The Big Bad Book Blog

It was with my burgeoning interest in design several years ago that I first became aware of the art of typography—how fonts are set in a design to appeal to readability, practicality, and aesthetic tastes. I’ve by no means since become a font aficionado, though I am something of a snob about choosing just the right font for my creative work.

There are those—typographers—who have made this their goal: to create just the right font for any situation. It is a true art. The intricacy of font work lends itself to a great deal of vision, patience, and mayhap a bit of oddity. (Check out “Being a Typographer” at CreativePro.com).

It is the same as any other unique image—and has just as much of a claim over copyright. But that fact is something we occasionally forget. ‘We’ being anyone from a personal user creating a poster for a band to a business creating a website for their product to, say, a very large company using the fonts for their ads.

Such was the case with NBC, which is currently facing a lawsuit from typographic firm The Font Bureau over a mishandling of font licensing. The Font Bureau, which is a big shot in the typographic world (having designed over 1,500 fonts for over 300 companies, according to their website), claims that NBC did not secure the rights to use a handful of fonts that appeared in their fall marketing campaign. A big mistake, as without proper licensing, all of that advertising can be pulled and would need to be redone. And that is an extremely expensive process.

Even large companies running intricate and expensive advertising campaigns make mistakes. But the fact of the matter is that, whether this or other incidents were purposeful or honest mistakes, people occasionally see a font as something they have an automatic right to—because it’s there, and it’s only text, and hey, who cares anyway? (more…)

Every time you publish a book, article, or blog, you become a potential target for a lawsuit. To protect yourself, you might consider looking into media liability insurance. There are other options available, but a good place to start is the new automated WriteInsure™ program from the Publiability Division of Argo Insurance Brokers, Inc. WriteInsure is an affordable media perils insurance program that was designed specifically for independent authors, small publishers, bloggers, and freelance writers. WriteInsure offers limits of liability insurance protection from $100,000 each claim with a $300,000 aggregate all the way up to and including $1,000,000. The WriteInsure policy provides traditional media perils such as, but not limited to, libel, plagiarism, piracy, copyright infringement, defamation, infringement of the right of privacy or publicity, outrage, infliction of emotional distress, misappropriation of property rights, and much more. Importantly, legal defense costs are also included. Visit www.publiability.com and then click on the WriteInsure link to start an online application, or click here to download their FAQ and learn more.

One of the most confusing (and least fun) aspects of publishing a book is making sure your title is in compliance with all the appropriate organizations in order to maximize its searchability.  There are so many different factors involved in this process that it’s easy to get bogged down with the amount of information that gets thrown at you.  Even though there is no need to learn all the ins and outs of the Library of Congress, the sheer multitude of acronyms alone is enough make you cross-eyed.

For those of you who don’t enjoy hours of web research on a topic that is less than stimulating, here’s a quick breakdown of the basic steps you’ll need to take. (Keep in mind that doing things in this order is important.)

Pre-production:

1. Get an ISBN.   International Standard Book Numbers are required for every book that is going to be sold in the book trade.  These can be obtained through Bowker, also known as Books in Print.
2. Register your book with Books in Print.  Once you receive the ISBN you’ll need to make sure that your title data is registered in their system.  This is important because a lot of sources (Amazon, Ingram, etc.) receive data feeds from this system—not to mention the fact that this is a resource for bookstores, libraries, and publishers around the world.
3. Create a barcode with the ISBN and price embedded.  Most trade stores require this to be on the back of your book before they will place an order.
4. Obtain a LCCN (also know as a PCN).  The Library of Congress Control Number (or Pre-Assigned Control Number) is a unique number that differentiates your book in the Library of Congress database.  Librarians use this number to access the associated bibliographic record for a given title.
5. Obtain CIP data.  Cataloging in Publication data creates a bibliographic record for forthcoming books that are likely to be acquired by librarians (and hopefully, librarians will want your book!).  This is to be printed on the copyright page, and this data is only available for works that are not yet published.

Post-production

1. Send one final copy to the Cataloging in Publication Division of the Library of Congress.
2. Send two final copies to the Copyright Office of the Library of Congress along with Form CO and the registration fee.  Alternatively, you are now able to fill out this form and submit payment online with eCO (electronic Copyright Office).
3. Wait to receive your Copyright Confirmation (current wait time is 12–16 months).

While this outline may not seem too arduous, there are many potential roadblocks in this process—so brace yourself, hope for the best, and don’t be afraid to ask questions!

Assuming you haven’t had the time, energy, or mental aptitude for legal matters to get to the bottom of what’s going on with Google Book Search and the settlement reached last October, we highly recommend this helpful FAQ from Wired. It gets directly to the root issues of the debate sans stuffiness or legalese.

Wired points out (as have others) that the real benefit to Google in all this will probably not come from selling or renting books, but from selling expensive database subscriptions to libraries—meaning that the same libraries criticized by publishers for being in cahoots with Google’s purported infringement could be the ones hurting under the new arrangement. Mike Shatzkin points out and discusses this irony in The Shatzkin Files (which, by the way, is a blog worth reading on a regular basis).

If you’ve found a specific image that you’d like to use in your book, make sure it’s usable before you get too attached. Keep the following things in mind for clear (and legal) images:

Size and Resolution: Is your image big enough? At 100%, your image should be at least 300 DPI (dots per inch). If it’s much smaller than this, your designer will probably lob it back to you, asking for a “high-res” version. If you pulled your image off the web, (we’ll talk about that momentarily) you may not have one. And I know, I know, Photoshop can do great things. All you have to do is type “300″ in the Image Size dialogue and voilà: it’s high-res, right? No. Not right. Don’t do that. Seriously.

Permissions: Do you have permission to use this image? If you didn’t create the image yourself, you might not. If you purchased the image from a stock photography bureau like Veer or Getty, review the license for any restrictions. Royalty-free images can be used for just about anything, but be sure to read the fine print for rights-managed imagery. For older, iconic images, check to see if they’re in the public domain before republishing them.

If you obtained your image by right-clicking and downloading it from the web, you probably can’t use it. (It’s low-res and it’s not yours.) Contact the owner of the image and find out about permissions and the availability of a print-quality version. It’s best to research this information early so that if you need to replace your image because of permissions or size, you have ample time to find a new one that’s just as perfect.