Books: A plan to scan By Richard Waters in San Francisco

Books: A plan to scan By Richard Waters in San Francisco

Published: August 12 2009 21:54 | Last updated: August 12 2009 21:54

graphic of pixelized old books

A 1960 sociological study of female Finnish students or an 1894 handbook on how to  play cricket are probably at the top of no one's poolside reading list this year.

Long out of print, such works are more likely to be gathering dust in attics, languishing forgotten at the backs of people's bookshelves or, as in the case of these two volumes, mouldering in the Harvard and Wisconsin university libraries respectively. Of the estimated 40m different books held by US libraries, well over half are unlikely ever to find their way back into a publisher's favour.

That makes an effort by Google, to burrow deep into the leading US research libraries to make digital copies of all the works it can lay its hands on, seem both ambitious and quixotic. The project, begun nearly five years ago, has also started scanning out-of-copyright works from libraries in other countries. A digital archive of all extant books – even ones in which few people are these days likely to show much interest – is carrying the internet company's mission to "organise the world's information" to the extreme.

Yet this mountain of fading literary oddments is now at the centre of a fierce debate in the book world that is about to come to a head.


After facing copyright lawsuits in the US over the digitisation project, Google reached a settlement last year that seemed to have something for just about everyone: publishers and authors, because it gives them a chance to make money from long-forgotten works; public and university libraries, as it provides them with a way to leap beyond their dead-tree stacks into the digital age; and readers, to whom it brings access to millions of works that would otherwise have remained out of reach.

But this agreement with the US book industry, which awaits court approval, has stirred up the sort of passions that always attach to books, those most cultural of manufactured objects. In particular, the deal has provoked the fear that a more centralised industry will arise as publishing turns digital, upending checks and balances put in place over decades.

"The book world has done really well out of decentralisation – anyone who has ideas, or access to a printing press, can take part," says James Grimmelmann, associate professor at New York Law School, a leading critic of the settlement. Giving Google too much power over old, out-of-print works, he adds, could set the stage for its dominance of the broader digital book market: "Control over the past will translate into control over the future of books."

The US Department of Justice has taken such concerns seriously enough to launch an investigation into the competitive implications of the settlement: it is due to submit its views to the court considering the case in the middle of next month. Before that, the European Commission has called its own hearing on the issue, to consider the impact on Europe's book industry and authors' rights.

The main focus of the settlement falls on out-of-print books that are still in copyright. These works probably account for 60 per cent or so of all books in the US, making them a massive – if heavily underused – intellectual resource. While Google's initial go-it-alone approach to digitising these works brought angst and lawsuits, the accord has turned it into an ally of the American book world. Unless copyright owners opt out of the plan, a Book Rights Registry to be run by representatives of the publishers and authors will have the power to license digital rights for all out-of-print books in the US to Google.

Google will then make parts of these works available through its search service, sell subscriptions to the entire database to university libraries and others – every library in the US will be offered a single free terminal to tap into the treasure trove – and sell access to full versions of individual works hosted on its computers. It will keep 37 per cent of the money from these sales, passing the rest to the registry to be paid out to copyright holders.

The undertaking is set to cost "hundreds of millions of dollars", says Dan Clancy, head of the Google Books effort. Yet there is little business in old books: second-hand volumes are estimated to account for less than $1bn of the $25bn US books market. The scale of the ambition makes it the sort of thing that only a Google would contemplate – or be able to afford.

David Balto, a former justice department lawyer, argues that any antitrust concerns are dwarfed by the benefits the settlement will bring. "What Google is doing is incredible – from a competition policy perspective, you don't want to punish people who are risking millions of dollars doing things like this that haven't been done before," he says.

Even the settlement's critics admit that it will bring immediate and substantial benefits, making millions of books widely available in the US for the first time. Yet its potential long-term impact on the shape of the digital book market has guaranteed that the settlement will attract close regulatory scrutiny, whatever its immediate attractions.

Critics fear that two aspects in particular could hand Google too much power, while also leaving a coterie of publishers and authors with disproportionate sway over setting prices for digital works, to the detriment of readers.

The first concerns the exclusive right that Google would have to distribute digital books whose copyright holders cannot be traced. These so-called "orphan works" may make up a large portion of all out-of-print tomes: Paul Courant, head of the University of Michigan library, estimates that they amount to 1m-2.5m of his collection of 8m volumes.

Congress has failed in its own efforts to free up these works so they can be sold without the risk of claims later from the copyright owners. It is a peculiarity of class action law in the US, though, that private legal action can achieve a result that has eluded Congress: since Google and the new books registry would be free to sell works whose owners did not actively opt out of the court-approved settlement, they would assume a right not available to anyone else.

But even if Google is left as sole distributor of orphan works, do the benefits outweigh antitrust worries? "Google is certainly going to be in a position of power in out-of-print books – but out-of-print books aren't exactly hot commercial properties," says Mr Courant. Balanced against that are the benefits to readers: "Being able to use these orphan works is much, much better than nothing."

