You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.
Book Typography
From TypeTogether:
Book-making has not become any easier, even with centuries of progress since Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible. New technologies have made the process faster but no less challenging. From typesetting to binding, every single step requires the eye of a conceptual artist, the keen attention to detail of an editor, and years of practice to perfect. In the realm of type design, making a great type family for books is as complex as it gets.
Great book fonts do not scream, draw attention to themselves, or require a multitude of styles to be useful. Since their task is to relay content while creating an enjoyable reading environment, any spectacular and eye-catching lettershapes are more of a hindrance than an advantage in these settings. Text typefaces rely on controlled contrast, pleasant proportions, even texture, and thoughtfully cohesive text setting. Add to these requirements the most subtle sense of personality, and a typeface will have the ability to influence the reader by pleasing the eye and engaging their receptive mind.
. . . .
Sirba
Sirba is a friendly, low-contrast serif that’s warm and even in complex settings. It was designed for use in demanding environments such as dictionaries, academic texts, annual reports, novels, and magazines. As such, Sirba includes a full set of IPA symbols for phonetic pronunciation and coverage for Greek and Cyrillic scripts.
Sirba has a classic touch revealed by its beauty in such design details as the asymmetrical bottom serifs, curved bracketing, and terminals with calligraphic undertones. Because of its open counters, large x-height, and short ascenders and descenders, it provides a pleasant reading experience and high legibility even in texts of demanding scope. Furthermore, annual reports and tables benefit from the low cap height and consistent width of the tabular numerals between the weights. With font weights from sparse to stark, Sirba can handle many levels of hierarchy and text differentiation in books.
Link to the rest at TypeTogether
TypeTogether provides examples of a variety of different Book Fonts that it licenses/sells.
PG acknowledges that he sometimes has difficulty discerning the details that differentiate fonts from the written description of those fonts. For example, he’s not certain he can distinguish between fonts with pleasant portions from fonts without pleasant proportions. He is certain he will not be able to identify a font that’s “warm and even in complex settings” from one which is not. He hopes that he’ll know it when he sees it.
PG notes that fonts used in ebooks may not display in the same manner on various ebook reading devices. He suspects that in many cases Serif and Sans-serif will be the font choices offered for ebook consumption.
The Self-Help Compulsion
From The Wall Street Journal:
‘How to Win Friends and Influence People” has generally been viewed as the self-help mother ship. But long, long before the 1936 publication of Dale Carnegie’s guide to self-betterment and reinvention (30 million copies sold and counting), the untutored and insecure had a choice of reading matter for the lowdown on how to live well and prosper. In fact, such books date back to antiquity, according to Beth Blum, author of “The Self-Help Compulsion.” What is Ovid’s “Ars Amatoria,” she asks, “but an ancient Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus?” As for one of the major works of the Stoic philosopher Epictetus, it is “cognitive behavioral therapy before its time.”
Age has apparently not withered the appeal of the genre. In the past 30 years, notes Ms. Blum, an assistant professor of English at Harvard, the self-help category has been among the most lucrative in publishing. It’s easy to understand why. Self-help makes the sort of claims and promises—a whole new you! a whole new in-control, wise, cultivated, savvy, beautiful you!—that readers find it hard to resist.
A recondite, sedulously researched monograph, “The Self-Help Compulsion” traces the evolution of self-help books, places them in historical context, and, perhaps most strikingly, suggests that they’re worthy of more respect than they get. Ms. Blum also discovers a kind of cross-pollination between literature and self-help, certainly liberal borrowing. The wall separating the two genres, she argues, has been frequently breached, sometimes mockingly, sometimes admiringly, sometimes to teach a moral lesson. The titles of several works of literary fiction—among them, Sheila Heti’s “How Should a Person Be?,” Mohsin Hamid’s “How to Get Filthy Rich in Rising Asia” and Jesse Ball’s “How to Set a Fire and Why”—cunningly ape self-help language.
