In publishing, increasingly the enemy of my enemy is my friend, but as in the game of Clue, one needs to keep a scorecard handy to figure out who is the friend, and who the killer, in the Library versus the Conservatory.

One of the thinly disguised fault lines in the Google Book Search settlement was the latent tension between the authors, represented by the Authors Guild, and the publishers. The thorny issue of which party has prevailing digital rights to older backlist titles published at a time when contracts either neglected to mention, or weakly addressed, the future revenue possibilities of ebooks has consistently failed to be brought to ground. The conflict has spawned some of the most incestuous conflicts in publishing in recent years, either between traditional publishing groups and new publishing companies, e.g., Random House v. Rosetta Books, or between authors’ agents and publishers, e.g. Wylie v. Random House. In the Google Book Search settlement, arbitrating a distribution of revenues between authors and publishers from the books was such a cornerstone that it earned a pole position as the first appendix.

Therefore, it is no surprise that the primary authors groups – the National Writers Union (NWU), the American Society of Journalists and Authors (ASJA), and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA) – have united with the Authors Guild to decry the recently announced settlement between publishers and Google, which effectively ends the McGraw-Hill et al. lawsuit against the Google Books Library project. There is a touch of dark humor lurking, as the three groups making this announcement – the NWU, ASJA, and the SWFA – were vociferously in conflict with the Authors Guild through their participation in the Open Book Alliance while the Authors Guild was a party to the settlement proposals. Now that the settlement has been dashed, they are free again to common cause against the publishers. Continue reading →