Opponents say this understates the potential value to Google in the long run. Having the world's most comprehensive collection could make it the default first choice for book buyers, overshadowing Amazon.com's claim to be the world's biggest bookstore. "You're much more likely to turn to Google first because they'll have many more titles," says the law school's Mr Grimmelmann.

Google Books

The international dimension to the debate over orphan works has also started to resonate, particularly in France, where a lawsuit against Google brought by local publishers is due to be heard next month.

Under the Berne convention, a long-standing international copyright agreement, copyright owners do not have to register in every country in order to protect their rights. The opt-out provision of the US settlement appears to fly in the face of that agreement by pre-empting the rights of anyone who does not come forward.

The publicity surrounding the case, and the creation of a single registry to administer rights, should encourage more rights holders outside the US to come forward, says Mr Clancy at Google. But with some European publishers already suspicious of having their rights circumscribed by American litigation, a visceral opposition has been building – particularly since the benefits from the settlement will accrue only to people in the US.

A second controversy surrounds the intended Book Rights Registry. Similar agencies representing the collective interests of artists are familiar in other parts of the media industry, for instance, the music world. But these typically are the creation of a legislative process or operate under close antitrust scrutiny. The settlement tries to combine two conflicting objectives – to maximise the revenues to authors and publishers while ensuring the widest possible access to the out-of-print works. Whether the complex system of incentives it creates can have the desired effect is a source of considerable unease.

"The library subscription could be excessively expensive," says Mr Courant in Michigan, reflecting a widely held concern. Gary Reback, a Silicon Valley antitrust lawyer, adds that the registry may have an incentive to license its book rights only to Google in order to keep prices up, rather than encourage competing distributors.

Countering this, Mr Clancy contends that Google's business model is based on obtaining the widest possible distribution: "Google's interest is to make it cheap." Even if libraries do not buy a subscription, he adds, the terminal they will receive for visitors to access Google's digital files will leave them better off than now.

With scrutiny intensifying on both sides of the Atlantic, a moment of truth is at hand for Google and its new allies (including Pearson Education and Penguin, sister companies of the Financial Times). They can push ahead with their settlement and risk provoking a backlash. Or they can try to adjust the terms to defuse some of the criticisms.

Those changes could be relatively easy to make, say opponents. Representatives of wider interests, such as libraries and readers, could be included on the book registry to prevent it limiting distribution only to Google or seeking excessive prices, says Peter Brantley, director of the Internet Archive, a non-profit organisation that is working on a digital archive of its own.

The court that is due to approve the class action settlement could also find ways to extend the "orphan works" protections to distributors other than Google, says Randal Picker, a law professor at the University of Chicago – though legal opinions are divided on whether this is possible. Google itself says it supports the idea of legislation to resolve the problem.

With the Department of Justice set to issue its verdict in less than a month, its behind-the-scenes discussions with many of the interested parties have been intensifying, according to people involved. There is so far no public indication that any voluntary changes to the complex book settlement will be forthcoming. But it seems increasingly likely that adjustments will be needed if the millions of tracts, treatises, thrillers and tragedies already embedded in Google's vast memory bank are once more to see the full light of day.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009. Print a single copy of this article for personal use. Contact us if you wish to print more to distribute to others.
FT.com print article (16 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/d9c722a6-877e-11de-9280-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=03d100e8-2fff-11da-ba9f-00000e2511c8,print=yes.html
http://snipurl.com/q180y


The market in prospect

Behind Google's efforts to win friends and mollify critics in the book world lies a simple message: its vision for digital books is at least more appealing than that advanced by Amazon.com.

Though digital editions of books are still only a tiny part of the overall market, Amazon has created a model for how this business might work. Its Kindle reader and linked digital store, with books sold only in its proprietary format, echo the iPod/iTunes model with which Apple conquered digital music. Amazon's pricing power and tight control are starting to stir up the same concerns among publishers and booksellers that Apple aroused in the music industry.

Dan Clancy, the former rocket scientist who is in charge of Google's books project, cannot be drawn into mentioning the rival's name but says: "If there's a single player you should be concerned about in the digital books market, it's not Google." In Google's vision, books dematerialise and move into the "cloud" – they sit as digital files in its data centres and can be accessed on any internet-connected device, not tied to a single gadget like the Kindle.

The company's bet, says Mr Clancy, is that just as consumers have shown they want to download music and manage it on their home computers, they would rather browse a giant bookshelf in the sky when they are looking for something to read – and would rather have a choice of device on which to read it.

The works it is copying from universities create a foundation for this virtual bookshelf. They cannot be downloaded but there will be limited powers to copy and paste sections of works. Through deals with publishers, Google hopes to extend this approach to encompass new books, which have far greater commercial potential.

In another attempt to set itself apart from Amazon, Google is also seeking to position itself as an ally of traditional booksellers – though given the fear and uncertainty stirred up by the move towards digital books, this is proving a tough sell. In the future, while the "cloud books" reside on Google's servers, other retailers will be able to sell access to them. Eventually, says Mr Clancy, those digital rights could be sold through brick-and-mortar booksellers.

"Our core business is not selling books," he says. "Our core business is search and display. We will work well with people whose core business is selling books."