Ms. Blum offers a close analysis of works by Gustave Flaubert, Edith Wharton, Virginia Wolff and James Joyce, offering a compelling argument for “Ulysses” as a self-help manual par excellence. Joyce, she says, employed proverbial advice in his works as “an anchor for his more experimental, esoteric formulations.” One particular favorite: “Let bygones be bygones.” She notes that Flaubert drew on a popular contemporary manual, fittingly titled “Self-Help”—by Samuel Smiles, a Scottish writer and reformer—to lampoon the foolish aspirations and failed DIY projects of the title characters in his posthumous novel “Bouvard and Pécuchet.” Flaubert, Ms. Blum says, showed how self-help advice “can’t account for the infinite particularities of real life” and “needlessly meddles with the natural order.” In Wharton’s novel “Twilight Sleep,” meanwhile, the main character is so ensorcelled by the latest self-help guru that she doesn’t notice her husband falling in love with their daughter-in-law.
Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)
What is causing the uptick in independent bookstores?
From veteran publishing consultant, Mike Shatzkin:
My first real job was in a bookstore, on the sales floor of the brand new paperback department in Brentano’s on 5th Avenue in the summer of 1962. I loved that place; I loved that job; and I’ve always had a soft spot for bookstores. But, romanticism aside, the truth is that books are just about the single best consumer product to buy online rather than in a store. For many reasons.
First of all, there’s finding what you want. An online bookseller will be able to offer you 15 million titles or so. A bookstore will offer no more than half-a-percent of the universe (which would be 75,000 titles) and most have far fewer than that. When Amazon began, there were more like half-a-million possible titles and many super bookstores carried 20-30 percent of them (more than 100,000 titles). And even then, before the numbers had shifted so massively, Jeff Bezos saw that books were the best place to start for an internet retailer.
Thus, the odds of finding any particular book in a store have moved from reasonable to minuscule. But on top of that, books are heavy, so if you are going anywhere after the bookstore, carrying a purchase around can be a nuisance. And how often do you “need” that next book right now, rather than it being just as good to get it in a day or two? (If you need it right now, you’d better be really lucky in what you’re looking for and the store you’re going to.)
The point is that book purchases, at least for personal reading (books for gifts and heavily-illustrated books are different, but are a smaller slice of the total sales) have moved from stores to online for compelling reasons, and there is no reason to think they won’t continue to. It is hard to see physical retail bookselling as a growth business.
But, in fact, the number of independent bookstores has been growing for the last decade. This has been a real cause for celebration in many quarters. Publishers are certainly glad to be seeing some additional inventory-stocking outlets springing up.
Why is this? Harvard Business School professor Ryan Raffaelli has formulated an answer based on his “3 Cs”. They are community, curation, and convening. By this he means that bookstores provide a “community” function, their owners perform a “curation” service by winnowing down the book selection, and they offer the opportunity for like-minded people to “convene” around an information quest or a purpose. He alliteratively wraps this all up with “collective identity”. And he discourages us from looking at the profitability of those stores; just the fact that they are there in recently-increasing numbers, he believes, constitutes the important indicator.
Does anybody else see a remarkable congruence between this vision of bookstores and what has always been the function of libraries?
. . . .
I can agree that community, curation, and convening are good touchstones for any bookstore owner to keep in mind to build their business. But I can’t agree that these are the explanation for why bookstores have been growing in number.
My nominee for “most important reason for indie bookstores growing in number” is also a “c”, but one that wasn’t mentioned. It is “closing”. By that I mean the “closing” of the Borders chain in 2011, almost precisely the date when the indie resurgence, tracked by number of active stores, began.
When several hundred Borders stores closed at one time, it moved the reduction of shelf space ahead of the declining demand for retail bookstores. Even in the bookstore market of 2010, reduced as it was from two decades before by Amazon and ebooks, there were a lot of people served by those closed Borders stores who hadn’t yet completely made the switch to buying all their books online. That could have been 30 percent or more of existing retail bookstore shelf space that was closed. (Borders was not 30 percent of the stores, but all of their stores were very big ones.)
