The XX Factor: What women really think.

BlackBerries Aren't Just Rude. They're Ruining the Art of Conversation.

Emily, you brought up BlackBerry etiquette yesterday, after Tom Golisano got mad at New York State Senate majority leader Malcolm Smith for rude usage of his. I'm continually astounded by the blatant disregard with which people whip out their devices and start multitasking in situations where full attention is obviously what etiquette demands. Or what safety demands—too often I've been the backseat witness to the unnerving practice of BlackBerrying while driving. I don't care that your BlackBerry has a map. Either pull over to check it, or have the passenger navigate, just like in the old days of paper maps.

But for the most part, it seems like even those guilty of succumbing to BlackBerry's pull toward constant communication, like Emily and Inci admit to being, realize and feel guilty about their breach of etiquette. The hazier question, I've found, is what's appropriate regarding... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Tell Us Your Awkward and Wrong Internet Tales

Scott Anderson's Modern Love Revenge column about a woman who wrote in the New York Times about how she Googled him before their first date, raises interesting questions about online etiquette. The piece that Scott reacted to ran less than a year ago, but already the concept feels dated to me. Embarrassment about Googling someone? As a journalist, I'd be embarrassed to go on a date without having Googled the potential suitor first—and looked him up on Lexis-Nexis and Facebook and (if he's older) Friendster, and tried... (To read the rest of this post, visit our new website DoubleX.com!)

Meet My Book Publisher, Google

Yesterday something important happened in the world of books: A federal judge ordered an extension of the deadline for authors to choose to participate in the Google book search settlement. The deadline had been May 5; now it's September 4. This is important, because the settlement is very peculiar, and more attention ought to be paid to what is going on. It presents a lot complicated questions that merit more debate. By settling, Google essentially transformed a relatively small lawsuit brought by the Author's Guild into a class-action style settlement that applies to all books. (Or so I understand from this piece.)

The part that is cause for concern has to do with so-called "orphaned books," or books that are out-of-print and whose copyright holders can't be located. In the fine print of the settlement, Google has in effect set up what some feel will be a monopoly on these books (you can read more at this New York Times blog) claiming it has the rights to scan them and put them online. This is one thing: Many writers would want their books to be widely available once they are, say, dead, and can't benefit from royalties. But Google isn't necessarily merely planning to make books more available. The company would establish something called the "Books Rights Registry," initially funded by it, which will, as I understand it, handle request for reprints, and be the recipient of monies derived from sales. All of this may end up being on the plus side for authors, but what is troubling is how far the range of the settlement was expanded, and with very little public knowledge. As Pamela Samuelson, a copyright scholar at Berkeley, put it last Friday:

In the short run, the Google Book Search settlement will unquestionably bring about greater access to books collected by major research libraries over the years. But it is very worrisome that this agreement, which was negotiated in secret by Google and a few lawyers working for the Authors Guild and AAP (who will, by the way, get up to $45.5 million in fees for their work on the settlement—more than all of the authors combined!), will create two complementary monopolies with exclusive rights over a research corpus of this magnitude. Monopolies are prone to engage in many abuses.

The Book Search agreement is not really a settlement of a dispute over whether scanning books to index them is fair use. It is a major restructuring of the book industry’s future without meaningful government oversight. The market for digitized orphan books could be competitive, but will not be if this settlement is approved as is.

Will Google Monopolize Books Someday?

Not long ago, I became obsessed with a book of poems by Thomas James, called Letters to a Stranger. The poems were brilliant and uncanny, magical and beguiling. They were also out-of-print. I read them in a kind of samizdat xerox passed around by the poet Lucie Brock-Broido. They did not exist in book form, as I recall, because no one could find James' relatives in order to get permission to publish the poems. Just last year, these poems were finally published, and an underground classic became available in print.

I mention this because James's book is a type of "orphaned" book that Google is claiming it would one day have had the right to publish, had James's relatives never been found. At least, that's what this post over at BoingBoing says. The back story is this: As you may remember, many writers were happy when the Author's Guild and Google finally reached a settlement over Google Book Search, which authors had claimed infringed upon their rights. (See here for more.) But as the BoingBoing post notes, the settlement has a funny loophole: It apparently allows for Google to take over rights of books whose authors have died, disappeared, or can't be found. As I understand it, in the past the rights to some of these books would have returned to the public domain; now they will go to...Google. The brilliant Lewis Hyde is protesting here.