Last updated June 16, 2008
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Bovee, Thill file amended royalty complaint against Pearson
Textbook authors Courtland Bovee and John Thill filed an amended complaint on May 28, 2008 against Pearson Education in the United States District Court of Southern District of New York.
The suit seeks monetary damages for "systematic breaches and bad faith performances" of author agreements. The authors contend that Pearson has withheld, at a minimum, hundreds of thousands of dollars of royalty income generated by the sale of their business communication and introduction to business textbooks.
The suit targets three accounting practices used by Pearson that the authors say reduces their royalties and increases the publisher's profits. They are:
1) Pearson applied a drastically reduced royalty rate of sales to the authors' works through the publisher's foreign affiliates and subsidiaries which would only apply if those foreign affiliates and subsidiaries were third parties (which they are not). These foreign affiliates and subsidiaries entered into license agreements with the publisher rather than the contractually required royalty rates of 15 percent and 10 percent on such sales.
2) Pearson unilaterally altered their method of calculating high discount sales several years after the execution of the author agreements in order to capture more sales at high discounts, on which a reduced royalty rate of 5 percent was paid instead of the default royalty rates of 17 percent o 18.75 percent, depending on the work.
3) Pearson applied a reduced royalty rate of 10 percent to custom published works (i.e. works in which the publisher's customers customize books by combining portions of several different textbooks or original material into one book or electronic work) as if such works were "other versions" or "abridgements" (which they are not), instead of the proper royalty rate -- the default rates (between 17 percent and 18.75 percent) or the 17.75 percent royalty rate for sales of electronic versions of the works.
In addition, the suit states that the publishers have refused to provide the authors with access to their books and records, in defiance of the authors' contractual rights. The publishers' improper accounting practices, said the authors, have resulted in profits for the publishers' at their expense.
Read the Expanded Royalty Manipulation Suit Filed Against Pearson: Click here
Call for Papers: Computers and Writing 2009
The American Education Research Association is calling for papers for its Computers and Writing 2009 conference at the University of California, Davis, June 18-21, 2009. They seek papers that explore the complex social, pedagogical and institutional dynamics around ubiquitous and/or sustainable computing. They encourage proposals that explain the impact and challenges of ubiquitous and sustainable computing in different contexts (educational settings, workplaces, and leisure spaces).
Deadline for proposals is Friday, September 19, 2008. Contact Conference Chair Carl Whithaus for more information: cwwhithaus@ucdavis.edu or visit the conference website.
Call for Papers: Conference on Convergence and Hybrid Information Technology
The Electronics and Telecommunications Research Institute (ETRI) (Korea), Busan Metropolitan City, Korea, and Korea Electronics Technology Institute, are calling for papers for the 3rd Annual International Conference on Convergence and Hybrid Information Technology. The conference will be held in Busan, Korea November 11-13, 2008: Click here
Selected papers will be published by SCI listed eminent international journals (e.g., SCI, Elsevier, Inderscience, Graz University of Tech). The conference will provide a forum to present research results in all areas related to the theory, development, applications, experiences, and evaluations of convergence/hybrid information technology and next generation information technologies and services fields. Submissions are also being accepted for workshops and special sessions. Deadline for paper submission is June 10: Click here
Call for Proposals for Center for Integrative Leadership Research Awards
The University of Minnesota is calling for proposals for its Center for Integrative Leadership (CIL) Research Awards, which will "annually honor scholars who are expected to fuel and broaden integrative thinking and practice across boundaries in their chosen field." The awards will help fund integrative leadership research, focusing especially on important societal problems. The Center will offer two types of stipends. The $10,000 CIL Scholar Award (up to three awarded annually) is intended for senior scholars who already have an outstanding record of accomplishment in leadership studies or related fields. The $2,500 CIL Leadership Award is for junior scholars who are beginning their work in leadership studies. Deadline for submissions is December 31, 2008. The proposed research must be completed by December 31, 2009. For more information: Contact Anna Lloyd, center executive director or: lloyd100@umn.edu or Angela Stehr, center administration: stehr002@umn.edu or (612) 625-5209.