So independents have seized an opportunity. Somebody smarter than I am ought to look at where the indies are and where the Borders were and I’d bet they’ll see a correlation. If they could also overlay the closed Barnes & Noble stores and the ones that have had their book inventory drastically reduced, they’d likely find more examples of substitution. Independent bookstores are substituting for the remaining portion of the demand that used to be supplied from the big store chains.
There is likely also one other factor at play — not a new one — behind the recent increase in the number of independents. To be consistent, let’s label this one “compromise”. All these independent bookstores are started and run by entrepreneurs who, most likely, had a career doing something else before they started their bookstore. I’m going to guess, without supporting data, that many of those bookstore owners could be making more money doing something else. But the psychic rewards of owning and running a bookstore, including the attraction of managing the first 3 “c”s , are sufficient to attract capable people to compromise by owning and running one rather than spending their time doing something where they might make more money.
Link to the rest at Mike Shatzkin
Mike certainly has more insider knowledge about all facets of Big Publishing and the traditional bookstore experience than PG does, but regular visitors to TPV will remember that PG has often harped on the overlooked effects arising from the disappearance of Borders, the second-largest bookstore chain in the US when it suddenly collapsed and disappeared into the bankruptcy court.
Literally overnight (it’s not unusual in bankruptcies likely to result in liquidation instead of a plan to continue the business entity’s operations after rearranging a variety of debts and blasting others into tiny pieces for a business to close all its doors at once) a huge amount of traditional publishing’s retail distribution network disappeared. Not only were publishers stuck with unpaid bills for unsold physical books, but large orders for future releases went up in smoke.
Some of Borders’ customers went to Barnes & Noble if there was one nearby, others tried Amazon and liked it and a few went to local independent bookstores (if there were any of those in the vicinity). Of those who went to indies, some liked the experience and continued as patrons but a lot missed the large selection of books on offer at the dead and departed Borders or were less than entranced by a down-market feel of their local independent and ended up going to Amazon or perhaps just stopped buying quite so many books.
The disappearance of Borders certainly helped Barnes & Noble postpone its decline for several years and removed competitive pressure to change how it did business on the meatspace side of things.
PG suspects the demise of Borders and the business benefits that accrued to Barnes & Noble may also have caused BN to feel less pressure to accelerate into ebooks (the first Nook was introduced in late 2009) than it would have felt if its largest competitor in the physical bookstore space had still been around.
At Casa PG, the closest Borders was about five minutes away and the closest Barnes & Noble was and is about 15 minutes away.
For whatever reason, when Borders died, about 95% of the book shopping at Casa PG almost immediately went online and, at the present time, the only occasions for visits to Barnes & Noble are when young offspring (who like books as objects) are in town. PG typically spends his time during such offspring-powered visits looking at non-fiction sections of interest to him and being disappointed at the small number of interesting books which are stocked.
‘American Dirt’ was supposed to be a publishing triumph. What went wrong?
From The Los Angeles Times:
It was poised to be a blockbuster long before copies arrived in bookstores last week: a thrilling contemporary migration story following a mother and her son, desperate to cross Mexico and reach the United States.
Its publisher, Flatiron Books, an imprint of Macmillan, paid a seven-figure advance after outbidding several competitors for the novel. It snagged a coveted selection in Oprah’s Book Club and had been shipped to key celebrity influencers, including Stephen King, Sandra Cisneros and Salma Hayek. A reported first run of 500,000 copies was printed. The film rights were sold.
But by week’s end, the novel “American Dirt” had garnered attention that its boosters likely didn’t expect: angry charges of cultural appropriation, stereotyping, insensitivity, and even racism against author Jeanine Cummins, who herself said in the book’s author’s note, “I was worried that, as a nonmigrant and non-Mexican, I had no business writing a book set almost entirely in Mexico, set entirely among migrants.”
Despite the backing of towering figures in American media, Cummins’ page-turning portrayal of a mother on the run is now at the center of the first bonafide literary controversy of the year, and is forcing a hard reflection on the state of Latinos in a cultural field that remains overwhelmingly white.
