Notably, the letter includes the total damage awards calculated by the states and lists the amount publishers agreed to pay as a percentage of those damages. In that regard, the deals look pretty good for the initial three settling publishers (Hachette, HarperCollins, and Simon & Schuster). Hachette was calculated to be on the hook for a total of $62,280,000, but has paid $32,686,165, roughly 52% of what it was liable for. HarperCollins paid $20,168,710, about 65% of $31,140,000 it was assessed for. And Simon & Schuster was on the hook for $42,920,000, and paid $18,303,551 or 42% of assessed damages.
Penguin and Macmillan, meanwhile, appear to have paid a premium for being the last two publishers to settle claims. Penguin, which struck a deal just days before Apple's June trial, agreed to pay $75 million to settle calculated damages of $62,128,000, or 121% of its assessed liability. Macmillan, which settled in March, paid $20 million to settle damage claims of $18,515,000—or, 108% of their liability.
Note that the way the "reparations" will be paid is a credits for future ebook purchases so they'll get the money right back.
As expected, they got off easy, though you'd never believe it to hear them whine about getting a wrist slap.
What do you do if something smells fishy? You ask your local competition regulator to sniff around until they find the potential source of the stink. Unfortunately for Senator Nick Xenophon, and for all our Aussie members, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) turned down his request to investigate the pricing of electronic books in Australia. The Australian Financial Review writes:
[A]n ACCC spokesman said the watchdog considered that "the conduct of concern occurred in the US and we note that conduct is being sanctioned by the regulator in the US."
We've seen plenty of examples here in the forums where MobileRead members pointed out the difference in e-book prices, usually to the disadvantage of our Aussie friends.
Instead of fretting about e-book prices, the Australian argues more attention should be given to snapper fish and giant squids (subscription req):
Nothing would be served by such an inquiry; it certainly wouldn't result in any significant reduction in e-book pricing, which is set beyond these shores, and as far as we can see no longer by Apple. [...] Xenophon, we reckon, would be doing more useful work petitioning the ACCC for an inquiry into the price of Aussie seafood.
Help us choose a book as the August 2013 eBook for the MobileRead Book Club. The poll will be open for 5 days. There will be no runoff vote unless the voting results a tie, in which case there will be a 3 day run-off poll. This is a visible poll: others can see how you voted. It is multiple-choice: you may cast a vote for each book that appeals to you.
We will start the discussion thread for this book on August 20th. Select from the following Official Choices with three nominations each:
Often listed as one of Clarke's finest novels, Rendezvous With Rama has won both the Hugo and the Nebula Awards. A fast-paced and compelling story of an enigmatic encounter with alien technology, Rendezvous With Rama offers both answers and unsolved mysteries that continue to fascinate readers decades after its first publication.
Available at libraries everywhere.
• A Princess of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs Patricia Clark Memorial Library:ePub | Kindle / Scott Dutton Design & Illustration:ePub
Spoiler:
A Princess of Mars (1917) is a science fantasy novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the first of his Barsoom series. Full of swordplay and daring feats, the novel is considered a classic example of 20th century pulp fiction. It is also a seminal instance of the planetary romance, a sub-genre of science fantasy that became highly popular in the decades following its publication. Its early chapters also contain elements of the Western. The story is set on Mars, imagined as a dying planet with a harsh desert environment. This vision of Mars was based on the work of the astronomer Percival Lowell, whose ideas were widely popularized in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
• Lost Horizon by James Hilton Patricia Clark Memorial Library:ePub | Kindle
Spoiler:
From Goodreads:
While attempting to escape a civil war, four people are kidnapped and transported to the Tibetan mountains. After their plane crashes, they are found by a mysterious Chinese man. He leads them to a monastery hidden in "the valley of the blue moon" -- a land of mystery and matchless beauty where life is lived in tranquil wonder, beyond the grasp of a doomed world.