Ring the changes on conference calls By Rhymer Rigby

Ring the changes on conference calls By Rhymer Rigby

Published: August 11 2009 22:37 | Last updated: August 11 2009 22:37

Mention conference calls and you will soon discover the corporate world is sharply polarised.

On the one hand are those who sing their praises as a productivity- boosting business tool that helps cut travel costs at a time when budgets are tight.

Then there are those who absolutely hate them, believing them to be unwieldy and a poor substitute for a meeting.

But, love them or loathe them, they are an unavoidable fixture in business life.

“I couldn’t do my job without them,” says Tony Reeves, European partner at Clifford Chance, based in Brussels. “My clients are all over the world, in different time zones. They’re the only way of getting people together.” However, he adds, there are two golden rules: “The first is that you have to have a disciplined chair with an agenda and the second is that you can’t have mobile phones without a mute function.”

Mr Reeves says without an agenda, a conference call can quickly become rudderless or hijacked. He also cautions that the agenda should be short, as participants’ attention drifts more quickly when they are on the phone and they forget where to come in on the conversation.

The reason mobiles need to be muted is simply that they are prone to pick up and amplify background noise, which can disrupt the virtual meeting when others are talking and greatly reduce its efficiency.

Jane Farrell, chief executive of the consultancy Equality Works, takes a similar view: “The rules that are important in conference calls are those which are important in meeting.” Like Mr Reeves, she’s a strong believer in a good chair. “You want someone who is going to direct the meeting, to ensure that everyone has an opportunity to speak. They will also direct the call – for instance, saying, ‘We need a bit more detail’ when someone has been unclear.”

Cary Cooper, professor of business psychology at Lancaster University School of management, says a good chair will also be adept at conflict resolution. “In conference calls, conflict can be much more difficult to defuse. In a meeting, if things get heated people will normally take a break.” Not being physically there, he explains, tends to make people less inhibited: “If you want to be obstinate and block things, or argue and behave badly, it’s far easier to do.”

Mr Reeves believes conference calls are far more effective when done with people with whom you have spent a bit of face time. “It’s important to know the people you’re speaking to, as you can’t see and judge their body language. You also won’t know their seniority or their level of knowledge.”

There is also the question of the number of people involved. Ms Farrell says ideally there should be fewer than six, with 10 as an absolute maximum, although Mr Reeves notes that “four very loud people who want to express their opinions and don’t listen can be worse than 10 well-behaved people”.

Whatever the case, though, in bigger conference calls you need to introduce yourself each time you speak – which can feel rather odd – and a good chair should summarise the call at the end. Speaking of which, there needs to be a definite time limit: anything more than an hour is likely to be subject to a law of rapidly diminishing returns.

All these rules are fairly straightforward for a normal conference call, but it gets a bit more complex when you have a split call, incorporating some people in a meeting room and others who are elsewhere.

Ms Farrell says this type of call can be tricky to manage but is worthwhile. “I’ve done meetings where most of us were in a room, but one person was in Edinburgh on a mobile and another was in Belfast. Having that flexibility is very attractive, especially when things need to be discussed quickly.”

Although conference calls are not the same as being there in person, she says, the real benefit is they allow flexible working. However, she adds, care must be taken to ensure that remote participants are brought into the conversation.

Not everyone is convinced. Amelia Hibbs, a media planner, is not a fan: “I think that they’re awful,” she says, “You have people in various locations and you’re led to believe that it’s going to be similar to a real meeting. In fact, it’s far from it. People have complete disregard for normal meeting etiquette. You can always hear them them shuffling paper, typing, and shutting doors when they nip out.”

Ms Hibbs adds that people will often dial in late and that if more than a couple of people start talking – which would be a natural part of a physical meeting – it quickly becomes unintelligible.

Moreover, if you have a split meeting it can create a real “them and us” culture.

Worst of all though, she says, working in advertising, where so much is about nuance, not being able to read the body language is a real disadvantage. “And what I find really funny is the immature behaviour they bring out in people. Sometimes you can almost hear the faces being pulled.”

All this invites the question: does video-conferencing get round these problems? The answer is “Yes”, but it throws up significant difficulties of its own, not least that it often involves the inconvenience of going to a booked suite. Besides, if you are just on the phone you can play a part no matter where you are. “Last time I went skiing,” says Mr Reeves, “there was a guy on the balcony opposite our apartment doing a very professional-sounding conference call in his boxers.”

OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS

OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS

Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson

Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and for Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for Critical Mass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year's prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:

Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
"This is Gould's most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould's views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance."

Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), by Jared Diamond
"This isn't just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic."

Right Hand, Left Hand (2003), by Chris McManus
"Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn't afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It's my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain."

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
"Just what science needs: the ideal beginner's guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider's perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too."