In the face of critiques, Cummins is pushing back in public. Her publisher released a statement encouraging discussion around the title, while some authors and booksellers have come to Cummins’ defense. In a culture that is used to debating black and Asian representation and stereotypes, the entrenchment around “American Dirt” is fueling even more complaints over the ease with which popular culture still employs Latino-related stereotypes in contemporary movies, television and fiction.
“American Dirt” is also highlighting factors that observers say have contributed a near shutout of contemporary Mexican and Mexican American voices from the top tier of the publishing publicity machine — the sorts of books that are guaranteed handsome sales by virtue of projection.
What went wrong?
As passages from the novel began emerging last month, Mexican and other Latino voicesbegan raising red flags. The author’s portrayal of Mexican culture was called outlandish, littered with stereotypes, stilted bilingualism and an awkward peppering of italicized Spanish phrases.
. . . .
“American Dirt” has also sparked an emotional discussion about how far the publishing industry still must go to more richly represent the scope and diversity of the Latino experience, said authors, literary agents and other industry figures in interviews last week. It’s a discussion focused on a complicated question: Who gets to frame others’ stories, and how?
. . . .
“American Dirt” has opened a window into the ways a few select books are brought to the public’s attention at a time when many authors have to hire their own publicists or arrange their own book readings and events. The roll-out to some took on the veneer of insult to Central American trauma and pain surrounding the treacherous passage through Mexico.
“They’re handling it like they handle a Marvel comics movie,” said Roberto Lovato, a Salvadoran American writer in San Francisco, who is finalizing an upcoming memoir. “But this industry will make you dance the minstrel salsa dance or the minstrel cumbia dance,” he added, in reference to the tenor of Latino-themed titles that are deemed palatable to wide audiences.
Indeed, the operation behind “American Dirt” made what many describe as cringe-worthy errors even before the book hit stores.
. . . .
More criticism followed among Latino writers, from the fringes to the center of the literary power establishment. Mexican author Valeria Luiselli, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient, called the book the “worst possible” pick for Oprah’s nod. Francisco Goldman, the celebrated Guatemalan American novelist and journalist who divides his time between New York and Mexico City, said in an interview he was “shocked” by the “tone-deaf” publicity roll-out. “And these are supposedly sophisticated people.”
. . . .
Kate Horan, the director of the McAllen Public Library in Texas, posted portions of a letter she sent to the American Library Assn. and Oprah’s Book Club, declining to participate in a recorded “unboxing” event meant to push “American Dirt.” Horan said she felt compelled to turn down the offer from Oprah’s Book Club after seeing the reactions among Latinx writers she and her staff admire
. . . .
“When we took the book out, our hearts dropped,” Horan said in a telephone interview from Philadelphia, where the American Library Assn. is holding its mid-winter conference. “There followed many conversations with people in my community, and of course reading the book, I can only compare it to a telenovela. It’s so hyper stereotyped, that it’s harmful.”
. . . .
By week’s end, as the U.S. commercial publishing industry was reeling from the expanding maelstrom over what its critics called a cartoonish melodrama about contemporary Mexico, Cummins still hit the road on a book tour. At an industry conference last week in Baltimore, she defended her right to write the novel from the perspective of the Mexican woman at the heart of her book.
Her character Lydia, 32, is middle-class, college-educated wife and mother who owns a bookshop in the resort city of Acapulco and survives a bloody massacre at a family quinceañera. With her journalist husband and other family members killed, the bookish protagonist and her 8-year-old son make a desperate run for the U.S. border, partly on the freight train La Bestia. Critics have mocked the narrative ploy as implausible for anyone of Lydia’s class stature, who can usually buy airline or bus tickets.
In Baltimore, Cummins said the migrants she met during her research for the novel “made me recognize my own cowardice” as she grappled with early failed drafts and doubts about authenticity. “When people are really putting their lives on the line, to be afraid of writing a book felt like cowardice,” she said, according to a report for the trade site Publishers Lunch.
The author, who did not respond to a request for comment for this article, identified as white as recently as 2016. On Wednesday, Cummins, whose grandmother was from Puerto Rico, said she was “a Latinx woman” while addressing the negative reactions to the book among Mexican, Central American and Chicano readers who have vigorously questioned her authorial integrity. “Not everyone needs to love my book,” she said.
