repeatedly and retroactively extended the length of copyright terms. Most works published between 1923 and 1977 currently have copyright protection for 95 years, so 1923 works enter the public domain on the first day of 2019, 1924 works on the first day of 2020, and so on. (So F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, first published in 1925, won’t enter the public domain for another two years.)  However, books published today don’t enter the public domain until 70 years after the death of the author. It’s all ridiculously complicated, so see this chart of Copyright Term and the Public Domain in the United States from Cornell University for details and exceptions.

Here are some recommended links for more information and lists of some of the 1923 works that entered the public domain today:

• The Public Domain Day 2019 website from Duke Law’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain and their spreadsheet of over a thousand 1923 items they’ve researched, including literary works, musical works, artistic works, movies, and more.
• My friend Glenn Fleishman’s article in Smithsonian magazine.
• My friend Cory Doctorow’s blog post for BoingBoing.
• Alexandra Alter’s article for the New York Times.
• John Mark Ockerbloom’s Public Domain Day advent calendar.
• The Hathi Trust’s collection of over 40,000 scanned 1923 works which will change to full-text access when they enter the public domain.

Lying to children about the past

I reviewed A Birthday Cake for George Washington, the controversial children’s picture book about slavery, for the Seattle Review of Books— read it here: http://seattlereviewofbooks.com/reviews/the-idea-of-freedom-might-be-too-great-a-temptation-for-them-to-resist/

In my review I tell the real story of Hercules, George Washington’s slave-cook, a story far different from the happy fictional one in the book, which was promoted as “based on real events.” SPOILER ALERT: On Washington’s 65th birthday, Hercules didn’t bake a cake– he escaped.

The book was withdrawn by the publisher over the MLK holiday weekend, but the issues it raises are larger than this particular book. We should tell the complicated truths about America’s founders and founding and stop lying to our children about the past.

Free access to Oxford online resources the week of April 13th

To celebrate National Library Week, Oxford University Press is providing free access to their online resources from April 13th through 19th:

Username: libraryweek
Password: libraryweek

Go here to see the full list (with links) of online resources you can access. A few highlights:

• Oxford English Dictionary
• Oxford Bibliographies Online
• Oxford Reference
• Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Online
• American National Biography Online
• Grove Art Online
• Grove Music Online
• Berg Fashion Library
• Oxford African American Studies Online
• Electronic Enlightenment

 

I’ll be teaching a research workshop for Clarion West in May

I’ll be teaching a one-day Clarion West workshop with Louise Marley on Sunday, May 4th from 10am to 4pm in Seattle’s University District:

Fiction R&D: From Research to Ideas to Stories
Research is a creative process that can help writers with inspiration, storytelling, and worldbuilding. Lisa Gold will share practical advice on doing research and finding useful and unusual sources, and she’ll provide an annotated list of resources. Louise Marley will explore generating, refining, and developing ideas into stories. They’ll use a combination of lecture, discussion, brainstorming, and writing exercises.

Check out these other Clarion West one-day workshops:

• Rachel Swirsky, Telling Old Stories in New Ways, April 6
• Nicola Griffith, The Magic of Immersive Fiction, April 13

For more information or to register: http://www.clarionwest.org/workshops/oneday/fiction-rd-from-research-to-ideas-to-stories/

An update to my post about self-employed health insurance in Washington

Important new update, October 2016: “Group of one” small group health insurance may no longer be an option for self-employed individuals in Washington state because of federal ACA law, though you can still purchase individual insurance either inside or outside our state’s health insurance exchange. I recently spoke with an analyst at the Washington State Insurance Commissioner’s office, who confirmed that though Washington’s “group of one” law is still on the books, it has been preempted by federal law (ACA and ERISA) and a legal challenge from an insurance company. Now you must have at least one employee on payroll to qualify as a group (and business owners are no longer counted as employees), so self-employed individuals or sole proprietors without employees don’t qualify for small group health insurance and must purchase insurance through the individual market.

Original post:

I’ve updated my 2010 health insurance post, “If you are self-employed and live in Washington state, read this,” with some new information and links because of a recent increase in views.

My original post was about Washington’s “group of one” law, which allows self-employed individuals or sole proprietors to apply for small group health insurance if they meet certain criteria. These plans offered better coverage, without health screenings, and you could cover your family as dependents.

That information is still accurate, but you now have more options to buy health insurance for 2014:

1. You can buy individual health insurance on the Washington state exchange (Washington HealthPlanFinder). If your family income (modified adjusted gross income) is below 400% of the federal poverty level, you may qualify for subsidies (tax credits) to help you pay for health insurance purchased through the exchange.
2. You can buy “group of one” small group health insurance outside of the exchange, if you qualify.
3. You can buy individual health insurance outside of the exchange.

If your income qualifies you for a subsidy, you’ll have to buy insurance inside the exchange to get it. Whether you apply for insurance inside or outside of the exchange, you can’t be denied because of pre-existing conditions, and specific “essential health benefits” (including hospitalization, maternity care, and prescription drugs) must be covered. You should do your research and carefully compare plans and provider networks. Many of the individual plans in the exchange have limited doctor and hospital networks, so depending on your circumstances, you might be better off in a small group plan or individual plan outside of the exchange.

See my original post for more information.

Edward de Grazia, the lawyer who fought book censorship & wrote Girls Lean Back Everywhere

In a 2008 post about Banned Books Week, I recommended an excellent 1992 book about literary censorship and obscenity prosecutions in the United States, Edward de Grazia’s Girls Lean Back Everywhere: The Law of Obscenity and the Assault on Genius. He was a lawyer who fought the censorship of books in a number of prominent cases in the 1960s.

This morning I learned that Edward de Grazia has died at the age of 86. Here’s his obituary from the New York Times.

Here’s an excerpt from my original post about his book:

The title is taken from a quote by Jane Heap, who (with Margaret Anderson) was prosecuted in 1920 for publishing episodes from James Joyce’s Ulysses in their magazine, The Little Review:

Mr. Joyce was not teaching early Egyptian perversions nor inventing new ones. Girls lean back everywhere, showing lace and silk stockings; wear low-cut sleeveless blouses, breathless bathing suits; men think thoughts and have emotions about these things everywhere–seldom as delicately and imaginatively as Mr. Bloom–and no one is corrupted.

This work describes in detail the publishing histories and obscenity trials of the most controversial books of the 20th century, including Joyce’s Ulysses, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer, D.H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, William Burroughs’ Naked Lunch, Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, and Theodore Dreiser’s An American Tragedy, as well as later trials involving the monologues of Lenny Bruce, the photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe, and the lyrics of 2 Live Crew.

What makes this work particularly entertaining are the extensive quotes from the authors and publishers involved. As de Grazia notes in his introduction:

I wanted to find out, and describe, how the persons who were most immediately affected by literary censorship–authors and publishers–responded to and felt about it, and to present their reactions as much as possible in words of their own. I also wanted to say what I could about the nature of the legal and constitutional process that has framed the struggle against censorship in our country….