It is here, in Shangri-La, where destinies will be discovered and the meaning of paradise will be unveiled.
This is the penultimate Culture novel by Banks--written in 2010. In fact, it is our final visit to the Universe of The Culture as it is set later than The Hydrogen Sonata which was his final science-fiction novel.
Surface Detail is regarded as one of the finest books set in that Universe.
It has an epic sweep spanning Real and Virtual worlds. We meet the fascinating Ship minds, a memorable villain, and are submerged in a murder story, Machiavellian politics, a revenge quest and fascinating minor characters all set within four inter-related and integrated plots. The blurb from Amazon reads:
"It begins in the realm of the Real, where matter still matters.
It begins with a murder.
And it will not end until the Culture has gone to war with death itself."
While the culture novels share a common setting, they can be read as stand-alone books.
The novel is set in a post-visitation world where there are now six Zones known on Earth (each zone is approximately five square miles/kilometers in size) which are still full of unexplained phenomena and where strange happenings have briefly occurred, assumed to have been visitations by aliens. World governments and the UN try to keep tight control over them to prevent leakage of artifacts from the Zones, fearful of unforeseen consequences. A subculture of stalkers, thieves going into the Zones to get the artifacts, evolves around the Zones.
Ray Bradbury’s internationally acclaimed novel Fahrenheit 451 is a masterwork of twentieth-century literature set in a bleak, dystopian future.
Guy Montag is a fireman. In his world, where television rules and literature is on the brink of extinction, firemen start fires rather than put them out. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden.
In order to develop a secure defense against a hostile alien race's next attack, government agencies breed child geniuses and train them as soldiers. A brilliant young boy, Andrew "Ender" Wiggin lives with his kind but distant parents, his sadistic brother Peter, and the person he loves more than anyone else, his sister Valentine. Peter and Valentine were candidates for the soldier-training program but didn't make the cut—young Ender is the Wiggin drafted to the orbiting Battle School for rigorous military training.
Ender's skills make him a leader in school and respected in the Battle Room, where children play at mock battles in zero gravity. Yet growing up in an artificial community of young soldiers Ender suffers greatly from isolation, rivalry from his peers, pressure from the adult teachers, and an unsettling fear of the alien invaders. His psychological battles include loneliness, fear that he is becoming like the cruel brother he remembers, and fanning the flames of devotion to his beloved sister.
Is Ender the general Earth needs? But Ender is not the only result of the genetic experiments. The war with the Buggers has been raging for a hundred years, and the quest for the perfect general has been underway for almost as long. Ender's two older siblings are every bit as unusual as he is, but in very different ways. Between the three of them lie the abilities to remake a world. If, that is, the world survives.
Ender's Game is the winner of the 1985 Nebula Award for Best Novel and the 1986 Hugo Award for Best Novel.
Alastair Reynolds's critically acclaimed debut has redefined the space opera with a staggering journey across vast gulfs of time and space to confront the very nature of reality itself.
Available at libraries everywhere!
Amazon.com Review:
Alastair Reynolds's first novel is "hard" SF on an epic scale, crammed with technological marvels and immensities. Its events take place over a relatively short period, but have roots a billion years old--when the Dawn War ravaged our galaxy.
Sylveste is the only man ever to return alive and sane from a Shroud, an enclave in space protected by awesome gravity-warping defenses: "a folding a billion times less severe should have required more energy than was stored in the entire rest-mass of the galaxy." Now an intuition he doesn't understand makes him explore the dead world Resurgam, whose birdlike natives long ago tripped some booby trap that made their own sun erupt in a deadly flare.
Meanwhile, the vast, decaying lightship Nostalgia for Infinity is coming for Sylveste, whose dead father (in AI simulation) could perhaps help the Captain, frozen near absolute zero yet still suffering monstrous transformation by nanotech plague. Most of Infinity's tiny crew have hidden agendas--Khouri the reluctant contract assassin believes she must kill Sylveste to save humanity--and there are two bodiless stowaways, one no longer human and one never human. Shocking truths emerge from bluff, betrayal, and ingenious lies.