The 2009 shortlist is at www.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks
FT.com print article (9 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=e502ea62-6264-11da-8dad-0000779e2340,print=yes.html
http://snipurl.com/pirde

Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond By David Pilling

Lunch with the FT: Jared Diamond By David Pilling

Published: August 7 2009 15:22 | Last updated: August 7 2009 15:22

Jared DiamondJared Diamond is the guru of collapse. Collapse is the title of one of the books that have made him a world-famous academic. It is a theme that captures the Zeitgeist: markets have collapsed, banks have collapsed and confidence, even in the capitalist system itself, has collapsed.

Diamond's celebrated book – which added to the reputation he earned through Guns, Germs andSteel, a Pulitzer prize-winner about why some societies triumph over others – sought to discover what makes civilisations, many at their apparent zenith, crumble overnight. The Maya of Central America, the stone-carving civilisation of Easter Island, and the Soviet Union – all suddenly shattered.

The question lurking in Diamond's work is: could we be next? Could the great skyscrapers of Manhattan one day become deserted canyons of a bygone civilisation, a modern version of Ozymandias's trunkless legs of stone?

Such thoughts are not top of my mind as I swing, in a bright yellow cab, past the splendid mansions of Bel Air under a cloudless Los Angeles sky. I had proposed meeting Diamond in Papua New Guinea, the place where his background in anthropology and evolutionary biology began to converge. Diamond had replied that he rarely made it to Papua New Guinea these days, and why didn't we have lunch at his Californian home instead.

After graduating from Harvard and then Cambridge, where he studied membrane biophysics, Diamond devoted years to researching the way substances, such as sugar, find their way in and out of cells. "I was the world's gall bladder expert," is how the 71-year-old describes his early years in academia. The gall bladder proved too confined a world. In his 20s, he studied the ornithology of New Guinea, publishing his first book, Avifauna of the EasternHighlands of New Guinea, in 1972. Over the next two decades he began to apply multi-scientific disciplines – including linguistics, evolutionary biology and environmental history – to big questions. The Third Chimpanzee, published in 1992 about human development, was followed by Why Sex isFun, the subject of which is pretty self-explanatory, and in 1998, Guns, Germs andSteel, the breakthrough work that brought him plaudits from scientists and generalists alike.

Set back from the road behind a white picket fence, Diamond's home is smaller and less gaudy than the surrounding mansions and mock châteaux. Nonetheless, it is quietly splendid. The professor of geography at UCLA, who is working on a book about what modern civilisation can learn from tribal societies, is waiting at the threshold to greet me. He is wearing a pink-and-white-striped shirt and casual slacks. Even from a distance I spot his white-peppered beard, neatly trimmed, in almost Amish style.

We make our way through a large hallway to the spacious kitchen at the rear. Diamond's wife is on her way out. Calling her "sweetie", he gives her a kiss and then, opening the cavernous refrigerator, announces in town-crier fashion: "Jared Diamond declares that he is about to pull out the California speciality of pomegranate juice, to which a story attaches. And then it is salmon, and orzo with spinach and bacon, and mixed vegetables that include squash with sage. And there is also yoghurt and there is an avocado and there is grapefruit."

I am famished, and opt for a bit of everything. Diamond ferries dishes to the large wooden table at which I am seated, my back to a pristine lawn. The plates he sets before me include one bearing a strikingly large wedge of chilled, delicately pink salmon that turns out to be the most succulent I have ever tasted.

As he moves between fridge and table, he launches into his pomegranate story. "Pomegranate was one of the first fruits domesticated in the world. It was domesticated in the Fertile Crescent around 4000 BC," he says. "A friend of mine, a very successful businessman, bought farm acreage in the central valley of California, which is the most productive agricultural area in the US. And there happened to be 100 acres of pomegranates, about which he knew very little. So he started learning about them and discovered how healthy they are, that they are full of vitamins and full of antioxidants and that they may be a treatment for prostate cancer."

OUTSTANDING SCIENCE BOOKS

Stephen Jay Gould to Bill Bryson

Jared Diamond has twice won the Royal Society Prize for Science Books, for The Rise and Fall of the Third Chimpanzee (1992) and for Guns, Germs and Steel (1998). Nicknamed the Booker Prize for science writing, the £10,000 award goes to an author chosen from a shortlist of six. Sir Philip Ball, who won the 2005 prize for Critical Mass: How One Thing Led to Another, is one of the judges for this year's prize, the results of which are announced on September 15. He tells John Sunyer about his favourite past-winners:

Wonderful Life (1991), by Stephen Jay Gould
"This is Gould's most popular and probably best book. It uses the story of the fossils of the Burgess Shale – a collection which shows how living creatures vastly diversified in form at the start of the Cambrian period – to explore Gould's views on how evolution happens, how it is represented in culture, and why it is so much a matter of chance."

Guns, Germs and Steel (1998), by Jared Diamond
"This isn't just a description of what we know but presents an original and important thesis in an accessible form. Diamond explores how human civilisation has been shaped by the geographical settings in which it has occurred: a vast, even awesome, topic."

Right Hand, Left Hand (2003), by Chris McManus
"Everything you could want to know about why left-right symmetry exists and what it means in nature, in humans, in art and in culture.
It is one of those books that isn't afraid to venture wherever the topic takes us, whether that is the origin of life, Billy the Kid or Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain. It's my favourite sort of science book, in which the science is just a launching pad for excursions into all kinds of wild and wonderful terrain."