Download flyer (Word Doc)
Participate in Authors Guild summer teleconferences
The Authors Guild is holding summer seminars and roundtables by phone on how to promote your book before and after its publication, how to negotiate a better book contract, how to register your copyright, and tax tips for writers. The cost for members is $10 per seminar. The non-member fee is $60 per seminar. Normal long-distance phone charges to Minnesota apply.
Authors Guild Phone Seminar Calendar -- Summer 2008
Book Publicity Roundtable
Hosted by Bella Stander, Authors Guild member, and proprietor of BOOK PROMOTION 101, offering publicity workshops and consulting to commercially published authors.
Monday, June 9, 3 p.m. EST
Tuesday, June 10, 6 p.m. EST
Wednesday, June 11, 9 p.m. EST
Book Contract Negotiation
Hosted by Anita Fore, Authors Guild Director of Legal Services
Tuesday, June 17, 12 p.m. EST
Thursday, June, 19, 3 p.m. EST
Copyright in 30 Minutes: How and Why to Register
Hosted by Anita Fore, Authors Guild Director of Legal Services
Tuesday, June 24, 12 p.m. EST
Thursday, June 26, 3 p.m. EST
Tax Tips for Writers
Hosted by Robert Pesce, CPA, Marcum & Kliegman Literary Services Group
Wednesday, June 18, 6 p.m. EST
To register, please click here.
Attend course on textbook effectiveness
A three day course on "What makes an effective textbook?" will be held at the University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, September 3-5, 2008. The course leaders are Arno Reints, director CLU, University of Utrecht, The Netherlands, and James McCall, Centre for Publishing Studies, University of Stirling. The cost for the three day course is 595 Euros. For registration information, email a.reints@clu.nl
Download flyer (PDF)
Princeton University Press to reprint typo-riddled book
After author Peter Moskos's friends and family members alerted him to numerous spelling and grammatical mistakes in his 245-page book, Cop in the Hood: My Year Policing Baltimore's Eastern District, his publisher, Princeton University Press, recalled all 4,000 copies and announced it will publish a reprint. The publisher has taken full responsibility for the errors.
Microsoft ends Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects
Microsoft announced on May 23, 2008 in its Live Search blog that it is ending its Live Search Books and Live Search Academic projects. The sites have already been taken down. The company also said that it is winding down its digitization initiatives, including its library scanning and in-copyright book programs. The blog post, written by Satya Nadella, Microsoft's senior vice president search, portal and advertising, encouraged libraries to build on the platform Microsoft developed with its partners to create digital archives available to library users and search engines.
Emerald Publishing launches new journal on historical research in marketing
Emerald Publishing recently launched a new journal, the Journal of Historical Research in Marketing (JHRM). The quarterly, peer reviewed journal will focus on marketing history and the history of marketing thought.
JHRM is inviting submissions for the inaugural issue of the journal, which will be published in March 2009. The inaugural issue will celebrate the contributions to historical research in marketing by the late Dr. Stanley C. Hollander who was a member of the faculty at Michigan State University and is considered by many to be the founder of the 'new' marketing history. The deadline for submissions is July 15, 2008.
View JHRM's Special Issue Call for Papers
Society for Scholarly Publishing to hold annual meeting May 28-30
The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) will be holding its 30th Annual Meeting, "Empires of the Mind: Inventing the Future of Scholarly Publishing", May 28-30 in Boston. The SSP Annual Meeting is an informative three-day event providing educational and networking opportunities for publishers, editors, librarians, scholars, printers, agents, wholesalers, booksellers, and other participants.A pre-meeting seminar, "Digital Preservation", will be held Wednesday, May 28 from 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.. The seminar will give an update on developments in digital preservation from the perspectives of all the major stakeholders: publishers, librarians and e-archiving vendors. The seminar will provide an opportunity for attendees to learn what is happening in the area of digital preservation for both current and backfile content. For more information, visit the SSP website: Click here
Scholarly publishing on the world wide web
"Working Papers", a graduate student publication of the University of Pennsylvania Department of Romance Languages, has a Q&A roundtable discussion entitled "Wikidemia? Scholarly Publishing on the World Wide Web" on its website. The Roundtable explores such questions as is online publishing a relevant vehicle for academic writing?; How will it affect the way we read, write and pursue our professional interests?; Will current publishing practices become obsolete, and if so, when can we expect to read the last words of offline print culture? Read more: Click herePublishers file suit against Georgia State University for copyright infringement
A group of publishers filed suit in federal court in April to stop widespread copyright infringement at Georgia State University (GSU). The complaint, filed by Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press and SAGE Publications and supported by the Association of American Publishers (AAP), charges that GSU officials are violating the law by systematically enabling professors to provide students with digital copies of copyrighted course readings published by the plaintiffs and numerous other publishers without those publishers' authorization. The lawsuit seeks injunctive relief to bring an end to such practices, but does not seek monetary damages.