The trail leads to a neutron star where an orbiting alien construct has defenses to challenge the Infinity's planet-wrecking superweapons.
At the heart of this artifact, the final revelations detonate--most satisfyingly. Dense with information and incident, this longish novel has no surplus fat and seems almost too short. A sparkling SF debut. --David Langford, Amazon.co.uk --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
The book is about the ultimate inadequacy of communication between human and non-human species.
In probing and examining the oceanic surface of the planet Solaris from a hovering research station the human scientists are, in turn, being studied by the sentient planet itself, which probes for and examines the thoughts of the human beings who are analyzing it. Solaris has the ability to manifest their secret, guilty concerns in human form, for each scientist to personally confront.
Solaris is one of Lem’s philosophic explorations of man’s anthropomorphic limitations.]
Winner of both the Hugo Award for Best Novel and the Nebula Award for Best Novel.
For Kivrin, preparing an on-site study of one of the deadliest eras in humanity's history was as simple as receiving inoculations against the diseases of the fourteenth century and inventing an alibi for a woman traveling alone. For her instructors in the twenty-first century, it meant painstaking calculations and careful monitoring of the rendezvous location where Kivrin would be received.
But a crisis strangely linking past and future strands Kivrin in a bygone age as her fellows try desperately to rescue her. In a time of superstition and fear, Kivrin -- barely of age herself -- finds she has become an unlikely angel of hope during one of history's darkest hours.
Five years in the writing by one of science fiction's most honored authors, Doomsday Book is a storytelling triumph. Connie Willis draws upon her understanding of the universalities of human nature to explore the ageless issues of evil, suffering and the indomitable will of the human spirit.
From Publishers Weekly:
This new book by Hugo- and Nebula-award-winning author Willis ( Lincoln's Dreams ) is an intelligent and satisfying blend of classic science fiction and historical reconstruction. Kivrin, a history student at Oxford in 2048, travels back in time to a 14th-century English village, despite a host of misgivings on the part of her unofficial tutor. When the technician responsible for the procedure falls prey to a 21st-century epidemic, he accidentally sends Kivrin back not to 1320 but to 1348--right into the path of the Black Death. Unaware at first of the error, Kivrin becomes deeply involved in the life of the family that takes her in. But before long she learns the truth and comes face to face with the horrible, unending suffering of the plague that would wipe out half the population of Europe. Meanwhile, back in the future, modern science shows itself infinitely superior in its response to epidemics, but human nature evidences no similar evolution, and scapegoating is still alive and well in a campaign against "infected foreigners."p. 204 This book finds villains and heroes in all ages, and love, too, which Kivrin hears in the revealing and quietly touching deathbed confession of a village priest.
Do you hear that sound? That's thousands of Finish digital rights activists cheering loudly, then coughing uncontrollably, then reaching for their inhalers, for they have succeeded in collecting over 50,000 vote signatures supporting their proposal on changing Finland's copyright legislation. Why does this matter? Because under Finnish law, once this quota is reached in a six-months period, the nation's politicians are required to vote on the matter, rather than merely taking a look at it or discussing it in the legislature.
The Common Sense in Copyright group is hoping to force amendments to the existing Copyright Act that, if approved, would allow individuals to share private copies of digital content with third parties and would reduce monetary fines for copyright infringement. From their mission statement:
There is widespread agreement, that the Finnish copyright law is too strict and allows for excessive infringements of privacy and penalties.
The case of the confiscation of the 9-year old girls Winnie the Pooh laptop in November 2012 made headlines internationally, but was only a tip of the iceberg. Since 2006 when the current copyright law came into force, countless youngsters have been found guilty of copyright crimes and sentenced to pay thousands, in some cases hundreds of thousands, of euros in punitive damages to the copyright organizations.