Free access this week to the Oxford English Dictionary & Historical Thesaurus

Oxford University Press is celebrating National Library Week with free access through April 20th to two of their best online resources:

• The Oxford English Dictionary, the mother of all dictionaries, which now includes the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. I blogged about the HTOED when it was first published in my post “Time-traveling through the English language….”
• Oxford Reference, which combines the information from hundreds of OUP reference works into a single searchable database.

Both sites can be accessed this week by using the same username and password: libraryweek

See OUP’s post for more information. If your local public library system subscribes to these resources, you may already have free access to them from home through your library website with your library card number and PIN.

News about The Mirage paperback, the Queen Anne Book Company, and Clarion West

• Matt Ruff‘s latest novel, The Mirage, will be published in trade paperback on February 12, 2013. (The hardcover and ebook editions were published in February 2012.) Matt will be doing some readings/signings in Seattle and Portland over the next few weeks.

• Queen Anne Books, the beloved independent bookstore that closed on Halloween, will soon be reincarnated in the same location as the Queen Anne Book Company. The new store, with new owner/managers and some of the booksellers from the old store, will hold its grand opening on March 1st. You can follow the Queen Anne Book Company on Twitter @queenannebookco or on Facebook.
• March 1st is the deadline to apply to the Clarion and Clarion West writers workshops for science fiction and fantasy. The instructors this year include Neil Gaiman, Cory Doctorow, Elizabeth Hand, Kelly Link, Samuel R. Delany, Joe Hill, Nalo Hopkinson, and Karen Joy Fowler (see my previous blog post for the complete list and more information). Clarion West has just announced that Margo Lanagan will be teaching instead of Justina Robson.
• Clarion West is offering a series of special one-day workshops in Seattle from February to May, taught by Molly Gloss, John Crowley, Mary Rosenblum, and Daryl Gregory. Each workshop is limited to only 14 students, so don’t wait to sign up.

UPDATE, 2/26/13: For more information about the Queen Anne Book Company’s grand-opening weekend (March 1st to 3rd) and their “Authors in the House” events, see this article from the Queen Anne View blog.

Seattle’s Queen Anne Books is up for sale again

Queen Anne Books, the independent bookstore at the top of Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill, is up for sale again. The store was sold only six months ago, but on Friday the owner posted this announcement on the bookstore’s website:

To the Queen Anne Book Store community:

I am writing today to let you know that I will be leaving Queen Anne Books as of the end of November. This has not been an easy or hastily made decision, and I thank all of you for your loyalty and your commitment to Queen Anne Books during the period of time that I have been a part of the store.

I would like to find a buyer for the store from among the wonderful community of people who have supported Queen Anne Books over the years. I encourage anyone who is interested to contact the store in person, by phone, or via e-mail at queenannebooks@queenannebooks.com.

I will keep you posted as more information emerges regarding the future of the store.

~ Katharine Hershey

Queen Anne Books is a great neighborhood bookstore, full of helpful, enthusiastic, and well-read booksellers. Queen Anne Books has always been very supportive of Matt and other local authors, and event coordinator Tegan Tigani makes every book event memorable and fun.

I do hope the store finds a buyer, as I’d really hate to see Queen Anne Books close.

UPDATE, 10/22/12:  A new announcement from the staff of Queen Anne Books:

Last week owner Katharine Hershey sent a notice announcing her intention to leave Queen Anne Books at the end of November. We want to provide you with some helpful information to assist you in the coming weeks.

Officially, the store will be closing Wednesday, October 31. However, our owner is actively seeking a buyer for the store. We remain hopeful that Queen Anne Books will be purchased and continue serving our wonderful community.

In the meantime, we want you to know:

• Queen Anne Books will operate as usual through Oct. 31.
• As has been our long-standing tradition, we will participate in Queen Anne’s neighborhood Trick or Treat festival from 3-6 on October 31.. Be sure to bring the kids to our store.
• We are no longer issuing gift certificates. If you have gift certificates, we encourage you to bring them in before our closing on Oct. 31.
• We will continue to add purchases to your Book Saver plan, and issue rewards.
• We will no longer be placing special orders as we cannot guarantee arrival before our anticipated closure. If you have special orders in the pipeline, we will do our best to get those to you. Not yet released books dated after Oct. 31 may not arrive in time, and we apologize for that.
• Though our website will remain functional, we are no longer offering online web ordering. Please call or come in the store for all your book needs. The website will be a good source of information regarding the future of the store, so please check in there.

Thank you for your many years of loyal commitment to Queen Anne Books. We have the best customers in the world, and we hope to have positive news for you in the coming weeks regarding the store’s future. If you know of interested parties, please have them contact us at our email queenannebooks@queenannebooks.com.

UPDATE, 10/30/12:  According to a new message on the website, Queen Anne Books will be closing its doors on October 31st at 7pm.

FINAL UPDATE:  Queen Anne Books is gone.

UPDATE, 2/5/13: Queen Anne Books is being reincarnated in the same location as the Queen Anne Book Company, with new owner/managers and some of the booksellers from the old store. Their grand opening is March 1st. See my blog post for more information.

Breaking news: Judge Chin rejects the Google Books Settlement

James Grimmelmann has just reported that Judge Denny Chin has rejected the Google Books Settlement. (For background, see my previous posts on the Google Books case or The Public Index website.) The full opinion is here (PDF). I haven’t read the whole thing yet, but below are a couple of excerpts from the beginning and the end of the opinion:

The question presented is whether the ASA [Amended Settlement Agreement] is fair, adequate, and reasonable. I conclude that it is not.

While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would simply go too far. It would permit this class action– which was brought against defendant Google Inc. to challenge its scanning of books and display of “snippets” for on-line searching– to implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners. Indeed, the ASA would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case.

Accordingly, and for the reasons more fully discussed below, the motion for final approval of the ASA is denied….

In the end, I conclude that the ASA is not fair, adequate, and reasonable. As the United States and other objectors have noted, many of the concerns raised in the objections would be ameliorated if the ASA were converted from an “opt-out” settlement to an “opt-in” settlement…. I urge the parties to consider revising the ASA accordingly.

I recommend checking Grimmelmann’s blog (The Laboratorium) for his analysis and information about the case.

Update: Here’s the link to Grimmelmann’s new post, “Inside Judge Chin’s Opinion.” More links at The Public Index Blog and TeleRead. Publishers Weekly has an interesting article about what could happen next and the obstacles in the way of revising the settlement.

The AP Stylebook is dropping the hyphen from “e-mail”

Last August I compared how a number of new style manuals treated tech words. In 2010, both the Chicago Manual of Style (16th edition) and the AP Stylebook Online finally changed their style recommendations from “Web site” to “website,” reflecting what has long been common usage.  But there was disagreement over other terms. Most notably, Chicago and AP still used “e-mail,” but the tech/digital style manuals (Microsoft, Apple, and Yahoo!) all dropped the hyphen (“email”)

Today Jim Romenesko reported that the AP Stylebook editors just announced a series of new changes— including the dropping of the hyphen from “e-mail”–  at the American Copy Editors Society Conference. Here’s an excerpt from the ACES 2011 post:

David Minthorn and Darrell Christian, editors of the AP Stylebook, brought with them to ACES 2011 in Phoenix some of the changes that will be effective as of 3 a.m. EDT Saturday, March 19.