The lawsuit asserts "pervasive, flagrant, and ongoing" unauthorized distribution of copyrighted materials, despite attempts to reach an amicable and mutually acceptable solution without the need for litigation. GSU distributes the unauthorized materials through its electronic course reserves service, its Blackboard/WebCT Vista electronic course management system, and its departmental web pages and hyperlinked online syllabi available on websites and computer servers controlled by GSU. U.S. copyright law applies to digital course offerings as it does to paper offerings, and does not distinguish between different methods of distribution.
While many U.S. colleges and universities work with university presses and other publishers to ensure their uses of published materials are in accordance with U.S. copyright law, the lawsuit states that GSU has flatly rebuffed efforts to reach similar agreements.
"University presses are integral to the academic environment, providing scholarly publications that fit the needs of students and professors and serving as a launch pad from which academic ideas influence debate in the public sphere," said Niko Pfund, vice-president of Oxford University Press. "Without copyright protections, it would be impossible for us to meet these needs and provide this service."
"Publishers must protect their interests and those of their authors when they believe that this spirit of cooperation--and the law itself--is being willfully and blatantly violated," said Pfund. "We take this action in sorrow, not in anger, as we consider universities, librarians, scholars, and presses to exist in the same, mutually supportive ecosystem, and believe librarians especially to be among our most important publishing partners."
"Of all places, we would expect universities to respect laws protecting intellectual property and to instill their students with such respect," said Frank Smith of Cambridge University Press. "One of the key values underpinning teaching and research in colleges and universities is the responsibility to credit academic work to its creator; and any attempt to take credit for work that is not your own is widely viewed as unacceptable. We think the majority of faculty would recognize that the same principles apply in respecting copyright law and the work of fellow authors and that these principles apply in the digital world, just as in the print world."
"Respect for copyright law is integral to the higher education process," said Patricia Schroeder, AAP president and CEO. "It provides the basis for publishing operations of university presses and scholarly societies, and makes possible the contributions of innumerable other authors and publishers to the educational process. Georgia State University's disregard for basic copyright protections undermines this very premise."
"AAP members and the publishing industry recognize the advantages of making course content available electronically for students, and offer licensing and permissions processes designed to allow such uses on a cost-effective basis," continued Schroeder. "We are simply asking Georgia State University to take the necessary measures to respect the law."
A copy of the complaint may be found on AAP's website, http://www.publishers.org.
Florida 'Textbook Affordability Bill' includes language regarding comp copy sales
Due in part to the efforts of TAA and its members, Florida's HB603 "Textbook Affordability Bill" has been amended by Representative Anitere Flores to include language regarding the sale of complimentary copies.
The bill was amended to include the following: "These materials may not be sold for any type of compensation if they are specifically marked as free samples not for resale."
"While this means that comp copies that are not specifically marked as 'free samples not for resale' can still be sold, on the whole, our effort to modify Florida's comp copy law was a reasonable success," said TAA Executive Director Richard Hull. "Now it is up to publishers to make sure comp copies are appropriately marked."
For more information on the bill and TAA member efforts: Click here
Amazon announces all POD books sold on site must use own POD house
As of April 1, online book seller Amazon is requiring small publishers to sign a contract agreeing to print all print-on-demand (POD) books sold on Amazon's site by Amazon's own POD house, BookSurge.
The American Society of Journalists and Authors, the nation's trade association for freelance nonfiction writers, said in an April 4 press release that it is "disgusted" with Amazon's announcement.