On Friday, Cummins turned up her defense during an interview with NPR: “I am a white person. … I am a person who has a very privileged life. I am also Puerto Rican. … That fact has been attacked and sidelined by people who, frankly, are attempting to police my identity.”
But her critics weren’t buying it.
Gurba and others accused Cummins of profiting off Latina identity and transforming her own ethnicity over time to suit professional interests. “She became a person of color for the sake of financial convenience,” Gurba told The Times. “I call that POC, a person of convenience.”
Another set of earlier photos of Cummins with barbed-wire decorated fingernails brought even more criticism. “Every day I see something new that pertains to this, that it seems like it can’t get worse, and it gets worse,” said YA author Rivera.
Cummins’ somewhat apologetic author’s note also fanned the flames. In it, she says she wished someone “slightly browner” than her had written her book. She also argued that her effort seeks to counter depictions of immigrants as a “faceless brown mass.” Goldman, reached in New York, called the phrase an admission to the book’s “pornographic feedback of violence.”
“It’s just unbelievable,” he said Thursday. “How mediocre, third-rate and sleazy it is for a fiction writer to appropriate violence and suffering that way.”
In her note, he added, Cummins also writes, “we seldom think of [migrants] as human beings.”
. . . .
The controversy doesn’t look to go away soon. On Saturday, a group of writers including Lovato, Gurba and others said they sent a letter to Macmillan promising more “action” if the publishing house doesn’t respond more directly to their critiques. Industry players are abuzz with the topic, book agents said, as a string of “American Dirt”-inspired Twitter parodies by brown writers took flight, mocking the publishing industry’s devotion to tired Latino tropes involving gangs and grandmothers.
Eddie Schneider, vice president of JABerwocky Literary Agency, and who represents author Rivera, said Flatiron Books made a string of mistakes in rolling out “American Dirt” and isn’t correcting them. On Thursday, the publishing house defended the title in a statement to The Times.
“I’m baffled I haven’t seen any apology yet,” Schneider said. “Maybe not for the book, but certainly it seems like an apology is in order for the insensitivity of the roll-out.”
Link to the rest at The Los Angeles Times and thanks to Karen and Elaine for the tip.
PG says that indie authors must admit that, for executing a really big book release, nobody can match the world-class talent and savvy that a major New York publisher brings to the task.
Grammarly
PG took Mrs. PG out for lunch today. She’s working on edits of her next book and required a break.
Over lunch, we talked about Grammarly. Mrs. PG has used Grammarly for several of her books and finds the program very helpful with her edits. In the past, Grammarly has caught problems that her human editors have missed.
However, as anyone who has used Grammarly understands, it tends to be over-inclusive when flagging errors, highlighting grammar and spelling that is not erroneous.
The reason for Grammarly’s bias toward over-inclusion is obvious. The programmers assumed that users would prefer that Grammarly catch potential errors that weren’t necessarily mistaken rather than to have Grammarly miss an error to the detriment of an author.
However, when working through a book-length manuscript, Mrs. PG finds some of Grammarly’s most common overinclusions can become a bit annoying.
In PG’s day-to-day use, he hasn’t had any complaints about Grammarly, so he’s never looked under the hood to locate levers and configuration options beyond what he did when he installed the program.
So, PG invites one and all to share their Grammarly likes, dislikes, tweaks and workarounds. Perhaps PG can make some changes so the program writes posts for TPV all by itself.
Is the program something you use all the time? If you don’t use it all the time, for what sorts of writing is it helpful and for what sorts of writing do you find it unnecessary or more trouble than it’s worth?
Have you tweaked or modified the program or its settings in ways you’ve found helpful? Do you ever use Grammarly in a manner that you don’t think the designers/engineers of the program anticipated? If so, how have you used it and why?
Is there an alternate to Grammarly that you like better? If so, what is it and why?
Any and all Grammarly-related comments will be appreciated.
Are You Ready For The Next eBook Boom?
From The Digital Reader:
The legacy book publishing industry is fond of telling itself comforting myths.