They are:

• email, instead of e-mail. (Other “e” terms, such as e-book and e-commerce, retain the hyphen,)

• Kolkata, India, instead of Calcutta, India. To follow local style.

• cellphone, smartphone become one word. (No longer cell phone and smart phone.)

• handheld, n., hand-held, adj.

Most news organizations follow AP style, but book publishers usually follow Chicago style, so the hyphen isn’t dead yet. (See my April 2010 post for more on “e-mail” vs. “email” and Bryan Garner’s “Language Change Index.”)

One of my favorite Seattle used bookstores is closing

Abraxus Books, one of my favorite used bookstores in Seattle, is closing and everything is 50% off. Their shop is in a building that’s going to be torn down and they have to vacate by February 12th.

Abraxus Books has a very large and deep inventory of high-quality used books in many fields. It’s a great place for browsing, as I always find interesting and unusual books that I haven’t seen in other bookstores. Yesterday I spent two hours browsing and never made it out of their excellent and extensive history sections– I left when I reached the limit of what I could carry on the bus. I’ll be back, and I recommend that you visit before they close.

Their address is 524 1st Ave. N. (in lower Queen Anne near Seattle Center), and their new hours are:

• Tuesday through Friday, 12 noon to 8pm
• Saturday, 11am to 8pm
• Sunday, 12 noon to 6pm
• Monday, closed

Here’s the link to their Facebook page and here’s the link to their location on Google Maps.

“Remember, darling?”: Alfred Kahn was my Fredrik in “A Little Night Music”

I was saddened to read this morning that Alfred Kahn, the Cornell University economist famous for his role in deregulating the airlines in the 1970s, has died at the age of 93. In the summer of 1985, I directed a production of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music for Risley Theatre at Cornell, and I cast him as Fredrik Egerman, the male lead. Fred was wonderful in the role and a delight to work with and talk to. I went digging through my old files and found the show’s program, and this is what Fred wrote for his bio: “Fred, a professor of Economics at Cornell and formerly Dean of the Arts College, has played leads in several Savoyard productions and La Serva Padrona. Fredrik Egerman is the part he said he’d gladly give up his job in the Carter White House to play.”

Here are a couple of photographs from the August 1985 production:

If you are self-employed and live in Washington state, read this (updated)

Important new update, October 2016: “Group of one” small group health insurance may no longer be an option for self-employed individuals in Washington state because of federal ACA law, though you can still purchase individual insurance either inside or outside our state’s health insurance exchange. I recently spoke with an analyst at the Washington State Insurance Commissioner’s office, who confirmed that though Washington’s “group of one” law is still on the books, it has been preempted by federal law (ACA and ERISA) and a legal challenge from an insurance company. Now you must have at least one employee on payroll to qualify as a group (and business owners are no longer counted as employees), so self-employed individuals or sole proprietors without employees don’t qualify for small group health insurance and must purchase insurance through the individual market. Insurance companies have begun phasing out “group of one” insurance on renewal or audits of group size, so keep an eye out for new language like this in your documentation:

“To qualify as a group health plan according to clarified common-law rules, at least one employee needs to be enrolled. Employees by this definition do not include someone who is: self-employed; a sole proprietor or his/her spouse; the sole owner of a corporation or sole owner with his/her spouse…”

Original 2010 post:

One of the biggest obstacles for the self-employed is health insurance. Individual health insurance plans are very expensive and often impossible to get at any price if you or anyone in your family has medical issues. So if you are self-employed, a freelancer, or a sole proprietor, your options usually are:  get coverage through your spouse (if you are lucky enough to be married to someone with a job that provides health insurance); pay a huge amount of money for a comprehensive individual plan (if you are healthy enough to qualify for one and can afford it); pay somewhat less for a crappy high-deductible or catastrophic individual plan (if you can qualify for one and can afford it); or go without insurance. This is why so many self-employed people–especially writers and artists–are uninsured. This is also why many people who want to quit their day jobs to work for themselves or start a new business can’t.

The fixes for this in the health care reform legislation (health insurance exchanges for individuals and small businesses, guaranteed coverage even if you have a pre-existing condition, etc.) unfortunately don’t take effect until 2014. That’s a very long time to wait if you don’t have, can’t get, or can’t afford health insurance.

However, there is some good news if you live in Washington state: if you are a sole proprietor or self-employed individual, you now may be able to qualify for group health insurance as a “group of one,” thanks to a new Washington state law (Senate Bill 6538) that took effect on October 1, 2010.

You can cover your family as dependents under a group plan. The best news is that unlike individual plans, group plans do not require applicants or dependents to pass a health screening, so you can get coverage even if you or someone in your family has a pre-existing condition. Group plans usually offer more options and better coverage at lower cost than individual plans.

It’s not easy to qualify for group health insurance, as you must meet strict guidelines, fill out a lot of complicated paperwork, and jump through a few hoops. For example, you must prove that you are a self-employed individual or sole proprietor, have been working for your business for more than a year, and at least 75% of your income comes from your business. You’ll have to submit copies of your Washington state business license and your most recent tax return (Form 1040 and Schedule C). You’ll need to do your research, request quotes, and carefully compare the different small group plans and their options for deductibles, annual coinsurance maximums, co-pays, prescription drug coverage, and premiums.

You can learn more about the new law by visiting the Washington State Insurance Commissioner’s website and calling the SHIBA (Statewide Health Insurance Benefits Advisors) helpline at 1-800-562-6900. To research and apply for small group health insurance, you can  use an insurance broker or contact insurance companies directly and request quotes and detailed plan information.

Matt and I recently completed the process, and though it took some time and effort, it was worth it in the end.

I wrote this post because few people seem to know about this new law, so please spread the word to anyone who might benefit from it. If you don’t live in Washington, go to the website of your state Insurance Commissioner to research the laws in your state.

Update, September 2013: You can find, compare, and buy health insurance plans on the new exchanges beginning October 1, 2013 for coverage that begins January 1, 2014. You can’t be denied because of pre-existing conditions. If you live in Washington state, go to the Washington HealthPlanFinder website. If you don’t, go to the HealthCare.gov website for more information.

Update, October 2013: If you are self-employed and live in Washington state, these are your options for 2014:

1. You can buy individual health insurance on the Washington state exchange. If your family income (modified adjusted gross income) is below 400% of the federal poverty level, you may qualify for subsidies (tax credits) to help you pay for health insurance purchased through the exchange. If you qualify for subsidies, you can either take them as an advance premium credit to lower your monthly premiums or wait until you file your taxes for 2014 and take the full tax credit then (which may be simplest if you can’t accurately estimate your 2014 income in advance).
2. You can buy “group of one” small group health insurance outside of the exchange if you qualify under the guidelines I outlined in my original post. Some insurers (like Regence) are only offering policies outside the exchange, while others (like Premera) are offering policies both inside and outside of the exchange.
3. You can buy individual health insurance outside of the exchange.