"At first, Amazon representatives denied they were threatening small booksellers with having the 'buy it' buttons for their books turned off if they didn't sign on the dotted line," said ASJA. "Later this week, Amazon admitted the move, as reported in Writer's Weekly and The Wall Street Journal. The contract being offered to print-on-demand publishers, which ASJA officers have seen, also includes a confidentiality clause forbidding disclosure of not just specific contract terms, as is typical, but any discussion at all. Thus, small publishers who have signed the contract may not say so, much less reveal the pressure they were under."
In addition to the POD requirement, said the ASJA, Amazon is punishing publishers who sell their books at a discount from cover price directly on their publisher websites by taking that discounted price as the book's "cover price" and then applying their own discounts accordingly.
"We applauded when Jeff Bezos and Amazon gave small publishers and even writers who self-published a way to get their books before the public," observed ASJA President Russell Wild. "With these grabby, strong-arm tactics, Amazon negates all that -- and the years of goodwill it has built up with writers, who ultimately will bear the brunt of any price increases in the printing of independently published books."
ASJA joins PMA, the independent book publishers association, which also has spoken out against Amazon's move to forcibly get business for its own BookSurge subsidiary. ASJA said it also will urge the Washington state attorney general's office to investigate whether Amazon's move constitutes restraint of trade or otherwise violates anti-trust laws.
Center for Inquiry raises concerns over errors in civics textbook
The Center for Inquiry (CFI), an international think tank promoting science and secularism, released a 25-page report today detailing what it calls "egregious errors" sufficient enough to warrant "immediate correction," in a widely used civics textbook found in many secondary schools around the country, including advanced placement courses.
CFI believes that the textbook American Government: Institutions and Policies, 10th edition, (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006) contains inaccurate and misleading statements, in particular in its analysis of global warming and certain constitutional law issues. In response, CFI's legal experts have analyzed the textbook and prepared a critique that sets forth recommended changes.
Derek Araujo, a lawyer and executive director for CFI's New York office, spearheaded the textbook review project. Araujo stated that he was "surprised and dismayed that a textbook used in advanced placement courses would contain clearly erroneous statements about significant issues, such as global warming and school prayer." Araujo recruited leading scientists, including Stuart D. Jordan from NASA, to provide their assessment of the book's treatment of global warming.
CFI's critique focuses on six areas: the science of global warming; the legality of school prayer; the significance of the Supreme Court's decision in Lawrence v. Texas; the alleged influence of the religious concept of "original sin" on the structure of the Constitution; the meaning of the Establishment Clause; and the significance of the Supreme Court's decision not to hear a case (what lawyers refer to as the denial of a writ of certiorari).
Ronald A. Lindsay, CFI's general counsel, characterized the errors as "significant and inexcusable. For a civics textbook to state—as this book does—that the Supreme Court will not allow students to pray in schools betrays either a serious misunderstanding of the law or a willingness to have the textbook serve as a propaganda vehicle for the Religious Right."
CFI maintains that it is very important for civics students to obtain accurate information about our Constitution, our legal system and public policy issues, and that instructional material should be objective and free of ideological bias.
The textbook critique was researched and written by Araujo, Lindsay, and Jordan. A downloadable PDF copy of the full report is available online: Click here
Quizlet makes learning vocabulary words easy
Point your students to Quizlet for an easy way to learn vocabulary words. They enter a vocabulary list of any words or data, and Quizlet gives them a specialized learning mode, flashcards, randomly generated tests, and collaboration tools for classmates. It's free to sign up: http://quizlet.com
Indiana University, Bloomington Libraries publish first e-journal
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Through a partnership that marks a turning point in scholarly publishing at Indiana University, Ruth Lilly Dean of University Libraries Patricia Steele announced on February 21 the publication of Museum Anthropology Review, the first faculty-generated electronic journal supported by the IU Bloomington Libraries.
Edited by Jason Baird Jackson, associate professor in IU's Department of Folklore and Ethnomusicology, Museum Anthropology Review showcases a new model for Bloomington faculty to disseminate their scholarly work.
With this pilot test, the IU Bloomington libraries are poised to support the electronic publication of journals, offering faculty editors a low-cost solution to the administrative and publishing functions of managing them. This expands the scope of IUScholarWorks, a set of services to make the work of IU scholars freely available, maximizing exposure and visibility of publications by making articles accessible to search services such as Google Scholar.
