Category: publishing

“Wikimedia’s new alliances with professors stem from its Public Policy Initiative, an effort to improve Wikipedia’s coverage of topics relating to U.S. public policy. On a grant from the Stanton Foundation, Wikimedia started recruiting public policy professors who were willing to have their students create content for Wikipedia.”

“Still in the running for the 2010 prize are Peter Carey’s Parrot and Olivier in America, Emma Donoghue’s Room, Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room, Howard Jacobson’s The Finkler Question, Andrea Levy’s The Long Song, and Tom McCarthy’s C.”

Here are reviews of the six books on the Booker Prize shortlist.

“Tim Waterstone, the founder of the [UK] bookshop chain that bears his name, is reportedly mulling a bid to buy back the stores if the current owner, HMV, fails to improve the business by next year. The bid would be valued at £100m or more.”

“Daytona State College thinks it has the answer: eliminate the used-book and rental markets on campus and have all students buy e-books. By doing so, the college could save its students as much as 80 percent on course materials.”

More than 100 poets have contributed “to Emergency Verse: an anthology of poems to be published online in protest at the coalition government’s public spending cuts…The e-anthology will be mass-emailed to No 10 Downing Street and every Whitehall department this month, as civil servants grapple with Treasury demands for savings of up to 40%.”

Alexis Madrigal of Longshot: “Everything we do is made possible by the new (free) technological tools out there. But we’re the ones that have to figure out how to deploy – in what constellations, in what order – to actually run a magazine.”

A take on Raymond Chander’s dick Philip Marlowe preparing a leg of lamb “is funny not just because of the incongruity between the tough-guy manner and the task at hand (‘I put the squeeze on a lemon and it soon juiced’); it’s also funny, a bit more disturbingly, because it shows us that there’s something inadvertently comical below the surface of Chandler’s hard-boiled prose.”

“Some books reach a cultural saturation point, where everyone — great aunts and frat boys, baristas and coffee patrons, defense attorneys and police officers — seems to be talking about them or has read them, or is planning to read them. It’s no surprise that these books, with broad and engaged reader interest, attract the attention of Hollywood.”

“By the end of this year, 10.3 million people are expected to own e-readers in the United States, buying about 100 million e-books. The trend is wreaking havoc inside the publishing industry, but inside homes, the plot takes a personal twist as couples find themselves torn over the “right way” to read”