So, you can buy insurance inside or outside of the exchange, but if your income qualifies you for a subsidy, you’ll have to buy insurance inside the exchange to get it. 

Whether you apply for insurance inside or outside of the exchange, you can’t be denied because of pre-existing conditions, and specific “essential health benefits” (including hospitalization, maternity care, and prescription drugs) must be covered.

You should do your research and carefully compare plans and provider networks. (Note that many of the individual plans in the exchange have limited networks of doctors and hospitals.) You can also ask an insurance broker to help you sort through your options.

If you have questions, you can contact the office of the Washington State Insurance Commissioner. Check out the Washington HealthPlanFinder website or call 1-855-WAFINDER. The Kaiser Family Foundation website also has information for consumers.

Update, October 2016: See my note at the top of this post– for 2017, your options may be limited to purchasing individual health insurance on or off the exchange.

The combined online Oxford English Dictionary and Historical Thesaurus has launched

The new  and improved OED website (www.oed.com) has launched, fully integrating the online Oxford English Dictionary with the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary. You can now quickly and easily search, browse, and cross-reference the two works. (For background, see my earlier post on the OED relaunch and my review of the print version of the Historical Thesaurus.)

Here’s a message from the Chief Editor about the relaunch, describing some of the new changes.

If your library has a subscription to the OED Online that you can access remotely from home (like the Seattle Public Library and King County Library systems do), you can get free, full access to the OED website by entering your library card number.  If not, you can get an individual subscription for $295 a year or $29.95 a month.

Go explore!

A final post on Cooks Source (updated)

Over the weekend, the Daily Hampshire Gazette posted an article by Dan Crowley containing an interview with Judith Griggs about the Cook Source copyright infringement kerfuffle. (See my two previous posts for background.)

I found the article rather sad, as she still doesn’t seem to get it. She admits printing Monica’s article without permission was wrong but continues to make vague excuses about overwork (she and her daughter run the magazine alone) and her “shortcomings when it comes to understanding copyright law.” She clearly doesn’t understand that what sent everyone into a frenzy was the tone and content of her truly extraordinary e-mail to Monica. It was just so wrong, arrogant, and unintentionally funny that it became an instant meme.

And now she has replaced her previous unsigned statement on the Cooks Source website with a new one, full of anger and self-pity (and lots of spelling and punctuation errors):

Its sad really. The problem is that I have been so overworked and stretched that when this woman — Monica — contacted me, I was on deadline and traveling at the rate of 200 mile a day for that week (over 900 in total for that week), which I actually told her, along with a few other “nice” things, which she hasnt written about. I was stupid to even answer her that night, her email to me was antagonistic and just plain rude and I was exhausted. But I got suckered in and responded. She doesnt say that she was rude, she doesnt say that I agreed (and did) to pay her. It was my plan to contact her after deadline and have a good discussion about it….

I should add that this email exchange took place the day before she wrote her article for the world. After she (likely) received my email, she called the home office phone at 10PM, I didnt answer that late, was in bed as I was traveling again the next day (left at 7AM the next morning) to Connecticut, and didnt get back to her. This is not an uncommon practice with anyone, to not respond to a phone call for a day or two, it happens to me from other businesses, all the time. I came home that day from being in Connecticut to find hundreds of phone messages and emails telling me I sucked and was a dirtbag… and much MUCH worse.

I really wish she had given me a chance to respond to her before blasting me. She really never gave me a chance….

This is how it happened:
When putting together a magazine, a publishing firm usually has a staff of many, a stable of writers and proofreaders. Cooks Source doesnt, it is just us two…and believe me we would if we could use more help. Consequently I do much, have a few stalwart writers who love to write (for free) and a number of publishers and book agents who send me A LOT of books, recipes, press releases, etc — I recieved one even today. In the past I have also assisted budding writers with their writing skills and given them a portfolio piece they can get jobs with, from magazines and newspapers that will pay them. In short, we do a lot of good, sell a lot of books for authors, and help a lot of people. But one night when working yet another 12 hour day late into the night, I was short one article… Instead of picking up one of the multitude of books sent to me and typing it, I got lazy and went to the www and “found” something. Bleary-eyed I didnt notice it was copy written and reordered some of it. I did keep the author’s name on it rather than outright “stealing” it, and it was my intention to contact the author, but I simply forgot, between proofreading, deliveries, exhaustion….

The bad news is that this is probably the final straw for Cooks Source. We have never been a great money-maker even with all the good we do for businesses. Having a black mark wont help…and now, our black mark will become our shroud. Winters are bleak in Western New England, and as such they are bleak for Cooks Source as well. This will end us….

Thank you to all our readers, thanks to all our advertisers and writers… and to everyone who has been supportive and who has been a part of Cooks Source. To one writer in particular, Monica Gaudio, I wish you had given me a chance.

You can read the whole thing here.

What a shameful way for Judith Griggs to exit the stage.

Update 1: Here’s Monica’s response.

Update 2 (11/17/10, morning): In a new article in the Daily Hampshire Gazette, Dan Crowley reports that Judith Griggs is officially shutting down Cooks Source magazine:

“Cooks Source is gone,” Judith D. Griggs said Tuesday, just days after personally distributing her last issue of the free magazine in western New England. “It’s done.”… In a phone interview Tuesday, Griggs said she will leave her statement up a few more days before eliminating the Cooks Source website altogether.

Update 3 (11/17/10, afternoon): The Cooks Source website is gone. Here’s the Google cache of Judith Griggs’ final statement.

Monica Gaudio has posted copies (with dates) of all of her e-mails to Judith Griggs, but she can’t publish the full text of the e-mails she received without permission.

But honestly, Cooks Source, your apology needs work

The Cooks Source website has been replaced with an unsigned statement (in serious need of editing) which eventually gets around to apologizing for the unauthorized publication of Monica Gaudio’s article in a very passive “mistakes were made” way. Without explicitly acknowledging that their entire business model appeared to be based on reprinting articles from food blogs and websites without permission or payment (see Ed Champion’s post identifying other articles as well as this spreadsheet listing the original sources of dozens of articles reprinted in Cooks Source), they do promise to change their ways.

Much of the statement is actually about the attacks on the Cooks Source Facebook page, the fake Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, and the harassment of advertisers. (The situation clearly escalated out of control and did lead to cyber-bullying and trolling. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for Judith Griggs because of her copyright infringement and her shocking and arrogant e-mail to Monica, but the rampaging internet hordes went too far with the personal attacks and the harassment of the advertisers.)

