Why isn't the WTO cracking down on the US for Google piracy?

WASHINGTON — Copyright piracy in the United States remains at "unacceptably high levels," causing "serious harm" to creators around the world, the top US trade official failed to say today, in a report to the US Congress that has not been made. In an expanded effort to stop this harm, the Justice Department was granted, just before Christmas, a cheer package of $30 million from Congress to fight piracy.

The US Trade Representative didn't say, in the nonexistent report on US compliance with its World Trade Organization obligations, that Washington is taking no steps to meet its commitments as part of the WTO. His department didn't report that the United States is protecting and using even the State Department to advocate for a major pirate, as that pirate surpasses all others in infringing intellectual property rights laws in the US homeland and abroad, and fraudulently claiming permission granted for its thefts.
— Plagiarized and mauled version of US says copyright piracy in China still 'unacceptably high' By P. Parameswaran (AFP) – Dec 22, 2009

See the US State Department's site: Intellectual Property Violations Expanding Globally, U.S. Says: 12 nations lacking adequate copyright, patent protections

Opt in? Opt out?
The wholesale theft by Google has caused much consternation, as authors waste time having to nut out the implications of opting in and out of a settlement that shouldn't have to be contemplated.

Ursula Le Guin was entirely right when she wrote in her online petition,

"The free and open dissemination of information and of literature, as it exists in our public libraries, can and should exist in the electronic media. All authors hope for that. But we cannot have free and open dissemination of information and literature unless the use of written material continues to be controlled by those who write it or own legitimate right in it," her petition continued. "We urge our government and our courts to allow no corporation to circumvent copyright law or dictate the terms of that control."

Her petition and the issues around it are well covered in this article in the Guardian, "Ursula Le Guin leads revolt against Google digital book settlement: As opt-out deadline approaches, writer launches petition asking for US to be exempt from controversial agreement

Ironically, if US authors are exempted from the agreement, this would mean that the US becomes an even more transparently egregious hypocrite about trade — a rogue state that aids (subsidizing in the multi-billion $s) and abets (in pay-by-the-word lawyereze), this pirate that is changing the meaning of piracy, if the WTO doesn't step in or the US government doesn't wake up.

Google theft is international
Google is ripping off Australians, but like many other countries, Australia isn't going to take the US to the WTO. Our government is too craven to do anything about any major trading partner, even when it's as brazen and disgusting as Japan's illegal whaling in the name of research.

Google "permission" takes permission to a new height of theft as business
If you, too have the experience of finding your books in Google Books, and see Google's statement explaining its "Limited Preview":

Pages displayed by permission of [linked publisher]. Copyright [linked to page in book]

you might also compare this permission to having money in the bank, and finding someone has taken it "by permission of [linked bank]". It's the same thing. The publisher doesn't hold the copyright. The author does.

Limited Preview also means something else to Google than to anyone else—in the case of a novel, the only page that I could find that wasn't available was the last page. In the case of a collection, I didn't come across any missing pages. I have since asked the publisher to get Google to remove these fake Limiteds that I never gave permission for, nor was any asked. By all means, if you would like to read my books, I am happy for them to be available online, making a decision to do so as the author, as all authors should have the ability to control. I'm happy to post the entire pdf of both on my site.

Note to future anthologists: just steal it!
In the case of anthologies, what Google has just done makes the permission to reprint laughable. In the case of two I've just looked at, most stories are printed in full. What Google is doing makes a mockery of the problems of, say, Alasdair Gray in compiling The Book of Prefaces. This is a masterpiece of a life's work not to mention a wellspring of fun (the glosses by Gray and others are a hoot—opinionated and intelligent) that I personally think belongs in every library, but Gray had to leave many prefaces out because he couldn't obtain permission. Despite the publicity about the copying of old books, Google knows its power lies in the modern world—fiction and non-fiction alike, all covered by copyright (will this word and concept become archaic as the wax tablet?) now.

What bothers me the most about this Google piracy is that it is part of a growing mentality in successful businesses (even ones that aren't baled out openly by government) that goes: honesty in business and human relationships is worthless, if you're big enough. Deceit and government connections are the way to prosper.

