Here is an excellent opinion piece from Berkeley Professor Hal Varian that ran in the New York Times today. Copyright law is a mess right now. It hinders publishers without really benefiting anyone, as the professor points out. Lawrence Lessig's recommendations, detailed in the piece, are the right way to go — give authors 14 years of copyright protection, then ask them to renew that protection or have their work move to the public domain. Simple and fair.

This is great. I don't know what the book is about but the cover is a very nice mash-up of real-time data recording, visualization and physicality. Resulting in an "artifact" of a moment (30 seconds) in New York City. The first video on the site (about halfway down the page) goes into details on how it was accomplished.

Here's one last reminder about a great benefit coming up this Thursday in Seattle for Yoga Behind Bars, an inspiring nonprofit that hopes to raise enough money to expand its program of teaching yoga to prisoners. The event is on Thursday night, 5/31, from seven to midnight. it's open to all ages, and it's at the Capital Hill Arts Center (1612 12th Ave., Main Theater). Shaina, the inspiration behind YBB, is asking for a $15-25 donation, but stresses that no one will be turned away. She has an awe-inspiring lineup of entertainment that includes:

Yoga
Fire Dancing
Aerialists
Comedy
Modern Dance
Capoeira
Break Dancing
Live Music
Art Auction
Drinks
Gourmet Food

And plenty more. Come by and say hi and support Shaina's cause.

This is ingenious.

Because of poor type, weathering from age or just plain dirtiness, books that are scanned are often misread by computers during digitization efforts. This is truer with older, out of copyright books. Humans, however, don't have as much difficulty reading a scanned page in image form. Which is to say, if you could get a group of humans to just sit and transcribe old books, the process would happen with much less error than the current automated processes. The only problem is, transcribing a book is supremely boring and tedious.

Blogs get a lot of spam. One way to stop spam is to use a CAPTCHA, which is an image of a string of messy or difficult to read random letters and numbers that a user must type correctly before the blog system accepts a comment.

reCAPTCHA combines these two problems. They take words from scanned pages of books that OCR software can't decipher, pair the indecipherable word with a known word, and present it as a CAPTCHA on a blog. The blog gets to avoid spam, and the book scanning project gets a (presumably) correct transcription of the otherwise un-computer-readable word. I suspect they must present the same unreadable word several times, aggregating responses and taking the most common set of responses as correct.

From the reCAPTCHA site:

About 60 million CAPTCHAs are solved by humans around the world every day. In each case, roughly ten seconds of human time are being spent. Individually, that's not a lot of time, but in aggregate these little puzzles consume more than 150,000 hours of work each day. What if we could make positive use of this human effort? reCAPTCHA does exactly that by channeling the effort spent solving CAPTCHAs online into "reading" books.

I love projects like this — this system is such a simple, elegant and beautiful way to take something annoying, time consuming and riddled with negative connotation (CAPTCHAs in general and blog spam) and make it productive. I'm going to look into setting it up on our blog in the next few days.

One of the big issues facing small presses today is the controversial plan to hike postal rates — a plan that is based on the work of Time Warner ... no joke. Here's an entry from the Daily Kos on the subject.

These rate hikes, which begin in July, won't affect Chin Music because we don't mail periodicals, but it is worth saying the obvious: This is more about silencing voices than it is about making a profit.

Recent postal hikes do affect us. We used to be able to mail our books overseas via priority mail for $5.25. Now it costs $8.80 and the service is several days slower. That means we're going to have to hike our postal rates on all the non-Chin Music stuff we sell in our store because the margins are just too small to absorb the extra cost. However, we're going to hold tight for now on the shipping rates for all Chin Music titles in hopes of keeping orders flowing in. We appreciate your business no matter where you find a Chin Music title, but the orders via our site bring us the most profit.

We feel sort of like the BFG in this media landscape, surrounded by giants like Fleshlumpeater, Gizzardgulper, Meatdripper and Bloodbottler. Some day I hope to make Rupert Murdoch (the Butcher Boy) eat a snozzcumber.

Congratulations to Toni McGee Causey on the publication of her first novel, Bobbie Faye's Very (very, very, very) Bad Day from St. Martin's Press. From the looks of the videos promoting the book on Toni's site, this novel will be a hoot. (And this is yet another example of publishers and writers turning to video to promote their books.)

Toni was instrumental in helping us put together Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans last year. Blogger supreme Colleen Mondor introduced me to her, and I spent the first few days after the levee broke riveted to her blog as she wrote heart-wrenching accounts of happenings at the LSU triage center. Those writings ended up as "Where Grace Lives" in Do You Know. Toni also introduced me to fellow bloggers Ray Shea and Juliette Kernion. Plus she helped us promote the book in her hometown of Baton Rouge.

We at Chin Music wish Toni and Bobbie a lot of luck. Can't wait to read about this "bat shit crazy" heroine from Baton Rouge.