Here’s what the statement says about the misuse of Monica’s article and future changes:

Last month an article, “American as Apple Pie — Isn’t,” was placed in error in Cooks Source, without the approval of the writer, Monica Gaudio. We sincerely wish to apologize to her for this error, it was an oversight of a small, overworked staff. We have made a donation at her request, to her chosen institution, the Columbia School of Journalism. In addition, a donation to the Western New England Food Bank, is being made in her name. It should be noted that Monica was given a clear credit for using her article within the publication, and has been paid in the way that she has requested to be paid.

This issue has made certain changes here at Cooks Source. Starting with this month, we will now list all sources. Also we now request that all the articles and informational pieces will have been made with written consent of the writers, the book publishers and/or their agents or distributors, chefs and business owners. All submission authors and chefs and cooks will have emailed, and/or signed a release form for this material to Cooks Source and as such will have approved its final inclusion. Email submissions are considered consent, with a verbal/written follow-up….

However: Cooks Source can not vouch for all the writers we have used in the past, and in the future can only check to a certain extent.

That’s nice– blame unnamed writers for the magazine’s repeated copyright infringement. I don’t think that will get you off the hook when the lawyers from Food Network and Martha Stewart come knocking.

You can read the whole statement here.

John Scalzi gave the apology a D+. What do you think?

If you somehow missed the original kerfuffle, see my previous blog post, “No, the web is not ‘public domain.'”

Update: I love this very funny “slightly corrected” version of the Cooks Source statement on the KitchenMage blog.

No, the web is not “public domain”

If you haven’t been following the mind-boggling copyright infringement kerfuffle that’s currently setting the web on fire, here’s a quick recap. A copyrighted article was copied off a website and published in a print magazine named Cooks Source without the knowledge or consent (or payment) of the author, Monica Gaudio. When Monica found out, she contacted the magazine’s editor, Judith Griggs:

After the first couple of emails, the editor of Cooks Source asked me what I wanted — I responded that I wanted an apology on Facebook, a printed apology in the magazine and $130 donation (which turns out to be about $0.10 per word of the original article) to be given to the Columbia School of Journalism.What I got instead was this (I am just quoting a piece of it here:)

“Yes Monica, I have been doing this for 3 decades, having been an editor at The Voice, Housitonic Home and Connecticut Woman Magazine. I do know about copyright laws. It was “my bad” indeed, and, as the magazine is put together in long sessions, tired eyes and minds somethings forget to do these things.

But honestly Monica, the web is considered “public domain” and you should be happy we just didn’t “lift” your whole article and put someone else’s name on it! It happens a lot, clearly more than you are aware of, especially on college campuses, and the workplace. If you took offence and are unhappy, I am sorry, but you as a professional should know that the article we used written by you was in very bad need of editing, and is much better now than was originally. Now it will work well for your portfolio. For that reason, I have a bit of a difficult time with your requests for monetary gain, albeit for such a fine (and very wealthy!) institution. We put some time into rewrites, you should compensate me! I never charge young writers for advice or rewriting poorly written pieces, and have many who write for me… ALWAYS for free!”

That’s the very definition of chutzpah.

This is a case of copyright infringement, not plagiarism. It would have been plagiarism if the magazine had published the article without crediting the original author. The magazine made unauthorized use of material protected by copyright. This could be quickly resolved if both parties reach a settlement, or else the magazine could theoretically be sued and face financial penalties, though that is unlikely, as the legal fees would be prohibitive. However, I suspect the magazine is not long for this world, as on the magazine’s Facebook page advertisers are pulling out and people are identifying other examples of copyright infringement. If they’ve copied material from major food magazines or websites with deep pockets and lawyers, they’re toast.

Some related links:

• Monica Gaudio’s original post and her follow-up post.
• Nick Mamatas’ post, which first spread the story.
• John Scalzi’s post and Neil Gaiman’s tweet, which sent the story viral.
• The magazine’s Facebook page, where people are expressing their displeasure.
• The controversy has already spawned two funny fake Twitter accounts:  @cookssource and @crookssource.

Update 1: A post on “How Publishing Really Works” has more information and links, and it points out a new Facebook page for reporting the original sources of other articles published in the magazine, which apparently include the websites of Food Network, Paula Deen, and Martha Stewart, among other big names.

Update 2: BoingBoing, Gawker, and The Consumerist have now picked up the story, and the Twitter storm continues to grow.

Did Tony Blair borrow dialogue from the movie The Queen?

Today’s Telegraph has an article by Tim Walker in which Peter Morgan, Oscar-winning screenwriter of The Queen, says he suspects that Tony Blair incorporated lines from the movie into his autobiography:

In A Journey, Blair claims that the Queen said to him: “You are my 10th prime minister. The first was Winston. That was before you were born.” In Morgan’s script to the 2006 film The Queen, Mirren, in the title role, tells Michael Sheen’s Blair: “You are my 10th prime minister, Mr Blair. My first was Winston Churchill.” Morgan tells me: “I wish I could pretend that I had inside knowledge, but I made up those lines. No minutes are taken of meetings between prime ministers and monarchs and the convention is that no one ever speaks about them, so I didn’t even attempt to find out what had been said.

“There are three possibilities. The first is I guessed absolutely perfectly, which is highly unlikely; the second is Blair decided to endorse what I imagined as the official line; and the third is that he had one gin and tonic too many and confused the scene in the film with what had actually happened, and this I find amusing because he always insisted he had never even seen it.”

As this is impossible to fact-check without the cooperation of Elizabeth II, we may have to give Tony Blair the benefit of the doubt and just marvel at Peter Morgan’s ability to get inside the heads of his characters. (If you haven’t seen it, it’s an excellent film– the screenplay and the performances are exceptional.)

The Mongoliad begins…

The Mongoliad launched this morning. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, see my earlier post, “The Mongoliad, a “sekrit project” from Neal Stephenson and friends,” or these articles from Fast Company or VentureBeat.

You can explore The Mongoliad website and read the free preview content, but you’ll need a subscription to read the novel, which will be published in serialized weekly chapters over the course of a year. (The first chapter of the story was released today.) Subscription rates start at $5.99 for six months or $9.99 for one year. Subscribers will also have access to the Forum and other goodies (art, video, music, etc.) as they are released.

If you’d prefer to read The Mongoliad on your iPad, iPhone, or iPod Touch, the apps will be available soon (once they receive the Apple stamp of approval). Apps for other devices will follow in time.

And yes, Matt and I are minor members of The Cabal, but you won’t get any spoilers out of us.

Update: New chapters of the serialized novel will be posted every Wednesday. (The first chapter was posted on September 1st, and the second chapter will be posted on September 8th.)

New Update, 10/31/10: The Mongoliad apps for iPad and iPhone are now available. See my new post for more information.

The Seattle Public Library’s annual shutdown

For those of you who live in Seattle, a reminder that the Seattle Public Library system will be closed from Monday, August 30th through Monday, September 6th. This week-long end of summer shutdown has unfortunately become an annual event (see my blog post from last year, “Why shut down the entire Seattle Public Library system for a week?”). All branches will be closed and the library staff of about 650 will be on unpaid furlough. In a change from last year, the SPL website won’t be shut down, so you can access the library catalog (though you can’t put books on hold), the databases and online resources, and digital media, but you are on your own if you run into problems or have questions. See this SPL document for details.