For example, one myth that just crossed my desk was the idea that younger readers preferred print books over ebooks. This is comforting to the legacy industry because it reassures them that their bad business decisions (high ebook prices, to be exact) will not continue to haunt them.
Alas, like many myths, there is little to back it up.
I was reading that Vox retrospective on the ebook revolution (the one that Teleread commented on, and Good e-Reader plagiarized) when I came to this quote from Andrew Albanese of Publishers Weekly.
And in part, Albanese tells Vox in a phone interview, that’s because the digital natives of Gen Z and the millennial generation have very little interest in buying ebooks. “They’re glued to their phones, they love social media, but when it comes to reading a book, they want John Green in print,” he says. The people who are actually buying ebooks? Mostly boomers. “Older readers are glued to their e-readers,” says Albanese. “They don’t have to go to the bookstore. They can make the font bigger. It’s convenient.”
Yeah, that claim is not true at all.
. . . .
Younger age cohorts are not only more likely to have read an ebook, they are also buying more ebooks – and I have the data to back that up.
For starters, the most recent reading survey from Pew Research Center showed that the 18-29 age cohort, which includes the tail end of the millennial generation, was the most likely to have read an ebook in the past 12 months.
. . . .
eBooks.com has revealed that their best customers are still in college. and that “62% of ebook purchases are made by people aged between 18 and 45”.
Link to the rest at The Digital Reader and thanks to Nate for pointing it out to me
Somehow, PG missed the Vox article that Nate mentions. Or perhaps he dismissed it like he does with almost anything Vox publishes. There’s a sense of born yesterday that often makes him think that nobody needs to know anything in order to write for Vox.
At any rate, assuming that Vox got the quote correctly from the Publishers Weekly writer, it makes absolutely no sense at all:
And in part, Albanese tells Vox in a phone interview, that’s because the digital natives of Gen Z and the millennial generation have very little interest in buying ebooks. “They’re glued to their phones, they love social media, but when it comes to reading a book, they want John Green in print,” he says. The people who are actually buying ebooks? Mostly boomers. “Older readers are glued to their e-readers,” says Albanese. “They don’t have to go to the bookstore. They can make the font bigger. It’s convenient.”
Let’s unpack this one component at a time:
- Gen Z and the Millenials are packed with digital natives.
- The natives are glued to their phones 24/7 to check on Instagram, TikTok, text messages from friends, etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc., etc.
- The natives are typing on their phones 24/7 to create Instagram, TikTok, text messages, etc., etc., etc. for their friends.
- These sorts of behaviors occur everywhere, including at school, watching TV, at the movies (despite announcements telling them not to use their phones – the ushers in the theater never do anything about it because they’re texting all the time, too), on the street, at fast food restaurants, in the bathroom, at the prom, etc., etc.
- The worst thing someone can do to a digital native is to take away their smartphone, limit their hours or otherwise interfere with 24/7.
However, when digital natives desire to read something longer than a text message, they want a physical book, a lump of dead wood that won’t fit into any pocket, something that is unlike anything else they encounter in their 24/7 lives (including the ebooks they use for their classes at school)
This is breaking news, a previously undiscovered trend for a Vox writer because s/he hasn’t touched a physical book in years. “People will be so excited to discover that books on paper are a new thing.”
And, of course, it’s a well-known fact that Gen Z has lots of extra cash sitting around with which to purchase hard-copy books (instead of new apps for their phones).
Plus, Barnes & Noble must be where Gen Z trend-setters have decided to congregate now. You’ll probably have trouble getting in without a reservation.
What’s in one’s own image (right)?
From The Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice:
In Western culture, one of the earliest myths dealing with what would subsequently become a literary topos is the one concerning Narcissus. Narcissus was known for both his great beauty and the disdain he showed to those who loved him. In the version of the myth as told by Ovid, Narcissus’s behaviour (particularly towards Echo) prompted Nemesis, the goddess of revenge, to punish him by luring him to a pool. There, Narcissus saw his own image reflected in the water and fell in love with it, without realizing that it was just his own reflection. Unable to fulfil his love, Narcissus eventually melted away from the fire of passion burning inside him.
