[PLUG] google docs

[TedKubaska]

Thanks. What you say makes perfect sense to me. 

My buddy hangs out with a bunch of writers and would-be writers. They've discovered word processing and Windows and struggle with email. It's nearly impossible to carry on a technical discussion with them. I stepped into this because he'd been sending stories through email to several people and then collating comments from several copies. I've had good experience collaborating on google docs for technical specs and opensource projects and suggested that (the privacy is not perfect, but it's pretty good), and it opened up a can of worms. At this point I wished I'd kept my mouth shut. 

This has nothing to do with copyright law as one person suggested. If you sell First North American Serial Rights, you still retain copyright. Apparently also some publishers buy FNASR and never publish the story, which is something I find hard to understand, but it happens. And you're right, they pay essentially nothing. As an unpublished author he'd be lucky to give his story away. 

The group he hangs out with discusses electronic publishing a lot, but no one understands it .... either technically or legally. 

I've read the google doc EULA (and pages of blogs about it) and I think it is contradictory. At one point they say they have the right to publish and in another place they say that right is only to allow them to present the work to you on google docs. 

I think if he really wants a definitive answer he has to see a lawyer (and pay). I gathered up the comments here and sent them to him. Thanks for the input; I think he's gotten about all he's going to get from us Linux geeks. 

-ted 


On Jul 28, 2009, at 8:18 AM, Michael M. Moore wrote: 

There is clearly no issue if he uses Google Docs and does not make his 
document viewable by anybody and everybody. You can selectively share 
documents via Google Docs, so that only the people you identify can view 
and/or edit whatever you share. There's no risk that doing so would 
have any impact on first-serial rights. I think, also, that it is 
extremely unlikely that making a story publicly available on Google Docs 
would have any impact on first-serial rights, but if he's paranoid about 
it you can at least assure him that limiting his works' availability is 
perfectly safe. 

First-serial rights are fairly specific and, for most fiction writers, 
not really worth much in dollars. At this point, only the New Yorker 
pays what most people would consider real money for stories, and most 
writers have about as much of a chance of winning the lottery as getting 
a story published in the New Yorker. Most other magazines, literary 
journals, sci-fi magazines, etc., that publish any fiction at all pay a 
nominal fee, unless the author is already well-known. The value of a 
first-serial sale for unknown or little-known authors is mostly 
exposure, and resume-building so that the author looks more appealing to 
a book publisher. The days of competition among magazines for short 
stories are long gone, as are the days when authors like Ray Bradbury or 
Truman Capote could make some nice change from selling first-serial 
rights even before they became famous. 

There might be more of issue with electronic rights, but again I think 
that's extremely doubtful even with a story that is publicly available 
over Google Docs. A service like Scrib'd might present more of a 
problem, since that is more of a "publication" tool than a collaboration 
tool (like Google Docs.) 

-- 
Michael M. 

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