identity, president of the author's built, president of the author's bill. >> the organization of professional -- professional authors in the united states. and sticking up on offers. >> host: is the guild's just best-selling authors? >> guest: includes everyone from self published doctors who make money at it, too a number of best-selling authors. frankly best-selling authors don't need anywhere near as much help as people who are starting out and people who are struggling to make a living. that is where our interests are concentrated, it remains a livelihood. for as many as possible. >> host: recently in the new york times you wrote the slow death of the american author as president of the author's built. >> the advent of digital has basically set off a free-for-all. everybody is trying to reposition themselves in this universe and the net result is everyone wants to do it at the expense of authors diminishing the value of copyright, paying lower royalties as the publishers want to do, libraries -- all kinds of things that diminish the market. and people have the attitude of those authors are so greedy whereas if you were talking about giving way automobiles everyone would understand why general motors would be unhappy. >> host: you take on amazon but why amazon? what has amazon done to hurt authors? >> guest: amazon, a company that can be either all bad or all good. amazon has done some great things for authors, especially kindled singles and self published authors, they have also done things that i think are not as clearly in an author's best interest including trying to build the bookstores. now they have got -- acquired a patent to resell e-book and they started out by creating this market for resale hardcovers which was damaging sales. reselling e-book would mean selling three e-book and everybody else would buy at a reduced price from amazon. and of course the big problem with that is that as i said, all of those profits from the second sale would go to amazon and that is the difficulty. >> host: you talk about a recent supreme court case. >> this was an example of what i said, no matter what you do authors end up getting kicked. this was an esoteric case before the supreme court but the publisher, publishing textbooks in english in foreign countries with the explicit provision that it couldn't be resold in the united states. a young student began importing english-language books through his family in thailand and selling him in the u.s. and said you can't do that and the supreme court said no, the first sale doctrine which treat the book as a physical object, the same way, sell it to whoever you want, that applies even to foreign sales of books, this young man could result textbooks from the united states. wasn't a big deal, although you never could have done that years ago he does it on the internet and ebay. it is just one more fairly unimportant example of how the advent of the digital world is nibbling away at authors and sources of income. >> host: one other, not any but one other point you make is public library and e-books, what is their role? >> guest: authors and libraries of long been friends and i hope they will continue to be. the problem is a lot of public librarians believe that information wants to be free which is a polite way of saying books ought to be freeze of a are very regressive in advocating digital scanning of existing copyright books and e-book lending from home. additionally you could use a library book for free but had to go to the library. now they want and have succeeded in persuading publishers to make e-book available to anybody with that library card and internet connection and we will see how it works out. some publishers like my publisher grand central is publishing a "identical," my next novel, and they have said we will still use the e-book but at three times its retail costs. other of the major publishers have made other arrangements. some say it will last 26 weeks and vanish from the library's virtual shelf. there are all kinds of ways of dealing with the obvious fact that e-book lending from home will have an impact on e-book buying from home and this is a tough question because in the united states we have always had a public library system which made books available without cost to library patrons and most doctors i know have been nurtured by that system. they don't want to see it come down but i am always amused when people bang the gone for the free enterprise system without realizing that a wide prairie is basically a communist enterprise. it takes a good and delivers them for free to the masses. and it worked well for me and it has worked well for most of us but the fact that people take it as a right without recognizing the conflict in the rest of the system is pretty amusing and just one example, microsoft for example, doesn't say you can download microsoft word for free, you can lend it. they are not buying it so the biggest economic interest in the country don't allow the same things the library system trade book authors to do. >> host: is there a percentage, an estimate of a percentage on how many of your books people could get for free on the internet? >> guest: there are two means these days of getting books for free, one legitimate which is to borrow them from a library. bennett will vanish. the other unfortunate way is there are tons of book parting sites located offshore and unfortunately for my publishers and me every book i have written is available that way. i am happy i have readers in public libraries and for somebody like me it doesn't matter. nobody needs to hold it for me. pirating drives me crazy and it drives me crazy because the search engines play a big role in this and they don't want any legislation that will keep them from directing their customers to these pirates sites. >> host: they had done these sites. >> guest: and it will direct you to the pirates light, google or yahoo! or everybody else are selling advertising in the process of doing that and as i pointed out if i went to a streetcorner and said to somebody where do i buy a joke around here and that person got paid every time they gave directions to a customer they would be in the penitentiary and yet google goes around with this motto don't the evil and as i said everybody is pretty much uncompromising in this environment and the truth is we all have to exist together and if we don't it is going to threaten everybody's existence. it is enter depended ecology. you can't have libraries without authors. google, whatever it wants to do in sampling copyrighted work, they're going to run out of it eventually view don't have more people writing