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How academic authors can help themselves and the cause of author's rights by retaining their copyright, and demanding a royalty for the use of their work. The days of truly not-for-profit educational publishing are over, so why are you gifting your work to the academy? Plus, a quick trip to Halifax and the intro to this year's Margaret Laurence Memorial Lecture. Here's that lecture for you enjoyment: https://soundcloud.com/writerstrust/author-olive-senior-on-the-writing-life-margaret-laurence-lecture-2019 And here is Dr. Aileen Fyfe's blog post about academic publishing: https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2019/06/03/what-the-history-of-copyright-in-academic-publishing-tells-us-about-open-research/ I want to thank my son, Fred Degen, for his help in editing and preparing this episode.

Checking back in on an earlier episode in which I took you to Ottawa for Parliamentary testimony from The Writers’ Union of Canada in the matter of Canada’s copyright law review. Yesterday, May 15th 2019, the Standing Committee on Canadian Heritage released a report containing 22 key recommendations. The upshot of those 22 recommendations is that Canada’s lawmakers have accepted the invitation to value the work of those who produce our culture. They've decided to lead again on protecting artists' rights. Yesterday was a good day for authors in Canada.

A short interview with author, illustrator and television producer Jay Odjick. I first became aware of Jay on Twitter, through his wonderful series of Algonquin Word of the Day tweets in which he provides an illustrated word in the Algonquin language. Jay is an Algonquin artist from the Kitigan Zibi community in Quebec. Go find him right now on Twitter @JayOdjick I sat down over Skype with Jay to talk about his latest success, which is his second illustration collaboration with popular children’s author Robert Munsch.

Today I'm quickly checking back in on an earlier episode to let you know that the European Parliament has indeed voted in favour of progressive new legislation encouraging and protecting professional content, including writing and publishing, across all member states. Finally, there's a group of lawmakers who see behind the curtain, and have made a real effort to share the online wealth, regulate and require responsible behavior from online platforms. This new law promises new content licensing opportunities for authors and artists fenced off from the banquet created by their own hard work.

In the last episode, I took you into a ballroom for an award ceremony. Today, we have another fancy room for you. I’m taking you with me into the Parliament of Canada for a short discussion about the state of writing and publishing in my country, and a specific problem that has plagued the work of authors in Canada for the last seven years now. Free copying of massive amounts of published work by schools, colleges and universities. You can access this podcast on either Soundcloud, RadioPublic, Stitcher, the Apple podcasts app, or the Google Podcast app. You can find individual episodes through my own website at http://www.jkdegen.com/, and bookroompod on Twitter. If you have suggestions for stories I might want to cover, you can reach out on Twitter or by e-mail at bookroom14@yahoo.com. Image courtesy me and my little camera.

The RBC Taylor Prize for 2019 was awarded in early March at a swanky lunch in Toronto. Come on into the ballroom with me, and listen to Noreen Taylor describe the very beginnings of the prize. You'll also hear a former Chief Justice of the Supreme Court of Canada introducing Kate Harris, who wrote "Lands of Lost Borders: Out of Bounds on the Silk Road." Kate Harris is this year's winner of the RBC Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-Fiction.

Between periods of a Toronto Maple Leaf hockey game, I sit down with my old friend Peter to talk about his — somewhat obsessional — love of Penguin paperbacks. We also get into memory loss, and how we both want to buy a turntable and start collecting vinyl again. We're really not as old as we sound. Subscribe to the Book Room here on Soundcloud, or through the Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts apps.

The world's authors and publishers have come together to protest the unauthorized scanning and release of their books through a website claiming to be a library. For the record... it's not a library. Libraries respect the rights of authors. I talk with one author who found her work online, just as she was getting ready to make her own e-book version for sale. See the related press release from The Writers' Union of Canada here: https://www.writersunion.ca/news/creators-and-publishers-unite-opposition-open-library See the appeal from a coalition of creator and publisher groups here: https://nwu.org/book-division/cdl/appeal/ Subscribe to The Book Room here on Soundcloud, through Apple Podcasts, or Google Podcasts. Photo courtesy me and my little camera.

On a very snowy evening in Toronto this week, folks filled the event space at Glad Day Bookshop to hear all about the history of the Freedom to Read in Canada. In this episode of The Book Room, we hear from Marcus McCann, lawyer and co-owner of Glad Day, as he details the bookstore's many run-ins with state censorship and book seizure. Bonus feature: Jael Richardson and the Festival of Literary Diversity win the 2019 Freedom to Read Award. Image courtesy me and my little camera.

February 24th to March 2nd is Freedom to Read week in Canada. I briefly examine the recent(ish) history of book challenges and book suppression in Canada, and point listeners to FTR Week events of note.

Today, I celebrate the arrival of a cheque from the federal government as compensation for the use of my three books in Canada's public library system. Over 17,000 authors across Canada are also celebrating. If your country does not have a Public Lending Right system (looking at you, USA), you might want to get on that. Libraries are awesome. Paying authors for their contributions to library collections is also awesome.

A quick hit in The Book Room to discuss Europe's new law designed to give authors greater control of their work online, and to level the playing field in terms of author contract transparency, and fair royalties. Also, I walk my little dog, Birdy. As always, thanks to Sandy Crawley for the music.

In which I apologise for the dormant interviews, and announce a more casual, on the fly, audio experience in the Book Room.

