starting at 7:00 p.m., watch an interview with conrad black. at 745, ralph nader talks about his most recent book. a selection of his opinion columns. at 9:00 p.m., mary eberstadt argues that the western world has lost god and has had an overall decline of the traditional family. at 10:00 p.m., lawrence leamer talks about his book, the price of justice. we conclude tonight's primetime programming with intellectuals and race. as a booktv.org for more information on this weekend's television schedule. next, we bring you the public industry tradeshow.

.. >> host: is the guild just best-selling authors? >> guest: know, the guild includes everybody from self-published authors who make money at it to begin no a number of best-selling authors. but it's frankly, best-selling authors don't need anywhere near as much help as the people who

are starting out and the people who are struggling to make a living. so that is where our interests are concentrated these days, trying to make sure that writing remains a livelihood for as many people as possible. >> host: recently in "the new york times" he wrote an op-ed the slow death of the american author as president of the authors guild. can you capitalize this for as? >> guest: yeah i think it's really easy with the advent of digital has basically set off a free-for-all and everybody is trying to reposition themselves in this universe and the net result is that almost everyone wants to do it at the expense of authors, and you know diminishing the value of copyrights, pirating books, paying lower royalties as the publishers want to do.

libraries want to lend books so you can get them from home. all kinds of things that will end up diminishing the market for books and people somehow have the attitude oh those authors are so greedy whereas if you are talking about giving away automobiles everybody would understand why general motors was unhappy. >> host: so, you take on amazon in this op ed. >> guest: among many others. >> host: what his amazon done to hurt authors? >> guest: well, amazon, a company that can't be either all better all good and innocents in a sense they have done some great things were authors especially kendall singles and they have also done things that i think are not necessarily in the author's best interest in quitting trying to kill the bookstores by beings -- now they have acquired a path to

resell e-books and you know they started out by creating this market to resell hardcovers which of course obviously is damaging to sales. reselling e-books would mean that you sell three e-books and everybody else would buy it at the original price from amazon and of course the big problem with that is that as i said, all of the profit of the second sale would go to amazon and that's the difficulty. >> host: you also talk about a recent supreme court case. >> guest: right. this was sort of an example of what i said at the start that namely no matter what you do authors and up getting kicked. this was you know sort of fat phase that arrives before the

supreme court but a publisher john lightly published his textbooks in english and foreign countries with the explicit provision that it couldn't be resold in the united states. a young thai student began importing these english-language books from, through his family in thailand and selling them here in the u.s. and wiley said you can't do that. the supreme court said no, the first sale doctrine which treats a book as a physical object says it's yours the same way the sofa in your living room is and you can sell it to whomever you want. that applies even to foreign sales of books and this young man could resell his textbooks in the united states. it wasn't a big deal although getting he never could've done that years ago. he does it on the internet on ebay and that is why it's working for him. it's just one more frankly

fairly unimportant example on the plus side of john wiley of how the advent of the digital world is nibbling away at authors and very often publisher sources of income. >> host: one other, not animate that one other point you make is the public libraries and e-books. what is their role? >> guest: authors and libraries have long been friends and i hope that they will continue to be. the problem is that a lot of public librarians are very doctrinaire in believing that information wants to be free which is a polite way of saying books ought to be free. so they are very aggressive in advocating copying, it digital scanning of existing copyright books and advancing e-book lending from home.

traditionally you could use a library book for free but you had to go to the library. now they want and have succeeded in persuading the publishers to make e-books available to anybody with a library card and an internet. we will see how it works out. some publishers like my publisher grand central who was publishing "identical" my next novel, you no grand central and the group in which it is parked have said we will sell you the e-book but at three times its retail cost. other major publishers have made other arrangements. some say it will only last 26 weeks and then it will vanish from the libraries nurture will shelves. there'll 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 you know

this is, this is a tough question because in the united states we have always had a public library system which has made books available without cost to library patrons and most authors i know have been nurtured by that system. so you know they don't want to see it come down but i am always amused when people will you know, bang the tub for the free enterprise system without realizing that a library is basically a communist enterprise. it takes goods and delivers them for free to the masses and again it worked well for me and it has worked well for most authors but the fact that people take it as a right without recognizing the conflict in the rest of the system is pretty amusing. and you know just one example

microsoft for example doesn't say that you can download microsoft word for free. you can't land it. they are not buying it so the biggest economic interest in the country don't allow the same thing that the libraries expect you know trade book authors to do. >> host: scott turow is there an estimate of a percentage of how many of your books people could get for free on the internet? >> guest: i mean there are two means these days of getting books for free. one legitimate which is to borrow them from a library and the book will last on your reading device for two weeks and then it will vanish. the other unfortunate way, far more unfortunate is that there are tons of look pirating sites located offshore and unfortunately for my publishers

every book i've written is available both ways and as i said i am happy that i have readers in public libraries and for somebody like me you know there is -- it doesn't matter. if there is a hit to sales so what, nobody needs to hold a tag day for me. pirating drives me crazy and it drives me crazy because the search engines have a big role in it. and they don't, they don't want any legislation that will keep them from directing searchers. >> host: and they have as. >> guest: you put in free scott turow e-book and it will direct you to the pirate sites and google or yahoo! or everybody else, tang will all be selling advertising in the process of doing that.

as i pointed out in the peace in the times, if i went to a street corner and said to somebody where do i buy dope around here in that person got paid every time they gave directions to a customer they would be independent -- in the penitentiary and yet google goes around with its motto don't be evil. 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's going to threaten everybody's existence. it's an interdependent ecology. you can't have libraries without authors. google, whatever wants to do sampling copyrighted work, they are going to run out of it eventually if you don't have more people writing books so it ought to be a cooperative venture. to some extent you know there

are people who actually come in and intervene and make this more difficult. the antitrust division of the justice department for example. we settled the big lawsuit with google and the antitrust division comes in and says while we don't like it does the little tiny of the corner of the market google will have an effect on monopoly. the public in a fit of having the contents of seven major university libraries available to people around the world, many often free to public library terminals it seems to me to overwhelm this minor concern that the justice department objected. and that is sort of typical of what seems to be happening in that even when the people within the ecosystem can work out their differences, somebody else intervenes and you know

everything is up for grabs. so google and the authors guild for example reached an amicable solution along with the publishers. we all figured we would work something out that was in the best interest of readers first of all and the world of knowledge. has worked for google, worked for the authors, works for the publishers and the justice department says no. so that's difficult. >> host: your new novel "identical," what kind of copyright protection will you have or do you have on this book right now? >> guest: while -- >> host: how long will it last? >> guest: as you might expect my publisher will copyright the book on my behalf. i will own the copyright. the copyright term i'm embarrassed to say i am not completely sure of but it will certainly last the rest of my life and i believe 50 years beyond that.

and 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 office guild by the way does not advocate unlimited copyright. we went to congress saying disney has a great idea about this. i believe it used to be the life of the author plus 17 years and -- >> host: at that point it becomes -- >> guest: 's domain, right. that was in the i.d. of the constitution. authors were supposed to have a monopoly over their works for a limited period of time. the idea was that would encourage an independent creator class with little early traffic and ideas for-profit and the framers view, courtesy of noah webster who was the original promoter of this idea, the framers view was that a

democracy thrives on having an independent class of people creating literature and the resulting ideas, representing reality. and this was good for the democracy and it's in the constitution, empowering congress to make copyright laws. so i mean i'm not sort of spouting some off-the-wall policy notion that i have come up with on my own. this is deeply embedded in our concept of democracy. >> host: mr. turow there is quite a bit of pushback on this op-ed. you were called a luddite among other things because of your position. >> guest: right. there are all kinds of different interests that don't like the idea of copyright protection. the search engines as i said they want to be