The use of permissions that the company knows are false is as dishonest as Enron's balance sheet. Google's spying is downright creepy, yet it looks like it will get away with it as smoothly as it has, its warrentless wiretapping and its pragmatically unturnoffable "personalized results", which like the opt-in, opt-out dilemma for authors, is an illegal activity that at least one government not only doesn't prosecute, but loves, undermining all that fine cant of the very government that prides itself on the rule of law—and hurting international standards everywhere.

In the absence of the US government being hauled before the WTO for protecting this pirate, I look forward to Google's making available free for the world's benefit: movies and music and prescription drugs.

Pre-order Polyphony 7, and keep a unique series alive

Wheatland Press is a small press of the highest quality—and by that, I don't mean ponderous sludge, but fiction that excites, intrigues, surprises.

And yikes. I haven't been paying attention. Their Polyphony anthology series is in danger of going under, and that would make it even harder for readers who are looking for something different.

In this case, There's only a short time left means something, as the financial crisis has bit hard. There really only is a short time left, just to the end of this month, as Wheatland Press explains here.

See the Table of Contents and Pre-order Polyphony 7 (edited by two terrific editors, Deborah Layne and Forrest Aguirre) here.

Charcoal and fungi

Many species of Australia's pyrophilic plants, particularly the eucalypts, wear their histories as suits that look like they made of charcoal. And so they are. You can draw with the stuff, and it certainly draws on you, if you brush past. When rain finally falls, as it has lately here, charred bark makes a perfect backdrop for explosions of fungi.

Three sites I recommend:

• The Australian National Botanic Gardens' Australian Fungi - This name is too limiting. Anyone with a tinch of interest in fungi, spores, gills, slime and strange unseen filaments will find Heino Lapp and Murray Fagg's explanations informative, but also entertaining.
• Jamie Derkenne's Fungi of South Eastern Australia
• "Gaye from the Hunter's"Australian Fungi - a Blog

Valentine man

He has watched over me for so many years that I forgot to notice his particular charms, some of which he collects as unfashionableness festoons him.

• He's always had just one arm.
• He never tells me his mood, what music he is listening to, what he is doing now.
• He doesn't have a novel in him. I don't mind. Perhaps he thinks he is lucky that I don't pester him about it, unlike people do to Kuzhali Manickavel who says, "Some of us keep getting molested because we aren't writing a novel or aren't married. I think this is very notnice. I mean, I don't go around molesting people because they ARE married or ARE doing the novel thing."

She's packaged up some bonbon responses to these rude people in "Why Aren't You Writing a Novel? Why Aren't You Married? Why Why Why?

Since her posts can be addictive, they are so perceptive but funny (today's Conversations –The Man with the Pipe is typical), a person could miss that Manickavel can also cause the reader to look funny. She can be so dry, she's astringent as an unripe quince. Perhaps the only well-travelled people who don't wince as they see themselves in How to Wear an Indian Village are too delicate to see themselves at all.

Blaft (that splendid confectioner of bonbons made of pulp and paper) has published Manickavel's collection,

Insects Are Just Like You and Me Except Some of Them Have Wings

Valentine man doesn't even have a collection in him (to my knowledge) but I haven't ever bugged him about it. I imagine that he loves me, which is good enough — and how couldn't he be irresistible? He's so lovably wordless and full of mystery.

Speaking of wordlessness and men with pipes, about a year after my father died, when I was in university, I grew an irresistible desire to privately smoke a pipe like his, with his brand of tobacco even though the smell of regular tobacco always makes me feel like I've just eaten a tub of engine grease. Anyway, I bought a pipe that was like his (plain boffin style) and the same tobacco that has that fruity wet leather tempering that mediocre pipe tobaccos do. I lit up and it wasn't a horrible disappointment, nor did I hear him laughing. It was the kind of disappointment you have when you visit someplace again that only has room for one unforgettable experience. I haven't tried the cigars. But that was all before Valentine man, the flame who abhors lights.

Predators and mouthfuls

The parrots around here have been very flighty lately, for the raptors have been eating well. A wedge-tailed eagle prefers a king parrot to a lorikeet tidbit, but both will do. Unlike the eagles that fly back into the treetops, a little Nankeen kestrel uses the top of a power pole as its perch, and makes repeated swoops down to the open paddock, for grasshoppers that are flourishing now after some rain, and the day-flying dung beetles. At night, the owls enjoy a flush of giant hawk moths.