A Short History of Nearly Everything (2004), by Bill Bryson
"Just what science needs: the ideal beginner's guide for anyone who thinks that science is scary. Bryson uses his outsider's perspective to fantastic advantage, asking the questions that every non-scientist wants to have answered. And, of course, it is funny too."

The 2009 shortlist is at www.royalsociety.org/
sciencebooks

The friend, Stewart Resnick, had the capital and commercial acumen to spread the message to the US consumer. Thus did the pomegranate boom begin, and the fruit make its way to the refrigerators of 21st-century America. The story somehow captures Diamond. We have the awe of ancient civilisations, the physical explanation of the fertile soil of ancient Mesopotamia and modern California, and the accident of his friend's financial resources and ingenuity. In this way, all things, big and small, come to pass.

There is no obvious segue between pomegranates and the recent shock to Anglo-Saxon capitalism but we get there via a discussion of collapsing fish stocks, a subject prompted by the salmon. Diamond knows I used to live in Japan and says, "If I was Japan's worst enemy trying to figure out a strategy to drive it into a crisis in 10 years' time, my strategy would be to get the Japanese to do exactly what they are doing, which is to over-harvest their main source of protein." Humans' ability to destroy the basis of their own livelihood is a recurring Diamond theme.

"There is a parallel based on the same fundamental mechanisms of the economic collapse that we're seeing now and the collapse of past civilisations such as the Maya," he continues. "The message is that when you have a large society that consumes lots of resources, that society is likely to collapse once it hits its peak."

He helps himself to a mouthful of vegetables, bought from the supermarket but as fresh-tasting as if he had dug them from the garden. Chewing slowly, he continues: "The Maya collapse began in the late 700s, and then simply the most advanced society in the New World collapsed over the course of several decades. They were mostly gone a century later," he says wistfully. "When a complex structure like that starts collapsing, you are pulling out dominoes in the whole structure."

I ask whether Lehman Brothers is such a domino. "The events of last October have crept up seemingly so suddenly," he replies: "I say 'seemingly' because, in a sense, it is not at all sudden. Any idiot knows that if you are drawing more money out of your bank than you are paying into your bank, then eventually something is going to happen. Somehow this lesson escaped the decision-makers in the US government."

Much of his writing suggests that only those societies able to stamp out unsustainable habits – over-logging, overspending, over-extension – have the ability to survive, I say, helping myself to more pomegranate juice. One might conclude that free-market economies, with less ability to rein in over-consumption of blue-fin tuna or over-leverage of red-blooded bankers, were more vulnerable to sudden failure.

But Diamond rejects the notion that his work can be read as advocating authoritarian central planning. "When people talk about the greater efficiency of dictatorships, they are forgetting that a dictatorship is no more likely than a democracy to make a wise decision," he says. The Chinese government moved quickly to ban lead in petrol, but it also virtually abolished education during a phase of the Cultural Revolution, he says. A democracy could never do that.

"This is orzo," he says, his mind turning to the barley-shaped pasta he is spooning onto my plate. As he traipses off to fetch a selection of teas, I notice he is wearing blue cloth sandals. A lawnmower buzzes in the background. In a hutch on the kitchen floor, a large rabbit munches away quietly. "You are welcome to try these," he says, returning with some fancy-labelled bottles. "We have pomegranate lychee green tea, pomegranate hibiscus green tea, pomegranate white tea."

Diamond strikes me as such a thoughtful man, so empathetic to other cultures and so obviously liberal in his outlook, that I was surprised to learn that some critics have described him as something close to a racist. According to his detractors, he puts too much emphasis on the environment and too little on social factors, thereby implying that people cannot change their physical inheritance.

But Guns, Germs and Steel, a book that sets out to discover why Europeans conquered the Aztecs, and not the other way around, seems to me a cogent demolition of racism. Dismissing as nonsense the argument that Europeans were racially or culturally superior, the book seeks to find the real reasons.

"Why do they say it is racism?" Diamond winces, clearly upset. "I think mainly because I discussed the subject at all. But I discuss why X conquered Y because it is a big question of history." He pauses before addressing his imaginary critics: "It is perverse and weird." Collapse is subtitled How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed, a swipe at those who suggest his books preclude choice. There is plenty of room for free will, he says. Yet he is sticking to his conviction that geography – the ease with which wild plants can be domesticated, or the prevalence of certain diseases – can have profound effects on a society's development.

"Was it a cultural choice that the Inuit up in the Arctic did not become farmers? No, it wasn't. You could not have agriculture in the Arctic," he bristles. "So it seems to me that the rise of agriculture in the modern world really does involve strong environmental influences. And if you want to call that geographical determinism, you can call it geographical determinism. Except that we are taught to react to that like you should react to wife-beating and incest with your mother: we all know it is not nice, and that it should be stopped.

"I find the easiest way to eat these is just to cut off the top and then break it into segments," he says, his focus suddenly narrowing from controversies of human agriculture to the single grapefruit before us. The abundance of food in his kitchen prompts me to return to the theme of sustainability.