"Libraries nationwide are interested in supporting faculty who can realize the benefits of publishing open-access journals," Steele said. "At IU, we're especially pleased to help advance one of the university's top disciplines. And by partnering locally, we're disseminating scholarship that will help researchers worldwide."
Steele said that universities, and particularly libraries, have been squeezed in recent years by a system in which the cost of acquiring journals from commercial publishers has grown increasingly more expensive.
Double-digit price increases forced upon library subscribers over the past decade have allowed commercial publishers to steadily grow their profits at the expense of university budgets. The library community contends that one approach to control runaway costs is to minimize the dependence on subscription-based models by publishing and promoting the use of freely available, or open access, journals.
Jackson founded Museum Anthropology Review on the basis of his experiences as editor of an established closed-access journal in his field -- the similarly titled and focused Museum Anthropology. Unlike Museum Anthropology Review, this more established journal is published by the American Anthropological Association in a partnership with the for-profit publisher Wiley-Blackwell.
"The costs associated with publishing in the traditional mode are astronomical," Jackson said. "Publication of a single research article in Museum Anthropology can cost thousands of dollars and, when published, the results will then be available to a small proportion of people worldwide."
Jackson said that making scholarly work more easily and affordably accessible is especially important in fields like folklore and anthropology that are rooted in the study of local cultures worldwide.
"If, for instance, a scholar spends months documenting the work of an elderly woodcarver living in a small American town and then writes about what she learned in a peer-reviewed research article, I have an obligation as her editor to make it as easy as possible for the schoolchildren of that town -- or the artist's grandchildren -- to gain access to her writing. Open access repositories and journals, in their varied forms, help make this possible."
Begun in February 2007 as a pilot project using weblog software, Museum Anthropology Review published 64 contributions from scholars worldwide. The works were consulted more than 20,000 times, Jackson said, and for many of the books that were reviewed in the journal, the assessments published in Museum Anthropology Review are the most highly ranked pages in standard Web searches.
"Everyone involved with the effort has been thrilled with the results," Jackson said, "and I am happy to be continuing the project in a more durable and robust way through our partnership with the IUB Libraries."
IUScholarWorks is a set of services supported by the IU Libraries and the Digital Library Program, a collaborative effort of the IU Libraries and University Information Technology Services. For more information, go to scholarworks.iu.eduHarvard jumps into open access arena
A Feb. 13 article in Inside Higher Ed announces a new open access plan by Harvard University's Faculty of Arts and Sciences. The department will be posting its faculty's finished academic papers online free, unless they choose to opt out of the plan. Read the entire article: Click here
On-the-job training
Four colleagues share their experiences as first-time faculty members in the department of teaching and learning at Northern Illinois University's College of Education, in the Jan. 29 online issue of "The Chronicle of Higher Education": Click here
'Ghettoized Poli Sci Textbooks'
A study by the American Political Science Association's Standing Committee on the Status of Blacks in the Profession, found a relative absence of black people in 27 introductory textbooks published or in circulation from 2004-2007. Read an article about the study, "Ghettoized Poli Sci Textbooks", on Inside Higher Ed: Click here
Register for upcoming Academic Writing Club
The Academic Ladder will be holding its next Academic Writing Club Feb. 11 to March 9. Early registration (before 9 a.m. ET on Friday, Feb. 8) is $50. After Feb. 8, registration is $60. Register at http://academicwritingclub.comThe truth behind the 'authors' of K-12 textbooks
Read this expose of the politics of educational publishing, "The Muddle Machine: Confessions of a Textbook Editor", written by Tamin Ansary, a former editor at a major publisher of elementary and high school textbooks, on the edutopia website: http://www.edutopia.org/muddle-machine
Cornell professor awarded Best Paper Prize
Yaniv Grinstein, assistant professor at the Johnson School at Cornell University, was awarded the Best Paper Prize for the most significant paper published in the Journal of Financial Intermediation in 2006 for his paper, "The Disciplinary Role of Debt and Equity Contracts: Theory and Tests."
The article studies how debt and equity should be designed to align managerial incentives. Both debt and equity have features that create incentives for management to work hard. Debt holders' right to cease assets if they do not get their money back and equity holders' right to replace the manager if they do not get a reasonable return creates very powerful incentives.