Although only sometimes we hear a short garbled cry or longer scream, we often find the remains of prey and can only imagine diner, prey, and dinner when we come upon the plucked out clumps of feathers, an unmeaty wing with the feathers all intact, cicada and moth wings. Our balcony has been chosen as a sanctuary by a number of traumatised parrots and on three occasions, mauled racing pigeons who somehow slipped a raptor's grip. The parrots come and then flee back to the more bushy trees, and then fly back here, undecided as to the safest place, but the racing pigeons hunker in the eaves.

Different prey
These leaves didn't get away from other predators who also have quite a discriminating taste.

The fish that didn't get away
All this is leading to a different mouthful, Queensland Museum's latest fascinating Question of the Month: "One jumped up, one pumped up, both dumped up"

Library discards can be treasured

Books are culled from libraries all the time. One Australian university library chooses and destroys books "by stealth", according to a librarian friend who works there. The management doesn't want to deal with librarians' knowledge, grief and rage.

Some libraries sell their discards to the trade, and that's how just last week my newest addition to the family arrived: Everyman's Library edition of Raymond Chandler's Collected Stories (a discard from the Houston Public Library, purchased by them in 2002, but still in perfect condition).

6 for $2
The four-book picture above is the latest haul from our local library. These wonderful classics have lived downstairs in stacks for years, so would only have been checked out if found on the computer. At the library, the discard table seems to waft some irresistible perfume. Readers leave it laden with books that for the first time in years, soon feel fresh air on their pages, and dropped into their cleavages, fresh crumbs.

The campaign against men selling women's underwear

The relativity of embarrassment displays all its flesh when one compares the kind of situations (usually involved with buying and fitting) in "Embarrassing Bra Stories" — "You’ll have to search pretty hard to find a woman who doesn’t have one or two embarrassing bra stories to tell."— with what women have to put up with in Saudi Arabia.

In a campaign now a year old and entering its second phase, women in KSA are trying to get a law that's finally on the books, actually implemented.

"We are supposedly the most conservative nation in the world and yet women here divulge their bra and undie sizes and colors to strange men on a regular basis. The contradiction is in the fact that we are supposedly the most conservative nation in the world and yet women here divulge their bra and undie sizes and colors to strange men on a regular basis. I have been to many countries, European, Arab…etc and I have yet to come across a lingerie shop or even section of a department store where a man is employed to help customers. Why is this? Because common decency and personal comfort dictate that the majority of women would much rather discuss and buy their underwear from another woman. This very simple fact somehow flew over our muttawas’ heads or they just felt that the oppression of women is more important than preserving a woman’s modesty. The minister of Labour, Dr. Al Qusaibi, attempted to tackle this issue by issuing a new law that only women were to be employed at lingerie shops. This was supposed to be effective in 2006. However powerful people behind the scenes have been able to delay its implementation. Why would they do that? Well it’s due to a multiple number of reasons.

Read all about them, and the campaign, on one of the best blogs on the web, Eman Al Nafjan's Saudiwoman's Weblog.

Amazon and the pipeline

The Amazon/MacMillan stoush about e-books in which Amazon took the Russian solution and cut off supply has more twists than a plate of fusilli bucati, yet it's interesting how one-sided a mainstream news story can be ~ and when it's from a wire service, that's even curiouser. Jay Lake just responded to Amazon reshelves Macmillan titles but not e-books ("Reporting by Lisa Shumaker; Editing by Eric Walsh"), a piece from Reuters that reads like an Amazon press release. Lake pointed out that "The writerly blogosphere has done a masterful job of covering this, you could easily find dozens of sources to discuss this, myself included."

There are by now many more posts, but I particularly recommend
Jay Lake's and John Scalzi's.

There are so many aspects to the situation, not the least of which are

• Amazon trying to command the market of actual reading platforms (their very uncheap Kindle)
  
• and to make us think that our lack of ownership of a book that we buy is the normalcy to which we should become accustomed.

