Origami Unicorn

The Halloween Tree

An animated version of Ray Bradbury's classic, with the author doing the narration and Leonard Nimoy as Moundshroud:

Publishing Profits?

Simon & Schuster had a strong third-quarter showing, although all major accounts have reported that in-store "traffic is down, and what traffics is in there seems to by buying the tried and true.... They're not buying the second book," according to CEO Carolyn Reidy.

"[T]he brands and name authors and that are landing are selling," says Reidy. She adds, "backlist is where we are seeing the dropoff and that is worrisome, obviously, because it is a very profitable part of our list." Also, "we remain optimistic that books will remain recession-proof, as everyone wants to believe, yet we are very much preparing ourselves for having to face an extremely difficult market."

More than halfway to their announced goal at BEA of making another 5,000 titles available for sale as ebooks, there was "a little bit of a delay because we're having to work through the terms" for electronic rights they did not already control. S&S proposes royalties of 15 percent of the catalog retail price of the e-book, and Reidy says "we're in the midst of some discussions" on those rates. Parent company CBS will be discounting book value, amid a slumping market for TV and radio stations.

(See previous article for news about Random House and e-book royalties.)

Canada's Harlequin "had a solid quarter and remains on course for a good year of growth," even as the economy weakens, although "we remain concerned that the US economy could have a negative impact on Harlequin's results, but to date there is no evidence of this." The weaker Canadian dollar makes US sales more valuable, although accounting also has the firm losing money in foreign exchange.

Random House Seeks to Adjust E-Book Royalties

Now that e-publishing is showing signs of becoming very profitable, Random House is seeking to adjust existing contracts and change the rates for future contracts. Richard Curtis comments on a letter circulating among literary agents and calculates what it means. The change is planned to take effect December 1, 2008 and apparently will result in the halving of an author's income from Random House e-books.

A Pinky and the Brain Halloween

"Children of Earth, I hope you are having a pleasant Halloween..."

The Old Mill

Disney regularly includes The Old Mill in its Halloween specials, although it is not especially horrific. Well, okay, somewhat less so than Bambi: no dead mother, no forest fire. It was a test film for the multiplane camera and naturalistic animation, and preceded the feature-length Snow White.

Danse Macabre

Audio only for this one, but be sure to click through to the page, and open "more info."

Doubleday Thins the Ranks

The Doubleday Publishing Group has eliminated of 16 positions. Spokesman David Drake says that the "jobs were cut in our editorial, marketing, publicity, art and ad promo departments."

He added, "These job cuts followed a close review of all aspects of our publishing operations by the management of our publishing group, and, as painful as it is for everyone here to lose a number of well-respected colleagues, we believe the decision was necessary and in the interest of our long-term publishing prospects at a time when we, like others in our industry and beyond, face a particularly challenging economic environment." He acknowledges, "this has not been a great year for us. It has not been a great year for many people."

Drake stated that "[we] do not have any plans to scale back in the number of titles we publish or how aggressively we publish them." This sort of makes one wonder what those sixteen people were doing, but no doubt DPG authors will be finding out.

Google Gets Green Light

Google reached out-of-court-settlements with the Authors Guild and the AAP. Google’s Library Search program made scans of books from libraries, including those in copyright. The settlement includes a $125 million payment by Google and the establishment of a new licensing system.

“It’s hard work writing a book, and even harder work getting paid for it,” said Roy Blount Jr., President of the Authors Guild. “As a reader and researcher, I’ll be delighted to stop by my local library to browse the stacks of some of the world’s great libraries. As an author, well, we appreciate payment when people use our work. This deal makes good sense.” There is a statement on the Authors Guild site.

“This historic settlement is a win for everyone,” said Richard Sarnoff, Chairman of the Association of American Publishers. “From our perspective, the agreement creates an innovative framework for the use of copyrighted material in a rapidly digitizing world, serves readers by enabling broader access to a huge trove of hard-to-find books, and benefits the publishing community by establishing an attractive commercial model that offers both control and choice to the rightsholder.” The AAP's statement is linked to here, along with other relevant material.

“Google's mission is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. Today, together with the authors, publishers, and libraries, we have been able to make a great leap in this endeavor,” said Sergey Brin, co-founder & president of technology at Google. “While this agreement is a real win-win for all of us, the real victors are all the readers. The tremendous wealth of knowledge that lies within the books of the world will now be at their fingertips.” Google's page for rights holders will here, but is just a placeholder as of 10/28/08.

Night of the Living Dead

The classic George A. Romero film, which slipped into the public domain because when its title was finalized copyright was not posted in the credits. This started a wave of low-budget but profitable horror films in a style that approximated documentary footage. Many of the people in the film went on to star in other horror films over the years and there's a fairly extensive list on the Wikipedia site for the film.

Frankenstein

It was a book first, of course, the most successful effort of a bet made to past the time with ghost stories, but it is the movie versions most people know best, among them this:

But before that version, there was this:

and

Which not only tell the story in a different way but also give some idea of the stage conventions of the time. Which are quite different than those of this more modern version of the tale: