Posthumous Nuala O'Faolain book launched

A POSTHUMOUS book from Nuala O’Faolain was launched at the final day of the Dublin Book Festival yesterday.

A More Complex Truth: Selected Writings is a selection of Ms O'Faolain's non-fiction from the mid-1980s to shortly before her death in 2008.

The essays were selected by Tony Glavin who worked with the writer on her bestselling memoir Are You Somebody?They are accompanied by an introduction from Fintan O'Toole. They cover matters such as sex, contraception, old age and the Border, and look at figures including Charlie Haughey, Mary Robinson and John McGahern.

Also at the Dublin Book Festival yesterday, it emerged that a representative from the Irish Copyright Licensing Agency is to meet with Google executives in Brussels tomorrow to discuss the implications of the internet giant’s digitisation project for Irish authors and publishers.

Google has embarked on an ambitious – and controversial – plan to digitise the world’s books and provide them in searchable form online. To date, the internet search engine has scanned 12 million books for the project.

The chief executive of the agency, Samantha Holman, said Irish authors and publishers are in a particularly difficult position, because, for historical reasons, most Irish books are automatically published in the UK, and do not have a specific country code.

Hence, the majority of Irish authors and publishers automatically fall under the remit of a landmark settlement currently before the courts in the US, she said.

Under the terms of this settlement, which arose from a class action lawsuit filed in 2005 against Google by groups representing the interests of US authors and publishers, Google has continued to scan millions of books, with certain provisos. It now has to pay copyright holders who claim authorship 63 per cent of all sales proceeds. Authors can also request Google to remove their work from public display, although it will still exist in the database.

While the settlement agreement only applies to books published in the US, Canada, Australia, and the UK, as well as to works registered with the US Copyright Office, in reality, the settlement applies to the vast majority of Irish books, as virtually all Irish books have either been published in the UK or registered in the US.

Ms Holman said the agency was uncomfortable about the project “but the reality is it is here, and we have to engage with it in order to get the best deal for our authors” .