Compare Amazon's intrusive and dictatorial attitude to e-reading with Baen's. Amazon comes off like Mad King George (an earlier mad George) while Baen is Thomas Payne. When you buy a book to read electronically from Baen, their attitude is that you own it. Unlike Amazon, they will not pull a book you already purchased off your shelf. Not only that, but Baen not only lets you, but expects you to download your purchased book in multiple formats to be read on multiple platforms, online and offline. If the world were ruled by Amazon, and it's getting to be if we keep de factoing it into our links and thought patterns, Baen is a revolutionary, though it's really only doing what should be supplier—>demand business.

Amazon's e-book "sales" on Kindle twist and break the concept of ownership, and get away with it because they are superficially cheap(er). This is like the superficial generosity of Google's destruction of copyright, while they, not we, control what they've copied (about which Ursula Le Guin has been so eloquent).

Both can cut off the supply whenever they wish.

It's always good to use and build other pipelines.

One thing that all us writers and readers can do when we talk about books is to link to a source of supply other than Amazon. I like to point to the publisher if the publisher has a good purchasing set-up on the site. In the case of books that are not published in the same country as the Amazon site, this makes the book much cheaper, too. One example is buying a book published by Blaft in India, not from Amazon.com, but from Blaft. This way, the publisher is paid a reasonable price—not Amazon's screwed-down price—and is paid in a reasonable period of time. Especially with small publishers, the Amazons of this world do what big companies generally do now with all small suppliers—pay them drips, and even at the small amounts they pay, delaying that, making suppliers into what banks are supposed to be: lenders. It doesn't make economic sense in some ways as it's destructive to the point of breaking many small suppliers—but with large companies like Amazon, there are always new suppliers eager for what they imagine will be a feast because the seller is big.

Another example of a publisher I recommend is Small Beer Press. I see they've also written an important post on this topic that lists independent booksellers, which is the other kind of linking I recommend though I haven't figured out how to properly do it. Which one(s) and how, if it's a simple link? Read their "Amazon rude? Surely not?"

The other advantage with buying from independents (and my favourite is Borderlands Books in San Francisco) is that, as an "international" customer, the good independents don't rip customers off in "postage and handling". We internationals subsidise the freebies, I guess, which makes it more of an insult to us when we get Amazon spam offering us free p&h that is only for the US (they can remember our preferences to spam us, but not where we live). Any "economy" in the "discounted" price from Amazon is wiped away by these extras.

NOTE: I would love to have to state a disclaimer here, but I have no books published by Macmillan (though in a world ruled by some readers, and I don't mean people who read between tweets, Farrar Straus and Giroux belongs on the title page of Crandolin, a novel which will probably only remain a bestseller on Asteroid *—where yes, they have no remainders). Anyway, I get no benefit from dissing Amazon, which might be the easiest place for you to buy my single-author books. But if we don't live for our principles, what is there to live for? Actually, so many things! First, catch your fusilli bucati. Next, see if there is any gas . . .

The delights of Daylight Robbery from Blaft

Though I'm not much of a social butterfly, I'd love to carry my emailed invitation to this celebration tomorrow (at the Delhi World Book Fair):

Blaft Publications invites you to the launch of Daylight Robbery by Surender Mohan Pathak, INDIA'S #1 BESTSELLING AUTHOR with 25 million books sold in Hindi over the last 40 years. This is a new English translation, by Sudarshan Purohit, of Pathak's classic 1980 crime novel दिन दहाड़े डकैती.

Read Blaft's Inside View

Who?
As Mark Schleffer writes in "Meet India's pulp fiction master" in Global Post, "Pathak remains unheralded, simply because his books are, he says, sold as commodities, not as works of literature or art." Like the l and a, I guess, of another tome by Dan Brown or Rowling, both of whom sell well in India, though they're probably unheralded where Pathak is sought out.

The world is a wonderfully larger place than it might seem if the products of the major publishers and booksellers were our sole suppliers of mental food. Blaft illustrates this beautifully with a quote on its site for Daylight Robbery:

"Surender Mohan Pathak was one of the two people I wanted to be as a kid. The other was Amitabh Bachchan." -Anurag Kashyap

Daylight Robbery is much more fun than a Dan Brown tome (which won't even age well as something you can laugh at) and you don't pay for the pretensions of scholarship with this undark unstudy of an anti-hero, Vimal. This is the second Pathak that Blaft has published in English translation, and both are from the hugely popular series featuring Vimal. See The 65 Lakh Heist (also translated from the Hindi by Sudarshan Purohit).

Like Chandler and some of the other authors in that priceless collection of incorrigibles, Hardboiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories edited by Bill Pronzoni and Jack Adrian, Pathak's story and telling both work together to aid your escape. If there is sufficient heralding for these translations to get to Western readers, there are even more thrills in store than mere escape. For instance, the opening scene in Daylight Robbery has a bonus that the original Hindi couldn't have delivered. Its description of Vimal disguised "in hippie getup"will make many memories squirm.

It's criminal
At Rs 195 each from Blaft (about $4.20 US dollars), these are a steal; and the site has so much more including The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction that I recently raved about—so you can be afford to be greedy.

An added mystery
I would like to know the role that translation played when faced with slang, idiom, vernacular, and just plain original style—both in the tone of the narrative and the dialogue. I ask this because of a modestly printed little treasure that's intrigued me for some time—Farewell My Lovely & Stories by Raymond Chandler published by Raduga Publishers, Moscow, 1983. The glossary is a glimpse onto the red scalp of what must have been a violently head-scratching soul. The first item explained for a Russian is "a three-chair barber shop" and the list proceeds like some fantasy thriller, to gems like "The Bible Belt" which takes 5 lines of Russian explanation, "You seem to pick up awful easy" which takes 8, and "Cut out the Pig Latin"—a doozy at 16. "I'll show you my etchings" takes only 5, presumably because the Soviets, of course, had etchings and guys who, as guys do, offered to show them. All of this glossary would be a treat if the Russian translations were translated. Tragically (for ignorant souls like me) the glossary is now a mystery unsolved but pungent. I'm dying to know, for instance, what the 5 lines say for "Hooey Phooey Sing, Long Sing Tung" and the 8 putting Russians right to "Scramola umpchay".

"Small press" is no excuse for this dog's breakfast, vomited

"Don't bother if you plan to half-ass it."
– Matthew Kressel, publisher and editor, interviewed by Charles Tan

"My one criticism of Festive Fear is that the editing is occasionally sub-par, as is so often the case with small-press offerings. That said, the contents of this anthology more than make up for the occasional typo. Buy this anthology. It's brilliant. Unfortunately, I believe it's also a limited edition, so you'll need to move quickly; hopefully, though, customer demand will lead to a reprint, as this is an anthology that all horror aficionados should - must - read. "
– HorrorScope review

If Festive Fear were a dish and Tasmaniac Publications, a restaurant, this reviewer could as easily have excused sub-par cooking and food poisoning. After all, many restaurants do make dog's breakfasts of good ingredients, and accidentally kill their customers by a half-ass attitude to the basics.

This anthology and its publisher deserve a review, as they are both outstanding. The good ingredients in FF include the concept, the quality of the concepts in some of the stories and some of the writing, some fine stories that luckily have authors who are more scrupulous in their own attention to the finish of submissions, and the artwork on the cover and inside pages. The mess the publisher made of all this should be noted and a Public Health Notice slapped on the web wall so that prospective customers and sellers looking to hawk their writing and their art (even for the love of it or the "publishing credit") are forewarned—for Festive Fear is planned as an annual, with submission details for the next repast already posted on the web wall.

Starting from the publisher's website, "quality" is spelled correctly, but spelling and language are hit or miss. This is one paragraph:

This unique e-package will contain the near 10 000 word short story, The Calling, seperate from the novella Stone Cold Calling, though it will involve a recognized character. A non-fiction piece, Make Me Frightful, where Simon offers advise to the horror writer, AND, a short video entitled The Haunted Page - shot by Simon.

Caveat venditor
The ability to convert a file from rtf to pdf does not an editor make, just as the ability to pay for a publication's printing does not make someone a publisher. There is no good reason to think that illiteracy in a publisher's site will lead to good work practice, let alone a publication you can be proud of as a contributor or should fork anything out for. There are many fine small publishers, so sellers of work (at any price) should examine the publisher closely before submitting—unless the seller thinks that a half-ass establishment is a good starting place to be in before trying to get work into another as a "pro". This makes as much sense as saying that a restaurant that poisons customers when it is new or small is just making its way toward becoming a four-star restaurant. If you submit dog's breakfasts as manuscripts, or submit to slob publishers without demur, you're not a writer—and if you're a graphic artist submitting good work to a slob of a publisher, expect to be treated like a potwasher.