Big Ben, the hour bell in the Elizabeth Tower in London, chimes out 10 o'clock just as I am leaving Westminster Palace with colleagues after a dinner meeting. March 2017. A few months later, Big Ben fell silent for repairs and renovations, which are expected to end in 2021.

Today in the Book Room, I talk with prolific author and paradigm straddler, Merilyn Simonds, who has written a meditation on the evolution of print and book-making that speaks directly to the very nerdiest core of my own bookish fascination. Gutenberg’s Fingerprint, a 2017 publication from Canada’s ECW Press, dives deep into the technical minutia of moveable type and single-sheet printing presses, the physical nature of that work, it’s superiority In many ways to the various digital processes that have for the largely replaced it. Gutenberg’s Fingerprint is a meditation on where we come from, bookwise, where we are and where we might be going.

Today's guest is journalist and author David Sax. We talk about his new book The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter. There is no denying we live in a world dominated by digital, but that matrix of digital process and product did not actually destroy the analog things it replaced. Those things are still there, behind the glowing green flow of ones and zeros. Pen and paper, photographic film, vinyl records, dice and playing cards... not only are these things not lost in our past, they are storming the future in surprising ways. David Sax would describe The Revenge of Analog as a business book - and it does indeed track the surprising resurgence of analog products, work flows and consumer preferences, showing how even in the age of tech dominance there is a solid business incentive for going real. All good stuff, but I read the Revenge of Analog almost as a self-help book - as a reminder that there are board games on the high shelf in my closet, that there are vinyl records in my parents garage, just waiting to bring me the same pleasure they did when I first bought them forty years ago, and that, like my previous guest Michelle Berry, real folks are laying down real money to open real old-school businesses like bookstores, still.

Michelle Berry is the author of nine books, including a new novel entitled "The Prisoner and the Chaplain", coming next year from Buckrider Books - the fiction imprint of Hamilton, Ontario's Wolsak and Wynn publishers. Michelle is a dedicated servant to literature, having taught creative writing in various post-secondary programs around the country, having served on the boards of some of Canada's oldest and most prestigious literary organizations including The Writers Union of Canada, and having reviewed many of her fellow Canadian writers for The Globe & Mail newspaper. All of that has not been enough for Michelle. Now she wants to grab you by the wrist, drag you over to a bookshelf and show you all the wonderful books you can buy in her brand new books store, Hunter Street Books, in beautiful Peterborough, a city ripe with literary history and excellent places to read while sipping wine. Michelle joins us in the Book Room to freak out a little bit about opening a book store. Sandy Crawley provides all the music to the podcast, for which we thank him again and again.

Today's guest is a woman of many talents. Nicole Dixon is a writer, of course - an award-winning author of short fiction and essays. She is a former teacher and librarian, and a current permaculture home-farmer on her company-town plot of land in New Waterford, Cape Breton, on Canada's Atlantic coast. As you will hear, she has also taken to raising chickens. Nicole spent the winter of 2015 at the Berton House Writers Retreat in Dawson City, Yukon - a very cold and dark place. While in Dawson, Nicole's fascination with permaculture led her to a unique view of the local lifestyle, and she wrote out her thoughts on all that in a wonderful essay called Permaculture on the Permafrost in Canadian Notes & Queries magazine. Nicole joined me over skype from her lovely home on Cape Breton, to talk about chickens and writing and everything in between. Thanks again to Sandy Crawley for the Book Room's music, and a reminder that the Book Room is entirely unaffiliated with The Writers' Union of Canada, where I spend my days.

For the first time ever, I have two guests at once in the Book Room. Silver Donald Cameron and Marjorie Simmins, partners in life and now in business, are setting out this week on a bold, some might say slightly crazy cross-Canada book and film tour. Driving themselves, their two dogs and their cultural products from Cape Breton on the Atlantic coast to Vancouver on the Pacific coast. Silver Don and Marjorie launch two new books and an environmental documentary, with stops, readings and parties in every major centre along the way. Marjorie Simmins has written a memoir about injury, recovery and the astounding power of animals to connect with and heal us. Year of the Horse (Pottersfield Press) is available now in book stores. Silver Don, after a career spanning 17 books, many of them award winners, has self-published his latest title, Warrior Lawyers, a collection of interviews with crusading legal professionals dedicated to saving the environment through the courts. Warrior Lawyers' companion film, Green Rights: The Human Right to a Healthy World, will be screened across the country during the tour. Listen to this episode of the Book Room above, and/or download it through iTunes (where you also can, and should, subscribe to the podcast).

The Book Room podcast returns! My first guest of the new season is Jael Ealey Richardson, author of not one but two books called The Stone Thrower. Richardson's 2012 memoir (The Stone Thrower, Dundurn Press, 2012) about her understanding of and relationship with her famous father, star quarterback Chuck Ealey, has been adapted into an illustrated children's book from Groundwood Books (The Stone Thrower, Groundwood Books, 2016, illustrated by Matt James). Jael and I spoke late into one evening last month about the books, her father, her current projects -- which include the creation and sustaining of Brampton Ontario's wonderful Festival of Literary Diversity (FOLD) -- about her experience growing up black in a country that likes to think of itself as post-racist, and of course about the Toronto Blue Jays. Jael has met more Blue Jays than I have, and I burn with an envy that can barely be contained.