I just discovered someone has scanned and uploaded my entire film book,( published 2002) onto the internet. It's the first heading to appear if you google my name and the booktitle. Look no further and put away your wallet, it's free. Has anybody any idea what I should do and what the chances are of it being taken off?

Sheila

It says the whole book is not uploaded, and it goes up to page 25, then the back cover. It also says "Pages displayed by permission of Wallflower Press. Copyright."
The court case dragged on a long time but I think Google it was settled, so you should chase up your publisher.
http://books.google.com/googlebooks/agreement/


- NaomiM

Thanks Naomi. I looked again and saw the small print under the front cover to say it was an extract but it seems only pp47-77 are missing. It's only 78 pp long, so that's a lot.

Wallflower Press went out of business in July and I signed a novation agreement to be taken over by Columbia Univerity Press with whom WP already had a marketing agreement. I knew about but not about the extract on the Internet.

There's more demand for courses on Chinese film in the US. I was happy for CUP to take over because they have much more clout. But it's a challenge to contact them. I've sent one email that bounced back.

I didn't know about any court case. Was it a general one?

Sheila

The court case was a major one in the States, because Google had basically been uploading all and sundry - books both in and out of copyright - on Googlebooks without permission. It was settled with google making an offer in exchange for keeping the extracts online, but I think it's left up to the publishers to put in a claim for the money, and probably unltimately down to the authors to push their publishers to make that claim.

Oh, that's news to me, although I may have read about it in The Author and not made the connection. I don't know how long it's been up there and the financial implication as far as I'm concerned is small. There's a service you can set up that tells you every time a certain book is mentioned - in my case I could see when it was on reading lists. However, I let it lapse because it was a nuisance after a while, so I missd the google site one.

Academic books don't pay, and there's an assumption in any case that they'll enhance the author's career so there's an indirect financial benefit. In my case, the book was published a while ago so the royalties aren't relevant, but the fees I get from library lending rights just about covered membership of the Society of Authors. Arguably students might download free copy instead of borrowing, but that may only be the case where library stocks were unavailable. Anyway, I'll wait to see what the SoA says about making a claim.

Thanks for this info.

Sheila