"The average per-person consumption rate in the first world of metal and oil and natural resources is 32 times that of the developing world," says Diamond. "That means that one American is consuming like 32 Kenyans." The problem is not the number of Kenyans, the problem is when Kenyans or, more pressingly, big developing countries such as China, gain the ability to consume like Americans.

Can't humans simply increase the supply of resources as they have done before? "We can change the supply of some things if there is only one limiting resource. If it is food, then we can have a green revolution and produce more crops," he says. "Unfortunately, we need lots of resources. We need food, we need water. We are already using something like 70 or 80 per cent of the world's fresh water. So you say, 'Alright, we'll get around water by desalinating sea water.' But then there's the energy ceiling, and so on."

With a nod to the feast before us, I say there seems little chance that Chinese or Indians will forgo the opportunity to live a western-style existence. Why should they? It is even more improbable that westerners will give up their resource-hungry lifestyles. Diamond, for example, is not a vegetarian, though he knows a vegetable diet is less hard on the planet. "I'm inconsistent," he shrugs. But if we can't supply more or consume less, doesn't that mean that, like the Easter Islander who chopped down the last tree, thus condemning his civilisation to extinction, we are doomed to drain our oceans of fish and empty our soil of nutrients?

"No. It is our choice," he replies, perhaps subconsciously answering his critics again. "If we continue to operate non-sustainably, then in 50 or 60 years, the US and Japan and Europe will be in bad shape. But my friends in the highlands of New Guinea will be fine. Some of my friends made stone tools when they were children and they could just go back to what their ancestors were doing for 46,000 years. New Guinea highlanders are not doomed," he says, draining his pomegranate juice. "The first world lifestyle will be doomed if we don't learn to operate sustainably."

David Pilling is the FT's Asia editor

..................................................

Jared Diamond's house
Bel Air, Los Angeles

Chilled salmon
Orzo with bacon and spinach
Mixed roast vegetables
One avocado
One grapefruit
One pomegranate lychee green tea
Lots of pomegranate juice
FT.com print article (9 August 2009)
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/144fa854-82e2-11de-ab4a-00144feabdc0,dwp_uuid=e502ea62-6264-11da-8dad-0000779e2340,print=yes.html
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Why the case for assisted dying is unanswerable By Samuel Brittan

Why the case for assisted dying is unanswerable By Samuel Brittan

Published: August 7 2009 19:26 | Last updated: August 7 2009 19:26

Let me declare, as parliamentarians sometimes do, an interest. I am neither a legal nor a medical expert, but I am a rather inactive member of Dignitas, a British organisation which campaigns for better-quality palliative care for terminally ill people, but also for “the option of medically assisted dying” when such people “are of sound mind and are experiencing unbearable suffering”. My only qualification is that as an economics writer I have some experience of assessing the costs and benefits of alternative courses of action. Nor am I going to detail the sufferings of terminally ill people who have lost all will to live but cannot find a dignified, legal exit.

I have nothing to say to those religious fundamentalists who consider that in no circumstances should life ever be terminated. I leave it to them to reconcile their views with their belief in a merciful God. They also need to be very sure of their convictions to impose them on the rest of humanity. But for the rest of us, some progress has been made. Attempted suicide is no longer a crime in the UK. There is also an instrument known as a Living Will under which I can declare that if I become “mentally incompetent to express my opinion”, and after two independent physicians agree my condition is irreversible, then certain kinds of treatment should not be given. The legal force of such documents is not clear, but many doctors now take them into account.

Most of the present argument is about “assisted dying” for those of sound mind. There have been notable cases of terminally ill people making accompanied visits to Switzerland, where the law is different. In the UK, assisting or abetting suicide is still a crime theoretically punishable by up to 14 years’ imprisonment. No returning companion has been so prosecuted. When the Law Lords were asked for a ruling by Debbie Purdy , a 46-year-old suffering from multiple sclerosis, who wanted to know whether her husband would be prosecuted if he helped her commit suicide overseas, they requested the Crown Prosecution Service for guidelines. An interim report is expected this September.

There is an overwhelming case for the removal of the threat of a custodial sentence for those who help their loved ones die in any country. Opinion polls show large majorities in favour of such changes, but attempts to enact them have so far failed to get through parliament.

There are many reasons why terminally ill people may want help in taking their own lives. They may lack the pharmaceutical knowledge to choose the least painful or quick acting drug. They may not be able to get hold of such drugs legally. Or in extreme cases they may need physical help in taking them. In some cases they may just want to depart this world surrounded by their nearest and dearest. But under present law there is a risk that their relatives and friends could be prosecuted for aiding and abetting.

The secular case against assisted dying can be put crudely as the fear that the procedure would be abused “to put granny away and take over her house”. Statistical surveys in the Netherlands and the US state of Oregon, where the law has been reformed, show no rise in the number of suicides that would have occurred if there had been such abuses on a significant scale. But I do not want to depend on statistical averages. There would undoubtedly be at least some abuses under a reformed law. But these have to be set against the much greater hardship almost certainly inflicted by the present suicide laws.