If we now move away from the realm of myth to that of law, a similar feeling—of attraction and yet unfulfillment—seems to be present when we review the type of legal protection available to one’s own image. In particular, it seems that this feeling is experienced where no self-standing image rights protection is available. In countries of this kind, in fact, different tools can be employed to repress unauthorized third-party uses of one’s own likeness, image, distinctive features, etc. Yet, none of them – even when combined together – seems to allow achieving the same results (and with the same apparent simplicity) that, instead, image rights as (predominantly) an expression of one’s own personality and identity provide.
The contributions that we host in this first special image rights issue move from, indeed, the attractiveness of the idea that the law should protect against the misappropriation and misuse of one’s own image. Yet, they also share a sense of dissatisfaction with the status quo.
. . . .
Any change, however, would need to be made, first, in a context in which several conflicting rights and interests are at issue, including third-party artistic and commercial freedom of expression (so that any intervention would need to be ‘surgical’ in both scope and objective). Second, as the articles on, e.g. deepfakes and revenge porn show, any such change would require considerations of different areas of the law and doctrines, as well as fast-paced technological developments. In a field, that of image rights, which puzzlingly remains substantially unharmonized at the international and EU levels, the challenges that, in particular, the latter pose show the need for effective enforcement tools and responses that, due to the very nature of such challenges, will also likely need to be increasingly transnational.Our contributions allow us to travel from the United Kingdom to California, to consider EU, US and Russian laws, to appreciate the interplay between technological, public policy and legal issues, to review image rights in relation to street photography, sexual images and deepfakes.
. . . .
[Analysis of a decision by an Italian court]
The Court of First Instance of Turin held that Audrey Hepburn’s image rights had been violated due to the unauthorized use and exploitation of her likeness for commercial purposes.
. . . .
The judgment considers the two fundamental provisions concerning image rights: Article 10 of the Civil Code and Article 96 of Law No 633/1941 (the Italian Copyright Act). The former protects image rights by solely describing the behaviour prohibited by law, yet without positively defining the concept of image or image right. In fact, the provision laconically states that ‘if the image of a person or his/her parents, spouse or children has been exhibited or published outside of the cases in which said exhibit or publication is allowed by law or [it has been exhibited or published] with prejudice to the decorum or reputation of the person himself or of the aforementioned parties, at the request of the interested party the judicial authority may order that the abuse is ceased, save for compensation for damages’(author’s own translation).
. . . .
It follows that the consent of the right holder is essential for the use of one’s own image or likeness, unless one of the exceptions provided by Article 97 applies. Notably, consent is not required ‘when the reproduction of the image [of a person] is justified by the notoriety or the public office covered by said person, by necessity of law and order, by scientific, educational or cultural purposes, or when the reproduction is connected to facts, events, and ceremonies of public interest or held in public. However, the portrait cannot be exhibited or put on the market if its exhibition or marketing causes prejudice to the honour, reputation or the decorum of the person portrayed’
. . . .
Luca Dotti and Sean Ferrer Hepburn are the sons of famous Hollywood actress Audrey Hepburn. They brought proceedings . . . against Italian corporation 2223 S.A.S. di MB Management & Entertainment S.R.L. (the Defendant), for the unauthorized use of their mother’s likeness.
The Defendant had produced and commercialized nine types of t-shirts representing just as many images portraying the likeness of Ms Hepburn. More specifically, the t-shirts carried the likeness of a woman wearing a sumptuous black dress, a diamond necklace and a tiara in her hair, together with big dark sunglasses and a cigarette with a mouthpiece. All these elements stood to recall, to the general viewer, the character of the young and elegant Holly Golightly in ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’, played by Hepburn. Other images represented the likeness of the actress under a more ‘modern’ angle, by showing her covered in tattoos, or chewing a big bubble gum, or doing a vulgar gesture with her middle finger.