"What's interesting about debt and equity is that their terms can be changed to create more powerful or less powerful incentives," comments Grinstein. "A debt contract with lenient terms and longer maturity does not provide as powerful incentives as a debt contract with stricter terms and shorter maturity. Similarly, a large number of equity holders who each hold only a small stake in the firm will have less power to replace the CEO than few strong equity holders with a large stake."
The model shows that, to provide the right incentives, both debt and equity are necessary in the capital structure, but that firms should choose either to provide incentives with strict debt terms or with strong equity holders. Having both strict terms and strong equity holders at once is suboptimal because it distorts incentives to discipline. The model has additional predictions on the determinants of the choice between strict debt terms and strong shareholders and the effect of other alignment mechanisms (such as managerial equity holdings or compensation contracts) on the results. The paper finds supportive evidence for the model's predictions in a sample of leveraged buyout transactions.
The Journal of Financial Intermediation editors cast votes to select the Best Paper Prize from all papers published in the journal during the year. The prize includes a $2,500 check, which will be presented to Grinstein during the Financial Intermediation Research Society conference in June.
Grinstein's research and teaching interests are in corporate finance and corporate governance. His current research focuses on the effect of governance regulations on firm policies, optimal executive compensation arrangements, and the determinants of board structure. Between 2006 and 2007, he worked at the Securities and Exchange Commission, continuing his research efforts in these areas.
He has published in several journals in the areas of corporate governance, capital structure, and dividend policy, including the Journal of Finance, the Journal of Financial Economics, the Journal of Financial Intermediation and others. His research has been widely cited in major newspapers such as The Economist, Financial Times, Newsweek, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Forbes magazine, Time magazine, Washington Post, as well as in Congressional hearings on the new governance rules. He is the recipient of the Best Paper in Corporate Finance Award from the Southwestern Finance Association in 2005, and of the Clifford H. Whitcomb faculty fellowship in 2004-2005.
Textbook authors allege Pearson Education manipulates royalty accounting
Courtland L. Bovee and John V. Thill, authors of Excellence in Business Communication and Business Communication Today, filed suit on January 7, 2008 against Pearson Education, Inc. and its subsidiary Prentice Hall in the United States District Court, Southern District of New York alleging that the company has systematically breached its contracts with the authors and acted in bad faith in order to minimize the royalties it pays them.
Download PDF of the complaint against Pearson Education by Courtland Bovee and John Thill
"Ever since Pearson Education became the corporate parent of Prentice Hall, we have noticed changes in the way in which our royalties are paid," said John Thill. The suit alleges that there is a pattern of misstating and miscategorizing sales so that Pearson can maximize its own profits at the expense of its authors.
The lawsuit alleges, among other things, that despite specific contract provisions related to sales by Pearson Education subsidiaries, the defendants purport to license Bovee and Thill's works to its foreign subsidiary companies for sale in foreign markets in order to pay royalties based upon on a much lower license fee rather than upon the volume of sales.
The suit also alleges that Pearson engages in the systematic discounting of Bovee & Thill LLC works. Rather than calculating royalties on the "single copy price" of plaintiff's textbooks, Pearson Education arbitrarily sets an unreasonably high "list price" for plaintiff's books in order to take advantage of contractual royalty provisions related to "high discount sales." Finally, Bovee & Thill take issue with Pearson Education's treatment of "custom published" editions of their work. Resembling allegations that have been made by other authors against Pearson and other publishers, Bovee & Thill's lawsuit alleges that Pearson Education reduced its royalty payments by categorizing custom published works as "abridgements," in order to apply a lower royalty rate to their sale. Said Thill: "Everyone knows that custom published works are not 'abridgments.'" The suit alleges that Pearson Education ignores such accepted industry definitions so that they can retain more profits for themselves. "In our case, this practice results in the reduction of our royalties by about one third," he said. Bijan Amini of Storch Amini & Munves, the firm representing Bovee and Thill, said: "Adding insult to injury, Pearson Education has consistently refused our clients adequate access to their books and records. While the lawsuit currently alleges a breach of contract, Pearson's secrecy raises a distinct possibility that there is more lurking in their books than meets the eye. We look forward to helping our clients uncover any and all wrongdoing and to obtaining their bargained-for earnings."
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