A more refined consideration is philosopher Bertrand Russell’s view that the remedy for the pains of old age and fear of death is to identify oneself less with personal concerns and more with the future of the human race. He lived up to his counsel, spending a week in jail at the age of 90 for his anti-nuclear activities and dying at 97 still corresponding with world leaders. But we cannot all be like him. Creative artists have often revelled in the pains and brevity of life. Last week, I went to hear Gustav Mahler’s Sixth or “Tragic” Symphony. After two or three literal hammer blows the work ends with a resounding orchestral crash that never fails to shock. Yet it does not, literally, remove anyone’s pain.

Any new law would have to be carefully drafted. What should be done about those who want to take their lives because of what can only be described as Weltschmerz, or world-weariness? An excellent play, Collaboration, by Ronald Harwood focuses on the German composer Richard Strauss and his Jewish librettist, the Austrian Stefan Zweig. The latter fled to Brazil, where he and his wife took their lives in 1942 because he could not acclimatise to life outside Europe. If, however, Zweig had hung on until 1943 when the war turned in favour of the Allies, life might again have seemed worth living. But you cannot expect the law or the medical profession to play God in such matters.

But to come down to earth. The main reason it is so difficult to reform the law on assisted dying is that those on the fundamentalist side will be prepared to base their votes on this issue, while humanist utilitarians will see it as only one of many issues. Or so ministers fear, which comes to nearly the same thing. Meanwhile my best advice is to make your wishes unmistakably clear while you are still in normal mental and physical health.

www.samuelbrittan.co.uk

America’s healthcare should no longer be tied to jobs By Matt Miller

America’s healthcare should no longer be tied to jobs By Matt Miller

Published: July 30 2009 22:32 | Last updated: July 30 2009 22:32

The bipartisan “gang of six” in the Senate wants to fine employers whose workers choose Medicaid, the US public healthcare system, rather than more costly insurance from their company. The House wants to impose an 8 per cent payroll tax on all but the tiniest companies that do not offer healthcare. These damaging proposals show that both political parties remain deeply confused about the roles of government and corporations in a modern economy. Their premise – that companies have a duty to provide health benefits – has such perverse consequences that it may doom reform efforts altogether.

America’s unique employer-based healthcare system may have made sense 50 years ago, when healthcare was cheap and business faced little global competition. But today’s circumstances are radically different. Soaring health costs strangle business and absorb cash that could otherwise go to wages. The link between healthcare and employment explains why millions of Americans have lost coverage during this recession. Budding entrepreneurs with ill spouses or children stay in jobs they loathe for fear of losing the insurance they need. Keeping employers at the core of the welfare state is bad for business, bad for the economy and bad for families.

With flaws like these you would think a prime goal of health reform would be to give everyone access to group health coverage outside the employer setting. But you would be wrong. Amazingly, this goal was taken off the table at the start. President Barack Obama and Democrats in Congress feared that moving beyond the employer-based system would leave them assailed as “socialists”. Business feared being slammed by unions for “shirking responsibilities”. Unions feared that if health benefits were no longer shaped through collective bargaining, their standing would fall further. Everyone in Washington feared too much “change”.

But ignoring the key structural flaw in US healthcare is precisely what has brought the question of how to finance expanded coverage to its current impasse. Having decided not to move beyond employer-based care, politicians now view the shift of Americans to any plan that requires public subsidy as a negative, because it adds to the cost of reform.

The most depressing examples of this thinking are the proposed rules to keep people in job-based care. Strict limits, for example, would govern who could use new insurance “exchanges” that would give access to competing plans, including a public insurance option. Those who already have coverage from an employer would be barred from seeking coverage there. But this is exactly the opposite of what sound policy should be doing. Worse, this lockdown obviously does not lower national health costs at all – it just keeps the amount on the public ledger below some threshold deemed politically acceptable.

The better solution would be a “grand bargain”, through which business shifts health costs off its payrolls and on to government, in exchange for business supporting the broader revenue needed for government to accommodate this shift. Contrary to conservative claims, it is perfectly possible to do so in market-friendly ways. As health systems in Switzerland and Holland show, the US could have universal coverage without taking the road of single-payer care.

Democratic Senator Ron Wyden has been the lonely voice arguing that America must move beyond job-based healthcare to boost business competitiveness while assuring family health security. Mr Wyden mustered a small bipartisan coalition around such a plan, but the weight of dead ideas in Washington has stifled the proposal.

In the long term there is reason for hope. As long as some form of insurance exchange is included in any final bill, some non-poor, non-elderly Americans will for the first time have a way to buy group coverage outside employment. This infrastructure can expand and become a safe way to move more people out of job-based coverage over time. Mr Wyden hopes to accelerate that process; he has proposed that workers be able to take the money employers spend on their benefits and use it to buy coverage at the exchanges if they prefer. If these innovations are launched in even modest form this year, America will be on a path to consigning employer-based coverage to the dustbin of history, where it now belongs.