To help close a $67 million gap in Seattle’s 2010 general fund budget, Seattle’s library system had to cut $3 million this year from its $50 million budget. The shutdown will save $650,000, with the rest coming from a reduction in branch hours (as of last February, 15 of the 27 branches are closed on Fridays and Sundays and open only 35 hours a week) and cuts to staff, the book buying budget, the capital budget for major maintenance, etc. It looks like there will be even deeper cuts in 2011, as Seattle is facing a $56 million gap for 2011 and the mayor has asked the library and most other city departments (except police and fire) for cuts of 9.5% to 14.5%, which for the library would be $4.9 to $7.4 million.

The SPL leadership is going to have to make some very tough decisions and face the fact that its budget will not only continue to decline over the next few years but may never again be what it was during Seattle’s boom times.

From 1998 to 2008, Seattle built, replaced, expanded, and renovated libraries throughout the city with the $291 million “Libraries for All” bond measure, passed during Seattle’s dot-com boom. The SPL website boasts:

Ten years later, we have finished the final chapter of Libraries for All. It’s time to pause for a moment and look at what we’ve achieved – four new libraries in communities without library service, the replacement, expansion or renovation of 22 existing branches, and a spectacular new Central Library.

Yes, let’s look at what we’ve achieved– we have 27 new or improved library buildings but we’ve had to cut back on the hours they are open, cut back on their staff, cut back on buying books and materials, and defer maintenance. Building new libraries is sexy, but funding their day-to-day operations is not, and expanding your library system results in significant and permanent increases in all of your costs. Unfortunately, the library system does not have a dedicated funding source, so it has to fight for money from the city’s general fund against higher-priority departments like fire, police, human services, the courts, and transportation, to name a few. In lean times, libraries are the low-hanging fruit.

Seattle may love its libraries, but it takes money to keep them open.

“The Second Day of July 1776, will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America”

Today, July 2nd, is the 234th anniversary of American independence. July 4th is the anniversary of the adoption of the Declaration of Independence. For the whole story, see my post from last year, “Why July 2nd is really Independence Day.”

The document above is the original resolution on Independence, adopted by the Continental Congress on July 2nd, 1776, in the hand of Charles Thompson, secretary of the Congress:

Resolved, That these United Colonies are, and, of right, ought to be, Free and Independent States; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British crown, and that all political connexion between them, and the state of Great Britain, is, and ought to be, totally dissolved.

It is from the Papers of the Continental Congress and is housed at the National Archives.

The document above is the first page (of four) of Jefferson’s “original Rough draught” of the Declaration of Independence, written in June 1776, including all the changes made later by John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, other members of the committee, and the Continental Congress. It is housed at the Library of Congress, and you can view it in their online exhibit “Declaring Independence: Drafting the Documents”. You can compare side-by-side the text of various drafts with the final version here.

Word lovers rejoice: the Historical Thesaurus will be added to OED Online in December

Last October, I blogged at length about the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary, which was only available in two massive print volumes priced just under $400 (though discounted at Amazon.com). As I wrote at the time:

Browsing this work feels strangely like time-travel. All the words from Old English to 2003—obsolete and current, including slang and dialect—have been extracted from the Oxford English Dictionary and organized by their meanings and dates of use. This places each word within its historical context, revealing how ideas and meanings emerged and the different ways they’ve been expressed through time….

The result is the world’s largest thesaurus, nearly 4000 pages of small type in two big volumes weighing fifteen pounds, with a slipcase and folding chart of the top levels of the classification system. I like print references because browsing can lead to serendipitous discoveries, but these books can be awkward to use. It’s especially frustrating when looking up a word with multiple meanings, as the index may list dozens of identification numbers, which means lots of page flipping. No, it’s not available online or on CD, though that may eventually change. I’d like to see the powers-that-be at Oxford University Press quickly add the HTOED to the online OED so both works can be used together and fully cross-referenced and searched.

Christian Kay, the editor of the HTOED, read my post and sent me an email noting that there were plans to eventually link the HTOED to the OED Online and make it available to subscribers, but that could be a couple of years away.

The good news is that you’ll only have to wait until the end of this year. John Simpson, the chief editor of the Oxford English Dictionary, has announced that the OED Online will be relaunched in December 2010 with major changes, including an integrated online edition of the HTOED:

It’s now just over ten years since the OED first went online in 2000, and these ten years have seen remarkable changes in the number, style, and functionality of online reference sites. The OED Online was a ground-breaking site when it was first launched online, and it has steadily received very positive responses from users.

Later this year we are taking the opportunity to make some major changes to the OED Online, taking into account readers’ comments and our own sense of how we would like the site to develop.

When the two-volume Historical Thesaurus of the OED was published in October 2009 we were immediately asked whether it could be incorporated into the OED Online. At the time, we were testing the feasibility of this, but now we can confirm that the relaunched OED site will contain an integrated online edition of the Historical Thesaurus. This means, for instance, that a user viewing the entry for halberd (the early modern weapon combining a spear and a battle-axe) can click to reach the related entries langue de boeuf, glaive, budge, poleaxe, ox-tongue, and partisan—to list only those first recorded between 1450 and 1611.

Here are more details from the OED Online relaunch FAQs:

Q. When will the new OED site launch?

A. The OED site will relaunch in December 2010. As well as the new-look website, the regular quarterly update will be published with new words and revisions of entries across the alphabet.

Q. What new content will be added at launch?

A. The most significant new content is the integration of the Historical Thesaurus of the OED (HTOED) into OED Online. This will allow readers to click through from entries to synonyms by date. The new site will also offer publicly-available feature pieces, providing guides to the OED content and regular commentaries on topical issues in the story of the language.

Q. What new functionality will be added at launch?

A. Amongst other things users will be able to search and browse the OED by a wide variety of criteria including subject, region, usage, or language of origin; see detailed information about the major sources of the OED; view search results as a timeline; and be able personalize the resource by saving searches and entries to their own profile.

Q. Will I have to take out a new subscription to access the HTOED?

A. No, it will be fully integrated and therefore accessible as part of your current subscription.

Individuals can subscribe to the OED Online for $295 a year or $29.95 a month. But you may not need an individual subscription, as many public and university libraries subscribe to it, and some (like the Seattle Public Library) offer free online access from home if you have a library card.

For more about the HTOED, see my original post, “Time-traveling through the English language with the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary.”

Update, 11/30/2010: The new OED website has launched, and it fully integrates the Oxford English Dictionary with the Historical Thesaurus. See my new blog post for more information.

The Mongoliad, a “sekrit project” from Neal Stephenson and friends

Here’s a preview of The Mongoliad, a new collaborative storytelling project headed by Neal Stephenson:

The Mongoliad is a rip-roaring adventure tale set in 1241, a pivotal year in history, when Europe thought that the Mongol Horde was about to completely destroy their world. The Mongoliad is also the beginning of an experiment in storytelling, technology, and community-driven creativity.