Here's a very interesting piece in the Washington Times from friend and Kuhaku contributor Takehiko Kambayashi. He's writing about our main man, Minoru Morita, and how he went from daily appearances on national TV to being unofficially banned from TV for the past two years for criticizing the government. More Americans should read Morita to understand the underlying tension between the Japanese government and those it is supposed to represent.

Seattle-based nonprofit organization Yoga Behind Bars is hosting a benefit May 31 on Capitol Hill (Seattle's Capitol Hill, that is) to raise money and continue bringing the practice of yoga and its therapeutic benefits to prisoners. The newly formed organization is working with prisoners in King County jail, but its goal is to spread the practice nationwide as an alternative to reduce recidivism. The event promises to be an evening filled with yoga, fire dancing, capoeira, live music and lots more. For more details check out their website.

A piece I wrote recently on Americans' increasing fascination with anime and Japanese pop culture was published by Reuters yesterday. Cheggit.

We hear a lot about the future of newspapers, how they are on death's door. Frankly, Chin Music would give David Cady's left leg for a profit margin of 15.6%, the newspaper industry average.

That said, there are glaring problems in the industry, no question. But are they structural or the fault of incompetent managers? That's the focus of the exchange between Robert McChesney and Glenn Harlan Reynolds in this very interesting Los Angeles Times piece. Here's a snippet from McChesney:

(We) agree about old media digging their own graves, only I think the reasons are structural, not largely because of incompetent owners. Most newspapers have been in a death dance of sorts for the past generation, a death dance that has picked up its tempo in the past decade. It goes like this: newspapers gut serious journalism because that costs money (and can antagonize powerful people in their community) and their marketing people tell them the desirable youth demographics (and major advertisers) want sports and entertainment and business and lifestyle news, which is far less expensive to produce. In the near term that equals higher profits. Younger readers over time find they can get this type of information faster and better online and stop reading daily newspapers. By this time they have less of an understanding of what good local journalism is because they have not been exposed to it. So newspapers find themselves painted into a corner, producing less of the product that makes them distinct and not having nurtured a market for quality local news.

One of the messages I heard loud and clear from people at the most recent Consortium (our book distrbutor) sales conference in New York was: Pare your list and focus on the best few. Of course, we can't pare anymore than we already have — one new book a season is about as pared down as you can get. But the point was, I believe, that the book world is overwhelmed with new titles and it takes so much more effort these days to sell a book once it is out.

The other reason for paring your list, I think, is that we all need to step back and figure out what should be a book and what is suited for some other media. Chin Music does this a lot more than most publishers, and that's why our books are few but special, and our online presence (including the recent addition of Hitotoki) is more extensive and eclectic than any other "book" publisher I know.

Design Observer has an interesting entry up on the exponentially growing book world and what a publisher's to do about it. Don't miss the many cogent comments, which really round out the piece.

I'm back from New York after a fantastic sales conference with Consortium, where I had a chance to pitch Goodbye Madame Butterfly to the national sales staff, take part in a marketing workshop (just what CMP needs) and attend a party at the foot of the Williamsburg Bridge where I met other publishers who share our same cultural mission. More on that later, but here's a piece that hit me like a breath of fresh air after all the recent Ronald Reagan hagiography. We so soon forget what a blatant racist Reagan was throughout his career. But not Alec Dubro — he wants to remind us all:

Ronald Reagan. The man was a saint, a positive saint. Such strength, such warmth, such conviction, such vision. Such claptrap.

Reagan was a mean, crazy old man with a withering contempt for most of the world’s people, beginning with African Americans and extending most strongly to black Africans.

From his rigid pro-apartheid stance to his blatantly purposeful choice of kicking off the last stretch of his presidential campaign at the very place where civil right workers were killed by the KKK and telling an all-white audience that he believes in "states rights," Ronnie was a true, blue white racist, and it's good that someone's reminding us of this fact. Now back to publishing.

Our latest project, hitotoki.org — a joint production with the very talented AQ in Tokyo — is now live. Feast your eyes on it.

I watched from Seattle as Craig worked with the folks at AQ to put together this very ambitious site. I helped with the editing and the occasional encouraging word, but this is very much a project born in Co-Lab in downtown Tokyo, where Chin Music has a desk.

My thoughts on this project over the last few weeks went from excitement about the idea to skepticism as I worried that the demands we were making on writers were too obscure to growing confidence as more excellent submissions rolled in to elation this morning when I went online and surfed through the site. Yes, I'm biased, this being partly a Chin Music production, but since I've only been tangentially involved in the project, what the hell: I think this is the sort of site the Internet is screaming for. It blends interesting text and visuals with a format and a structure that is suited to the Net. In other words, you can't pull this off in print.

Check it out. And if you've been to Tokyo, send us a submission. I'm sure we'll hear more from Craig about this after he recovers from the several sleepless nights he's endured leading up to the launch.