The writer, a management consultant, is the author of The Tyranny of Dead Ideas

Could Plushmusic supplant record labels? By Laura Battle

Could Plushmusic supplant record labels? By Laura Battle

Published: July 18 2009 01:57 | Last updated: July 18 2009 01:57

It’s a chicken-and-egg question. Is the internet simply filling the void left by a natural fall in classical record sales or is it confirming and hastening the descent? The shrinking CD market has been well documented (and has been made all too apparent by the disappearance of the high street record store) along with growing speculation about the health of the classical record industry – but it’s difficult to determine the internet’s role, and whether it is online pioneers or traditional labels that are now calling the shots.

Since the mid-1990s the classical music industry has been accused of myopically cultivating a handful of profitable stars – many of them so-called “crossover” as opposed to echt-classical – to the detriment of up-and-coming musicians, who find it increasingly difficult to set up recording contracts. With the advent of broadband internet these performers and composers have been able to bite back by posting high-quality music samples and MP3 files on their personal websites or social networking profiles, and thereby undercutting the traditional dependence on labels. But until recently they have lacked support or a sense of community.

This looks set to change with the development of Plushmusic, a new kind of music website that went live last November and has just received its official launch. In the words of its founder and artistic director Adrian Brendel, cellist and son of the great pianist Alfred Brendel, it was “born out of the idea of giving musicians the opportunity to record things in a different way, and to use new technology for new projects”. The Plushmusic name might sound a bit kitschy (it could almost inspire a new subgenre of “easy listening” – heaven forbid) but its origins are reassuringly wholesome: in 1995 Brendel founded a chamber music festival in the Dorset village of Plush and the website has developed as an extension of its values and activities.

As at Plush, there is a strong emphasis on chamber music but there are also designated areas for opera, jazz and world music. Individual artists are given “channels”, where they can they can post free video excerpts or charge users for a complete streaming or download of a live concert recording. Classical guitarist Zoran Dukic, for example, has posted a number of free audio clips, while Julian Steckel has made available a film of himself performing Kaija Saariaho’s short piece for solo cello Spins and Spells, and pianist Aleksandar Madzar is charging £9.99 for a high definition recording of a concert he performed at last year’s Plush festival.

So far this section represents exclusively professional, hand-picked artists but elsewhere, under the “community” tab, anyone can set up a personal channel, and interact with forums and message boards.

There are, of course, already a number of sites that stream classical music, including Classicaltv and the Berlin Philharmonic’s own “digital concert hall”. But Plushmusic is the first to conflate the roles of record label, publicist, impresario and TV channel. As such, it hopes not only to support artists but also the wider network of arts. Music venues and festivals, for example, are likely to benefit from links to upcoming events and a blog, which proved a powerful publicity tool at last year’s Cologne Festival, where saxophonist Hayden Chisholm and his band performed a series of jazz concerts. And they are encouraged to become media partners with Plushmusic.

A number of high-profile companies, including Glyndebourne, the Wigmore Hall and the Cheltenham Festival, have already been convinced. As Brendel explains: “The flexibility of the site means that festivals and venues, as well as artists, can use it, and to a certain degree autonomously.” Glyndebourne is currently offering free clips of recent productions of Giulio Cesare and Hansel and Gretel and, for those of a sterner disposition, the entire performance of Tristan und Isolde to download for £24.99. An upcoming streaming of this season’s new Falstaff production, which will be free for a limited period, highlights the win-win nature of this collaboration: the Glyndebourne name brings new users to Plushmusic and, in return, the opera house gets wide-reaching publicity ahead of their autumn tour.

There will be many hoping the site will also offer some transparency on the smoke- and-mirrors world that is the classical record industry. All too often albums are tailored around a perceived personality or – where that individual has the influence or gumption – negotiated on a bartering basis: “You can have your quirky Schoenberg number if we can toss in ‘Song to the Moon’.” Here, however, artists retain creative and editorial control, and design their own playlists, whether it’s a programme of improvised jazz or back-to-back Bartók. Indeed, independence and flexibility are all part of the ethos: “We’d like to decentralise it a bit so that we can ask artists who we respect and admire to conceive of projects of their own and come back with some ideas rather than us just steering it,”Brendel explains.

Already pop labels and festivals are looking to websites like MySpace for a heads-up on flourishing bands, based on viewing figures and online reception, and it seems likely that the classical industry will follow suit. When asked if Plushmusic could pose a threat to the traditional record label, Brendel admits the project will prove “very subjective”, and explains that while Hyperion has been keen to engage, believing the project can be mutually beneficial, other labels have been less enthusiastic.

“It’s such a volatile space at the moment because no one really knows what’s going to happen in the short term or long term with the recording industry, but we’re seeing more and more general interest and we’re really encouraged by the reaction of musicians.”

It is, of course, early days, but if Plushmusic gathers pace and power the consequences could be quite provocative. Once sites such as this successfully supplant the role of record labels, it can’t be long before people begin to question the necessity of agents: if musicians can manage and market their own recordings, if they can nurture relationships with opera houses, music venues and festivals around the world, and interact directly with a pre-existing and potential audience, what need is there for middlemen?

www.plushmusic.tv