Our story begins with a serial novel of sorts, which we will release over the course of about a year. Neal Stephenson created the world in which The Mongoliad is set, and presides benevolently over it. Our first set of stories is being written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other authors; we’re also working closely with artists, fight choreographers & other martial artists, programmers, film-makers, game designers, and a bunch of other folks to produce an ongoing stream of nontextual, para-narrative, and extra-narrative stuff which we think brings the story to life in ways that are pleasingly unique, and which can’t be done in any single medium.

Very shortly, once The Mongoliad has developed some mass and momentum, we will be asking fans to join us in creating the rest of the world and telling new stories in it. That’s where the real experiment part comes in. We are building some pretty cool tech to make that easy and fun, and we hope lots of you will use it.

People will be able to get The Mongoliad over the web and via custom clients for mobile devices – we’re going to start out with iPad, iPhone, Android, and Kindle apps, and will probably do more in the not too distant future.

Stay tuned. Fun stuff coming!

On May 25th there will be a sneak peak of the alpha version at the SF App Show. Here are links to The Mongoliad’s website and Facebook page, and you can sign up for e-mail updates here.

Update, 9/1/10: The Mongoliad has launched. See my new post for more information.

AP Stylebook surrenders the battle over “Web site” vs. “website”

I was very pleased to read today in this post on Poynter Online that the Associated Press Stylebook (the style manual used by most newspapers and journalists) is finally changing from Web site to website. This change now appears in the AP Stylebook Online and will be in the printed 2010 AP Stylebook.

It’s about time, as common usage long ago moved to website, a fact acknowledged by Bryan Garner in his excellent 2009 third edition of Garner’s Modern American Usage:

website. One word, lowercase. But some stylesheets and dictionaries specify Web site (a clunker). When Web stands alone, it is capitalized. Cf. World Wide Web.

The New York Times, which has long had its own rather idiosyncratic style rules (see my 2009 post on the subject), uses Web site, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they continue to do so long after everyone else has abandoned it.

Here’s what the Chicago Manual of Style Online says about the issue:

Q. Which is currently accepted: Web site, web site, website, or Website?

A. A lot of people are writing “website.” A lot of people have come to prefer “website.” But formal usage still calls for “Web site,” in recognition of the initiatives of the World Wide Web Consortium (write “Web-site” as an adjective). The most elaborately formal modern American publication I can think of, the New Yorker, still writes “Web site,” but then again, they also write “E-mail,” “coördinate,” and “reëxamine”—they are very particular. We at Chicago are very particular too, and we recommend “Web site.” But our press as a whole is not in the position of publishing a single, unified publication—such as a magazine. It is easier to apply a set of standard rules and never vary from them for one publication, but rules applying to all sorts of books, articles, and other writing must be a little more flexible. Moreover, when a word gets used a lot it tends to lose any awkward edges (and what could be more awkward than a compound formed of one capitalized word and one lowercased word?). Each new book that appears on the scene presents an opportunity for an author to express a usage preference or to demonstrate a familiarity with changing usage.

But generally, I would recommend “Web site” for formal writing, but “website” for informal writing or friendly writing. Unless, of course, you prefer “Web site” even when you’re being friendly.

It’s a fact that style and usage change over time, though it often takes time to filter up to the guardians of language. One of the things I really like about the new edition of Garner is that he includes a “Language-Change Index” to “measure how widely accepted various linguistic innovations have become.” His Index has five stages:

Stage 1: A new form emerges as an innovation (or a dialectal form persists) among a small minority of the language community, perhaps displacing a traditional usage.

Stage 2: The form spreads to a significant fraction of the language community but remains unacceptable in standard usage.

Stage 3: The form becomes commonplace even among many well-educated people but is still avoided in careful usage.

Stage 4: The form becomes virtually universal but is opposed on cogent grounds by a few linguistic stalwarts….

Stage 5: The form is universally accepted (not counting pseudo-snoot eccentrics).

For example, email for e-mail is in Stage 4, and he explains in detail in the entry:

e-mail; E-mail; email. The first is the prevalent form in print sources. The letter e–short for electronic–is sometimes capitalized, but the trend is to make it lowercase. The unhyphenated email is unsightly, but it might prevail in the end. In print sources, e-mail is five times as common as email. Ultimately, the hyphen may well disappear–since that is what midword hyphens tend to do–but for the time being it is more than holding its own.

Of course the reason e-mail is much more common in print sources is that the style manuals used by print publications specify that as the correct usage.

For more on style manuals, see one of my earliest posts, The writer’s bookshelf (part 3), or some of my other posts on the subject.

Update, 8/5/10: The new 16th edition of the Chicago Manual of Style now embraces “website,” as I noted in the post I wrote after receiving my print copy.

Update, 8/6/10: See my new blog post, “A comparison of how the new style manuals treat tech words.”

Update, 3/18/11: AP has just dropped the hyphen from “e-mail.”

Amazon threatens publishers again

This morning brings news (from an article in the New York Times and a blog post in MobyLives) that Amazon “has threatened to stop directly selling the books of some publishers online unless they agree to a detailed list of concessions regarding the sale of electronic books” (NYT).

Amazon is trying to prevent publishers from making deals with Apple to sell their ebooks on the iPad using the agency model. Amazon is apparently refusing to negotiate an agency model with any publishers other than the five majors who’ve already made deals with Apple. According to the MobyLives post, independent publishers are being told that “if they switched to an agency model for ebooks, Amazon would stop selling their entire list, in print and digital form.”

Amazon and Apple are each requiring publishers to agree to restrictive terms, which may in effect force publishers to choose between Amazon and Apple. From the Times article:

Five of the country’s six largest publishers — Macmillan, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, HarperCollins and Penguin — have already reached deals with Apple to sell their books through its iBookstore, which will be featured on the iPad. (The holdout is Random House.)

Under those agreements, the publishers will set consumer prices for each book, and Apple will serve as an agent and take a 30 percent commission. E-book editions of most newly released adult general fiction and nonfiction will cost $12.99 to $14.99.

Amazon has agreed in principle that the major publishers would be able to set prices in its Kindle store as well. But it is also demanding that they lock into three-year contracts and guarantee that no other competitor will get lower prices or better terms.

Apple, for its part, is requiring that publishers not permit other retailers to sell any e-books for less than what is listed in the iBookstore. So the publishers have sought to renegotiate agreements they have with Amazon under which they sold books to it at wholesale, allowing Amazon to set the consumer price….

According to three people briefed on the discussions, publishers are reluctant to sign three-year contracts because the digital book world is changing so rapidly and they want room to adjust as it takes shape.

Amazon has also begun talking with smaller publishers that have not yet signed contracts with Apple. In those conversations, according to one person briefed on the discussions, Amazon has said it prefers to retain its wholesale pricing model, as opposed to Apple’s so-called agency model.