This crowdsourced law proposal suggests several changes to the current copyright law including allowing the fair use of copyright-protected material for parody and satire and in teaching situations and impriving the situation of freelance artists. It is not a pro-piracy law proposal. However, it does suggests that the individual downloading of copyright-protected material from the internet should be a misdemeanor – and no longer a crime. This is actually what the law in Finland was until 2006. It is also in line with the international tendency, for example, in countries like Holland and United Kingdom, to alleviate the overly strict copyright regulations.
So it's not just the British but also the majority of Americans who prefer paper books over e-books. At least if you're inclined to believe the poll done by Rasmussen Reports.
A new Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 75% of American Adults would rather read a book in a traditional print format than on an electronic book-reading device like a Kindle. Fifteen percent (15%) prefer reading on an electronic device. Ten percent (10%) are undecided.
You find the original questions asked in the poll over here.
Hot on the heels of yesterday's proposal to keep bookstores alive, the Sunday Times is proclaiming that book fans are reverting to the traditional way of reading, at least in the UK. The article names various well-known authors, thinkers and journalists - among them Roger Scruton, Alain de Botton, Philip Stone (The Bookseller), Rosie Boycott (journalist), John Simpson (broadcaster), Jilly Cooper (novelist), and Richard Curtis (screenwriter) - as examples of critics who've been experiencing a growing antipathy towards e-books. Some of their reasons:
"irritation about "ugly adverts" to matters of art and aesthetics"
"whatever I read on my Kindle I couldn't really remember in the long term. It was as if I had never read it"
"The prospect of the bookshelf of the future -- just containing a slim tablet -- is truly depressing"
"I can't stand the sloppy, ugly, ignorant way ebooks are often presented"
"I'd much rather have the feel and look of pages with nice type to enjoy"
"I like to scribble all over [books]"
The articles cites the results of a poll that appears to support this negative sentiment. Adults asked what they'd take with them on holiday, 17% said e-reader, 32% said paper books, 26% don't know, 9% take both, and 16% take neither. Asked which one they'd prefer, 17% said e-reader and 65% said paper books. 32% of those who were polled owned an e-reader.
For some, DRM stands for Down-Right Maddening. Nobody likes the painful and annoying restrictions it imposes on us, and the very fact that there's an increasing number of e-book stores selling their content DRM-free can be seen as proof that the publishing industry doesn't depend on it either. So why do we still have to deal with DRM for a majority of e-books, whereas most downloadable music has gone DRM-free?
Or, could Apple step in and pressure the publishing industry to go completely DRM-free, the same way they did when renegotiating deals with the big music labels? Kirk McElhearn of Macworld thinks there is a chance, also for Apple:
I can listen to my digital music files on just about any device; I want to do the same thing with my books. [...] Apple could take the lead, as the company did with DRM-free music, and help change another market that needs it. This could be good for Apple itself, too, given the perception of the company in the wake of the ebook price-fixing ruling.
A random sample of new books for sale on Amazon.com shows three times more books initially published in the 1850’s are for sale than new books from the 1950’s. Why? This paper presents new data on how copyright seems to make works disappear.
The full paper, written by professor Paul J. Heald from the University of Illinois, is available here.
PW: Conspiracy Fines detailed, so far...
Those poor put-upon victims of the Feds have so far paid $166M dollars for their two year run of price fixing.
What do you do if something smells fishy? You ask your local competition regulator to sniff around until they find the potential source of the stink. Unfortunately for Senator Nick Xenophon, and for all our Aussie members, the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC) turned down 
Do you hear that sound? That's thousands of Finish digital rights activists cheering loudly, then coughing uncontrollably, then reaching for their inhalers, for they have succeeded in collecting over 
Hot on the heels of yesterday's 
For some, DRM stands for Down-Right Maddening. Nobody likes the painful and annoying restrictions it imposes on us, and the very fact that there's an increasing number of 
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