The publisher/editor of FF wrote the introduction, which reads well in concept, but in the fourth paragraph, "immanent" stares out like a sheep's eye in the custard pudding. Few spell perfectly without help, and no one can proof themselves and trust to catch everything including messy writing (this column included!), so it is pretty outrageous that the editor didn't even get his own introduction proofed, or use a spell checker at any stage. Contrary to the reviews, one of which would get no pass in literacy, this is not a praiseworthy introduction to what could have been an excellent anthology.

Spelling is all over the place in FF, showing that many authors don't bother to check their own work or have anyone else proof it for gross mistakes before submitting, let alone those mistakes a program can't pick up and that are often missed. There are both typos and the kind of mistakes that occur when revisions are made and sentences garbled. These are common and understandable, and should have been easy to fix, as simple proofreading would have picked many of these up.

Punctuation must have been converted directly from submissions, with all their inconsistencies within a manuscript and amongst them. This is understandable because, as the website shows, the pub/ed hasn't the faintest idea what the function of punctuation is, nor what those little doodads are. Thus, there are hyphens used as em dashes sometimes, em dashes at other times, haphazard spacing everywhere. Asterisks are used in line breaks sometimes and at other times, even in the same story, are left out—even when the proper use of dingbats is called for (the top or bottom of a page where there is a line break). Semicolon abuse is rife, and if the pub/ed knows what an ellipsis is, I'll eat a dead wombat. I could go on, but the gist of what I'm saying is that the pub/ed might enjoy reading, but that doesn't mean he knows what a sentence is, or a paragraph, and as for grammar, what's that? I'm talking basic literacy here, and this pub/ed fails, so to function as an editor would be impossible.

Editing, therefore, has been reduced to saying "Yes" to a submission. That is no more editing than buying a meal makes someone a restaurateur. Editing, real editing that goes beyond proofreading, is both a skill and a talent. Any degree of editing starts ahead of this book, as the basics of spelling and punctuation and grammar should be mastered before a writer even contemplates sending in a submission. This might be a good place to recommend Ellen Datlow's "Rant on Proper Submission Formatting".

Although there are different levels of editing, some of which is just proofing for bloopers of spelling, etc., editing of the sort that a person can state with veracity, "I am an editor" can lift a story out of the writer's stumbles of meaning and obscurity. It can untangle a story's guts. A great editor is a joy to work with, and a lack of editing is nothing for writers to sigh about with relief. Only amateurs consider their submissions perfect as submitted.

The basics of book design have also been ignored in FF. The publisher has been so arrogant that there has been no attention paid to some conventions that aid reading pleasure. I suspect that this is because he is impervious to learning from example, though he claims to be a great reader. There are no headers in this anthology, though a reasonable convention for anthologies has running headers with the author's name on, say, the left page and the name of the story on the right. Page numbers are more helpful if they are placed on the outside of these headers, not the bottom centre.

There is no understanding of the roles of display fonts and body fonts, but that pales compared to the gap-toothed appearance that occurs in this book and does with all others every time a publisher doesn't understand that justifying paragraphs leaves spaces that need manual correcting.

Paragraph indents follow the manuscript indent, making the printed page take on a corroded appearance. Most amateurs who get books printed and call themselves publishers, fail to notice that the printed page should be set with less of an indent than what a typesetter needs to notice that there is a new paragraph. It just looks better and makes reading smoother.

A picture is worth how many words?
All that writer stuff is just an egg dropped on the floor and put on your plate—nothing to make a fuss about—compared to treatment of the art in this volume. The artists are as credited as the sculptors of Notre Dame's gargoyles. Although there is a "Contributor Bio's" list in back, there is no crediting of individual artworks. The Table of Contents does not list the illustrations by artist, nor does anywhere else. Even the cover is uncredited, though a casual glance at other books would have shown this publisher that the artist of a book cover is often not only credited on the cover itself, but in the book, near where the publisher itself claims rights. It is a nice touch when the ToC lists the illustrations, but wherever they are credited (and sometimes it is on the page that they are displayed), they should be listed somewhere.