books. so it ought to be a cooperative venture. to some extent there are people who actually come in and intervene and make this more difficult. the antitrust division of the justice department for example, we settle a big lawsuit with google. the antitrust division comes in and says we don't like it because all the little tiny corner of the market google will have a monopoly. not wrong but a public benefit of getting the content of several major university libraries available to people around the world, many fleas through public library terminals, seems to overwhelm this minor concern of the justice department objective. and that is typical of what seems to be happening, even when the people with in the ecosystem can work out their differences somebody else intervenes, everything is up for grabs the google and the author's built for example reached an amicable solution along with the publishers. we all figured we would work something out in the best interests of readers and the world of knowledge, worked for google, work for the authors, work for the publishers and the justice department said no. that is typical. >> host: your new novel "identical," what kind of copyright protection will you have or do you have done this book? how long will it last? >> as you might expect my publisher will copy write the book on my behalf, i will own the copyright. the copyright term i am embarrassed to say i am not completely sure of. will last the rest of my life and i believe 50 years beyond that. that term has been extended mostly through the influence of companies like walt disney that didn't want mickey mouse to go out of copyright and the authors guild does not advocate unlimited copyright. we want them saying disney has a great idea about this. it used to be the life of the author plus 17 years. >> host: at that point is in the public domain. >> guest: that was the idea in the constitution, that offers were to supposed to have a monopoly over their work for a limited period of time the idea that that would encourage an independent creator collapse who would literally traffic in ideas for profit and framers view courtesy of noah webster who was the original promoter of this idea framers's view was a democracy thrives on having an independent class of people creating literature and the resulting ideas representing reality, that this was good for the democracy and it is in the constitution and power in congress to make copyright laws so i am not spouting off the wall policy notions' but i have come up with on my own. this is deeply imbedded in our concept of democracy. >> host: quite a bit of push back on this op-ed. you were called luddites among other things because of your position. >> guest: there are all kinds of different interests that don't like the idea of copyright protection. search engines as i said, they want to be able to exploit copyrighted works in all kinds of different ways. people do not realize how powerful google and its cousins are in congress now. google is i think the second-largest company in the world. and then a political system where money makes a difference, they swing in one way but it is not just the google of the world. amazon doesn't like some of the things i have to say. a too are a mighty economic entity and beyond that are what is referred to as the copy and lots, people who want all books to be free, and when copyright to have unlimited term. most of them are academics and they drive me nuts because there books don't make much money so of course they think they ought to be free because their economic well-being depends on being promoted within the university system where they are rewarded if there books are out there and well read and will review and so they have another way of making money and therefore say everybody's for got to be free. well, thanks, but the constitution didn't envision a patronage system for the creator class. it wanted them to be independent. it is really infuriating when people wrap themselves in the mantle of all knowledge ought to belong to all people but they don't forsake their university salaries which they are paid in order to create the works that they want to be free. >> host: any idea what percentage of "identical" will sell as an e-book? >> the predecessor stole better as an e-book that as a hard cover. i was very lucky both versions sold really well but at least three years ago, and you cannot begin to imagine how dynamic the book market has been throughout my career. the percentage of hardcover versus e-book is somewhere between 75% to 70% hardcovers still landed by reducing i would say innocent probably sold 35% hand that has to do with the fact that i am popular especially with lawyers so they support kindleds and ipads and hobo reading devices so i think that is what accounted for it. i am like every other author. whoever reads "identical" whether it is from the library or a reading device for the old-fashioned way of turning the pages, that is great with me. office first of all want an audience. >> host: not the we are encouraging people to do that but when his publishes in october will you check on line to see if people download it for free? >> guest: i know they will be able to download for free from pirates sight. the publishers are finally beginning to get a little more sophisticated. all of this invites a world literally like the cia where they are downloading countermeasures, hearing somebody propose a scheme that when you download a book in which the encryption has been stripped out, there will be something in it that will expand the size of the file so it eats up all of your computer space, all of your hard drive space and something like that is bound to happen if people keep stealing books. >> host: we have referred to "identical" a couple times. what is it about? >> guest: it is about identical twins, two men, one of the running for mayor and the other about to be released from prison after 25 years, and in the midst of the mayoral campaign of murder victim's brother, a wealthy eccentric guy accuses the mayoral candidate of also having a hand in the murder and this leads to the investigation of murder, it is about politics and murder and mystical kind of relationship between identical twins. >> host: how does it end? >> guest: very well. >> guest: scott turow, novelist, president of the authors guild joined us on booktv. comes out in october. >> host: here's what some of you had to say. >> ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ ♪ >> we want to know what you are reading this summer, tweet us or send us an e-mail. >> booktv is on location at book expo america in new york city held every