This unrealistic and inelegant interpretation of their mother’s likeness was considered by the Claimants as detrimental to her reputation and honour. Therefore, they sought a declaration of infringement of her image rights as well as compensation of damages, both for profit loss and the weakening of the commercial value of Hepburn’s image, as well as for the moral prejudice to her reputation.
In response, the Defendant argued that the images at hand did not consist of a mechanical representation of the likeness of the actress but, rather, a new, different, original work, which could not in itself be considered a violation. The intent was not that of devaluing the likeness of the actress or her reputation, but rather revisiting the female image through an empowering representation. Furthermore, it claimed to have lawfully used the image since the interested person was a well-known public figure so that the use would fall under the exceptions in Article 97 of the Italian Copyright Act.
. . . .
The Turin court reaffirmed the approach of earlier Italian case law, also recalling that the public interest defence, which is to be applied strictly . . . ‘does not apply where images taken from a film are published and the publication takes place in a context other than that of the cinematographic work and its marketing’.
. . . .
Having ruled out the applicability of Article 97(1), the court considered Article 97(2) applicable instead. This provision states that, even where lack of consent could be disregarded due to exceptional circumstances, the use of one’s own image is still prohibited when the use is detrimental to the honour, reputation or dignity of the person portrayed . . . . Since the images on the t-shirts portrayed the likeness of Ms Hepburn with disregard to her real appearance and her elegance, the court found that the use at hand caused a prejudice to her reputation and dignity.
Link to the rest at The Journal of Intellectual Property Law & Practice (multiple citations to statutes, cases, etc., omitted for the benefit of non-legal readers)
PG suggests that, as a general proposition, indie authors should avoid using the images of famous people (even if deceased) on book covers, promotions, etc., unless they have been dead for a long time – Ms. Hepburn died on January 20, 1993.
If an indie author is publishing a book across a variety of different national borders via Amazon, even if the use of an image might pass muster under US law, the laws of other nations might give rise to claims for damages.
PG further suggests that if someone plans to sue an author for misusing an image for a self-published book, it is quite likely that this person/entity would also sue Amazon in the same proceeding.
Amazon’s involvement would trigger Paragraph 5.8 of KDP’s Terms and Conditions which reads as follows (Highlights are PG’s. He has also separated out some of the sub-parts of the original legalese into subparagraphs for ease of reading):
5.8 Representations, Warranties and Indemnities. You represent and warrant that:
(a) you have the full right, power and authority to enter into and fully perform this Agreement and will comply with the terms of this Agreement;
(b) prior to you or your designee’s delivery of any content, you will have obtained all rights that are necessary for the exercise the rights granted under this Agreement;
(c) neither the exercise of the rights authorized under this Agreement nor any materials embodied in the content nor its sale or distribution as authorized in this Agreement will violate or infringe upon the intellectual property, proprietary or other rights of any person or entity, including, without limitation, contractual rights, copyrights, trademarks, common law rights, rights of publicity, or privacy, or moral rights, or contain defamatory material or violate any laws or regulations of any jurisdiction;
(d) you will ensure that all Books delivered under the Program comply with the technical delivery specifications provided by us; (e) you will be solely responsible for accounting and paying any co-owners or co-administrators of any Book or portion thereof any royalties with respect to the uses of the content and their respective shares, if any, of any monies payable under this Agreement; and (f) you will not attempt to exploit the KDP service or any other Amazon program or service.
To the fullest extent permitted by applicable law, you will indemnify, defend and hold Amazon, its officers, directors, employees, affiliates, subcontractors and assigns harmless from and against any loss, claim, liability, damage, action or cause of action (including reasonable attorneys’ fees) that arises from any breach of your representations, warranties or obligations set forth in this Agreement. We will be entitled, at our expense, to participate in the defense and settlement of the claim or action with counsel of our own choosing.
PG notes that that, in the event that someone felt an author had violated her/his image or publicity rights and was considering a lawsuit, author Jane Jones of Tincup, Montana, might not make a particularly attractive defendant from whom to collect a large amount of money.
However, Ms. Jones and Amazon combined would have the means to pay a very large judgment if the complaining party was successful in a lawsuit pursued jointly against both of them.