I don't know what the contributors think about this book, but I will say that I suspect they didn't get a galley as part of the pre-publication and editing process. Galleys should have been sent out, and sent out again. I don't know if the word is familiar to this pub/ed, but anyone thinking to submit to a small press should make sure before submitting, that there will be an editing process that involves the writer seeing a copy of the work in the galley stage, and being able to make comments and ask for adjustments if there are mistakes.

Slash and burn, splash and flambé
I don't like to cut down people who attempt something, but there is nothing noble in this small publishing venture. This is not the product of some kid just out of school, many of whom have standards that would shame this. This is not some production by people who are not living in an Anglo country. Back in the prehistoric days of the 1980s when spell checking relied entirely on people, the humble "Soviet Literature: Modern Soviet Short Stories" series was a fascinating read, and not because it was a shambles of language and grammar. The translations were flavoursome and served up such good grammar that it was a shame the restaurants had to serve their fare with forks that couldn't take the strain of food. Today's small presses in many non-Anglo places, such as Blaft in India that I raved about recently, can often be pointed to as models of excellence. Two other examples are the consistently fine Philippine Speculative Fiction series published and edited by Dean Frances Alfar and Nikki Alfar, and A Time For Dragons, An Anthology of Philippine Draconic Fiction edited by Vincent Michael Simbulan with illustrations by Andrew Drilon (who is credited on the front cover and twice in the book as the illustrator). This dragon anthology is quite a treasure, by the way, and I hope that one day it is reprinted and made available internationally, for it has a wide breadth of vision that is unique, and really memorable stories. Included in the volume is a wonderfully informative (without pain) essay by Charles Tan, about the great variety of dragons and their relationships with us.

In contrast, by its sloppiness, FF has not only hurt the standards of the contributors if they are happy with the standard and consider this a stepping stone to the pro market, but small press publishing, if the quality is considered acceptable and the publisher not taken to task. He was interviewed on the ABC, self-righteously talking of altruism. "I accepted a long time ago that if I were to pursue my dream of publishing fresh horror fiction then my drive would be based solely on love and admiration and not towards the financial gain. . . . My hope is that eventually the average Australian's (sic) preconceptions of horror fiction will change for the better. If, through Tasmaniac, I can change some people's views then that's a positive sign."

This could be said to be an amateur publication and a small press, but if you buy one of his books or are a contributor, you spend money and time, and to paraphrase my grandfather, money and time don't know from amateur.

What causes me the most outrage is the slap in the face that this give to good small presses. There are many superb small publishers today who pay great attention to all aspects of what publishing should be, from the concept of the book to the way submissions are treated, to the process of actually reading and understanding and editing and communicating with authors, including paying them. These publishers know what galleys are, and all the aspects of editing. They have as role models, great editors like Ellen Datlow and Gardner Dozois.

Their commitment follows through to the look of the book in all its aspects—and that includes the look of the publisher. Only then can the publisher can be said to be a publisher, and the editors earn the title of editor, for it is a great skill and there are few fine editors.

As the publisher of FF is Australian, this is the final straw. There is a timidity in Australia to say when the she'll be right attitude is just dog vomit. By accepting Tasmaniac's claim of quality, we do wrong by the fine contributors this publisher has effed up by not presenting them as the best that they can be.

By praising FF, this leaves anyone justifiably mistrusting any claims, so when a bookstore is approached to carry a small press publication, we can't blame it for not even considering the work.

High notes
MirrorDanse Books and its publishing/editing team of Bill Congreve and Michelle Marquardt have proved for years that there is no excuse needed for a small press. Their Year's Best Australian Science Fiction & Fantasy series is always well designed and a pleasure to read (even if I still think they indent too far). Some of its publications are the equal of any from the most respected houses, and some should have received far more international recognition than they have. I particularly like Confessions of a Pod Person by Chuck McKenzie and A Tour Guide in Utopia by Lucy Sussex. The MirroDanse website is lousy, but they put the work into the making of fine books, the relationship they have with their authors, and the promotion of quality fiction in Australia beyond their own press.

(1 Feb correction: I was sloppy with my use of "lousy", which needs qualification. MirrorDanse has no intuitive url and no glitzy Enter page such as Tasmaniac's with its nice graphics and no information [these infuriate me]. MirrorDanse's website is very plain and makes no attempt to be anything other than informative. It is, however, in English, and organised well. Also, all its links work, unlike those on many other small p's sites, including Ticonderoga's.)