year, the publisher's yearly conference held at the javits center in new york city and we're doing some books that are coming out this coming fall. joining us is george gibson, the publisher of bloomsbury publishing, tell us a little bit about this. >> it is the u.s. arm of a company located in england best known for publishing harry potter, originating all very power books, the u.s. operation was started in 1998 and grown steadily since then. that is 15 years and we are a general-interest publisher here, midsize general-interest publisher, fiction, nonfiction variety of different kinds of books. >> host: what are the challenges facing a mid-sized publisher these days? >> guest: between small and large. of your small you can be very reactive and personal and if you are a large you have a lot of resources and a reasonable level of resources with a lot of personal touch and try to publish books in as personal way as we can involving authors and authorized in the publishing of books so they get the best publishing experience. >> host: how important book tours? >> they can be very important, more challenging to put on now than they used to be in part because so many authors are out on tour. some bookstores to 700 events a year so that is two or three day and it is not getting all that big an audience that every event so we tend to send offers to institutions and organizations rather than bookstores because guaranteed audiences, sometimes they'd pull in a bookstore, we find those are more successful and we do a lot of bookstores but we're trying to broaden out the number that we aim at. >> host: a lot of the chatter is about the books, how does that affect you, what are your thoughts? >> we published an e-book of everything we published. e-book are incredibly important, that has been really interesting to watch, that he books have leveled off. hands gives everyone who loves the printed word, the printed book hope that the printed book doesn't disappear and the independent bookstores are doing really well in the country and they are having a renaissance and resurgence which is gratifying to hear and we are finding out readers, the printed book has more staying power and there's something intrinsically valuable about the physical object of a book, not just the physicality of it but people connected with in a different way than they do something on line, the tanned ability of a book is very special and can't be replicated on line. >> host: we wanted to talk about your upcoming titles. let's start with this one. ebony and it. >> this will be a controversial book written by a very well-known african-american academic who was at dartmouth when he wrote the book and it is a controversial story about how every major american university of the ivy league variety was in some way built on the back of slavery. slaves were involved and the slave economy was involved in the creation of almost every major academic institution in the country so you can tell how that is going to be controversial and we are publishing it in befall to coincide with back-to-school, back to college. it will get a lot of attention for the controversy that it inevitably will generate. >> host: doesn't seem to be a story that has been told. >> guest: it has not been which is why is surprising to a lot of people. >> host: tom standish. >> guest: the digital editor of the economist and he knows more about more things than anybody i met in my life, a fascinating man. this is the history of social media. you may think social media began when the internet was developed but it goes back 2,000 years and make a direct connection between what social media was like in roman and greek times and what it is like today and how similar those were and interrupted for 150 years by a big media, newspapers, radio, television, controlled what was said to the public and with the internet we have gone to all more open world which existed for thousands of years prior to the rise of the media. >> host: john furlong. >> guest: one of the founding periods, written biographies like george washington and others, and alexander hamilton, two polar opposites among the american founding fathers and what they represent the hamilton federalist, those themes still exist today and come up in our politics. if you want to understand politics today, understand the difference between jefferson and hamilton, first time they were put in a joint biography. >> host: do founding fathers would do well almost automatically? >> guest: it depends on who writes from. certain people are well known for doing that. they certainly -- there's always an audience for a book on the founding fathers, always. >> host: finally we want to talk about larry. >> the director of the center for politics at the university of virginia, has been fascinated by john f. kennedy ever since as a teenager he fell in love with politics in the kennedy administration and this is called the kennedy half century and will be the most comprehensive book to come out this fall about the legacy of john f. kennedy so it will encompass his campaign for the presidency, his brief term in office, his assassination and particularly focus on the impact the hat on every president since, everyone of a nine president since is directly linked to jfk in fascinating ways and ronald reagan more than any of them used the kennedy name, reputation, more ways than any president since. you might think bill clinton or barack obama but actually reagan did but every president made use of the kennedy name and kennedy legacy in one way or another. larry also landed the biggest hole ever undertaken about a public figure in america, that will be part of the book, new information about the assassination no one has seen before that he finally dragged out of bureaus and not released, we will embargo that into the book is finished. among many books on jfk this fall on the 50th anniversary of the assassination. >> host: this book is coming out in fall of 2015. when did you start working with larry on this book? >> guest: we acquired the book 2.5 years ago in 2011 and larry has pretty much been working -- 2010, working on it pretty much steadily ever since, a lot to do with vote university and this turned into a long look and a long project, the manuscript literally went into production this week earlier this week on monday so we are late with it but we will catch up in the production process. we should have been in production two months ago but we will make up the time. >> when used a production we're talking the end of may of 2015 this book coming out november of 2013 what do you mean by production? >> it goes to the copy editor. ..