But some of these smaller publishers have begun talking with Apple, which has effectively said that any publisher that wishes to sell its books on the iPad must offer the same terms to all booksellers. In other words, to do business with Apple, publishers must export Apple’s business model to all retailers. Amazon, by contrast, has not promised to adopt the agency approach for any but the largest publishers.

Amazon appears to be responding to the Apple threat by waging a publisher-by-publisher battle, trying to keep as many books as possible out of Apple’s hands, while preserving as much flexibility as it can to set its own prices.

But if Amazon tries to enforce its demands by removing “buy” buttons from some pages again, some believe it could harm its reputation in the eyes of customers and the publishing industry….

Amazon may have more leverage with smaller publishers, which typically sell their books in fewer outlets and thus tend to rely more on Amazon for sales. Amazon may believe that if it can keep those publishers from moving to an agency model, Apple will choose not to sell their e-books, and Amazon will be seen as having a broader selection.

For those of you who want a reminder of the Amazon/Macmillan boycott battle and the ebook agency vs. wholesale sales model controversy, here are links to a two of my blog posts about it from late January and early February:

• “Amazon declares war on Friday, concedes on Sunday (updated)”
• “Day 5 of Amazon’s boycott of Macmillan books (and authors)”

New e-mail addresses

To make a long and uninteresting story short:

• My new e-mail address is lisa@lisagold.com
• Matt’s new e-mail address is matt@bymattruff.com
• Matt’s website, www.bymattruff.com, has moved to a new web host and his page links have changed.

That is all.

Libraries and the Espresso Book Machine

I’ve written before about bookstores using the Espresso Book Machine to print books on demand. Thanks to Resource Shelf, I just learned that the Grace Mellman Library in Temecula, California has purchased an Espresso Book Machine with grant money as part of a program to study “the usefulness of on-demand printing to enhance library collections”:

Library patrons will now have the option to request titles, have the book printed for free, read it and return it to the library collection, or they may choose to keep the book and pay a printing fee. If the requesting patron is at the Book Espresso location and wants to pay for the book, it can be printed immediately while they wait.

“Growing our collections based upon patron on-demand choices is a new concept for our library system,” said Jan Kuebel, Manager of Grace Mellman Library. “Rather than relying solely on interlibrary loan, we now have a way to immediately respond to patron requests for materials outside of our current collection.”

Available book titles will be obtained from Lightning Source, with over 500,000 titles available, and Google Books, who has partnered with over 20,000 publishers to make their content available for on-demand printing….

I think this is great, and I only wish more libraries (and independent bookstores) could afford EBMs, as they provide instant access at a reasonable cost to a wide range of material not currently on their shelves.

I still haven’t tried out the EBMs in Seattle at the University Bookstore or Third Place Books, but I will report back when I do.

How cutting and pasting can lead to plagiarism

In today’s New York Times, Public Editor Clark Hoyt’s column, titled “Journalistic Shoplifting,” is about the recent plagiarism scandal surrounding Times business reporter Zachery Kouwe.

I wanted to point out this particular passage, in which Hoyt notes that both Zachery Kouwe and Gerald Posner claim that their plagiarism was unintentional, caused by cutting and pasting material from other sources and mixing it up with their own writing:

Kouwe told [John Koblin of the New York Observer] that the plagiarism happened with minor news reported elsewhere that needed to be matched on DealBook. He said he would copy stories from wires, paste them into a file in the editing system, verify the information and then put the material in his own words. At least, he said, that is what he intended to do. When I asked him how he could fail to notice that he was copying someone else’s work, he added further explanation: He said the raw material in the computer files in which he assembled his stories included not only reports from other sources but also context and background from previous articles that he had written himself. When putting it all together, he said, he must have thought the words he copied were his own, earlier ones. “It was just my carelessness in trying to get it up quickly,” he said.

The explanation was similar to one offered only days earlier by Gerald Posner, a reporter for The Daily Beast, who was caught by Jack Shafer of Slate cribbing sentences from The Miami Herald. Posner, who resigned after even more plagiarism was found, also said that he did not do it intentionally. He said he had poured all his research — interviews, public documents, published articles — into a master electronic file and then boiled it into an article under tight Web deadlines, a process that led to disaster.

We’ve seen before how cutting and pasting material written by others can lead to plagiarism, as in the Chris Anderson Free/Wikipedia scandal.

Writers can protect themselves from this kind of  “unintentional plagiarism” by incorporating some simple and practical tips into their research and writing process. In a July 2009 blog post on avoiding plagiarism, I recommended Harvard University’s excellent PDF publication Writing with Internet Sources. The chapter on “Incorporating Electronic Sources into Your Writing” contains a section called “Strategies for Avoiding Internet Plagiarism” (pages 42-44), with important advice for writers:

Internet plagiarism most often occurs when writers cut and paste from the Internet or paraphrase carelessly… The following tips will help you research and write with honesty and integrity.

• Plan ahead
  … Budget enough time to search for sources, take notes on them, and think about how to use them… Moments of carelessness are more common when you leave your [writing] until the last minute and are tired or stressed. Honest mistakes can lead to charges of plagiarism just as dishonesty can; be careful when note-taking and in the incorporation of ideas and language from electronic sources so you don’t “borrow”—i.e., unintentionally plagiarize—the work of another writer.
• Print your sources
  Print the relevant pages from any websites you use, making sure that you note the complete URL….
• File and label your sources
  Never cut and paste information from an electronic source straight into your own [writing]. Instead, open a separate document on your computer for each electronic source so you can file research information. When you cut and paste into that document, make sure to include the full URL….
• Keep your own writing and your sources separate
  Work with either the printed copy of your source(s) or the copy you pasted into a separate document—not the online version—as you [write]….
• Keep your notes and your draft separate
  Be careful to keep your research notes separate from your actual draft; this will ensure you don’t cut language from a source and paste it directly into your draft without proper attribution. You can open your notes and your draft next to each other on your computer screen and work back and forth.
• Acknowledge your sources explicitly when paraphrasing
  In your research notes, use some form of notation to indicate what you’ve paraphrased (e.g., put brace brackets around the paraphrase), and mention the author’s name within the material you paraphrase. Once you start writing and revising, make sure you avoid gradually rewording the paraphrased material until you lose sight of the fact that it is still a paraphrase of someone else’s ideas….
• Quote your sources properly
  Always use quotation marks for directly quoted material, even for short phrases and key terms….
• Keep a source trail
  As you write and revise…, keep a source trail of notes and of each successive draft…. You ought to be able to reconstruct the path you took from your sources, to your notes, to your drafts, to your revision….

I also recommend that you read Craig Silverman’s recent column for the Columbia Journalism Review, “The Counter-Plagiarism Handbook: Tips for writers and editors on how to avoid or detect journalistic plagiarism.” Here are two of his useful tips for writers:

• Use a different font and text color for your research files. This will help you instantly recognize other people’s words when you paste them into your story.
• Add in the proper attribution as soon as you paste any research into your draft.