Two other small presses and names in Australia that deserve praise for their dedication, products, and integrity in how they have treated their contributors, are: Cat Sparks and Robert Hood's Agog! Press and Russell B. Farr's Ticonderoga Publications (both of these publishers in hiatus). New promising small presses include Peggy Bright Books whose first publication, The Whale's Tale, reads well and presents well from the cover all the way through. Simon Petrie in particular, has married legibility with attractiveness in his topnotch book design, which makes lovely use of artwork by cover artist and illustrator Eleanor Clarke. This is one book that credits even the editor. PB's second book is now out, this one by Petrie, but I don't have it yet, so I can't report. I mentioned Twelfth Planet yesterday. There's quite a risk-taking attitude in this press that I like, and so I do hope it does good and does well.

Andromeda Spaceways Inflight Magazine is produced by a cooperative, which should be enough said. It should be a disaster, but it isn't. Sometimes the magazine is bloody brilliant, and sometimes less so. Sometimes the editing is a work of love and dedication in addition to talent and skill, sometimes less so. Some issues are better proofread than others. But there are no dud issues. ASIM does things right far more than it does things wrong, which is why I like it to read and to submit to. If that's not enough, ASIM likes to make its readers smile, a good enough reason on its own.

Some other small presses that deserve high praise that I can tell you about because I've seen their kitchens (been a contributor):

Rusty Morrison and Ken Keegan's Omnidawn Publishing. I was able to improve my story in ParaSpheres because of the sensitivity of the editing, down to some incredibly fine attention to comma placement. The process was also smooth, and best of all, I love the design of the book. Someone with old-fashioned typesetting and layout knowledge was involved, and it shows. John Klima is a superb editor and it shows in his Electric Velocipe, now a joint venture with Nightshade Books. His editing also improved my story in his anthology Logorrhea: Good Words Make Good Stories (which was his concept, too). Matthew Kressel I've quoted at the beginning of this rant. The way that he and editor Ekaterina Sedia treated us contributors in the making of Paper Cities: An Anthology of Urban Fiction is a major reason why the anthology won its award. Mike Allen and his little poetry zine, Mythic Delirium. You might think he'd just wing it for a poetry magazine, as any crime can be covered by poetic license, but not so. I was delighted to be pulled over politely by him when he told me that his "copy editor" questioned my use of "mayhaps". Jay Tomio is another insanely dedicated perfectionist, and a joy to work with. Like all wonderful publishers and editors, he is both considerate and not afraid to point out something that tastes off. That's what makes his Heliotrope Magazine consistently good. Vera Nazarian and her Norilana Books win A's for her dedication, drive, and integrity—but in my opinion, Nazarian still needs to learn more about book design so that the products consistently match her vision. That's not to say that Sky Whales and Other Wonders isn't a better book than many that big presses put out. It is. But she could do even better if she got some lessons from a book design fanatic. An editor any writer would be lucky to work with is Jed Hartman. There are many more editors and publishers I haven't mentioned, some that I only know are good from second-hand knowledge. Ann VanderMeer and Jeff VanderMeer can be excellent editors—when they put out a book, it's not only a great read, but right with great attention to look, and promoted beautifully. But their profile is such that I'm telling you something you expect to hear. On the other hand, you might not know of Brett Alexander Savory and Sandra Kasturi's ChiZine, based in Canada. Their production of Claude Lalumière's Objects of Worship, should, in my opinion, get the Hugo for 2010 Best Collection.

But of all the small presses, the one I would hold up as the model that deserves all stars, is Neil Clarke's (he describes himself as"Publisher/Editor" and lists a crew of other editors) Clarkesworld Magazine. It was laughable that this was a nominee for the 2009 Hugo as "semipro". Sure, there's no claim to "quality" on the site, but when it's there, it shows. Mmm-mmm! And I love how Clarkesworld treats its artists.

Eat it!
Well, this was a rant with many self-corrections, so it's probably a dog's breakfast, vomited. You don't expect me to follow my own advice, do you? I don't want to be toooo perfect. So thanks for dining at my restaurant. I hope you remembered to rub the spoon on your clothes before you ate, to clean it.