Former children's laureates Quentin Blake, Anne Fine and Jacqueline Wilson, bestselling authors Jeffrey Archer and Louis de Bernières and critical favourites Thomas Pynchon, Zadie Smith and Jeanette Winterson have all opted out of the controversial Google book settlement, court documents have revealed.
Note: The Guardian is using a total of 6,500 authors opting out.
As well as the authors named above, these include the estates of Rudyard Kipling, TH White, James Herriot, Nevil Shute and Roald Dahl, Man Booker prizewinners Graham Swift and Keri Hulme, poets Pam Ayres, Christopher Middleton, Gillian Spraggs and Nick Laird, novelists Bret Easton Ellis, James Frey, Monica Ali, Michael Chabon, Philip Hensher and Patrick Gale, historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, biographer Victoria Glendinning and bestselling author of the Northern Lights trilogy Philip Pullman.
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"I decided to opt out of the Google book settlement on the advice of my agency, David Higham Associates, and on the advice of Gill Spraggs, who had read the small print. Then I was inspired to read the small print too, and I didn't like what I found. Google's preemptive action has 'turned copyright law on its head'. It seems they plan, unilaterally, to take ownership away from the writer, and the ownership doesn't pass to the readers (fat chance!) but to a giant profit-making corporation. A vast entity allegedly intent on 'doing nothing evil' has simply decided this will be so, and then hired a fleet of lawyers to make it happen," said award-winning science fiction author Gwyneth Jones. "The danger to me, and every other writer, is not that our works will be available free online (I offer most of my recent novels free online already. These 'portable document format' novels are the text as I wrote it, and they do my sales no harm at all.
Most of the authors who opted out were still likely to continue to have their works indexed by Google, said James Grimmelmann, an associate professor at New York University law school.
He described the number of opt-outs as largely symbolic and a sign of the unease many authors have expressed about the plan.
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Both supporters and opponents of the plan said the author opt-outs were unlikely to make much of a dent in Google’s book service. The number of authors is relatively small compared with the large numbers of works Google has digitised, according to a spokesperson for the Open Books Alliance, a consortium of Google’s opponents.
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