Category: publishing

“The new Google-UM agreement (.pdf) gives the university a digital copy of every book on its shelves, regardless of whether Google scanned its copy or another library’s. The school gets more rights to distribute its copies of the digitized works, and, most importantly for Google public relations, a way for the school to protest the pricing scheme of full-text institutional subscriptions to the millions of digitized books.”

“Ruth Padel, the first woman to be elected to the most important academic poetry position in Britain, is resisting calls from across the literary world for her to quit following her admission that she tipped off newspapers about claims of sexual impropriety against her chief rival for the post.”

Writers who teach grammar to professionals and bureaucrats sitting on a panel discussion about grammar at the Sydney Writers Festival argued old-school grammar adopted a moralistic approach, under which a split infinitive became a moral failing.

Experience also teaches that, in trying to assess the likely outcome of any debate about shortlists, it always makes most sense to look not so much at the books in contention as the judges on the panel. Will they favour more or different? Are they pro-hedgehog or pro-fox? Such is the contemporary power of some book prizes, far more persuasive than almost any amount of review coverage, that any winner becomes automatically a more and a hedgehog, the proud possessor of “one big thing”.

“It helps create curious, intellectually rigorous kids with a rich interior world, people who have the tools to see our world as it really is because they have encountered and imaginatively experienced another that is so like, and so very unlike, our own.”

“Police in Iran believe they have caught the country’s first female serial killer and are claiming she has disclosed a literary inspiration behind her attempts to evade detection: the crime novels of Agatha Christie.”

There goes another rescue fantasy. CEO Eric Schmidt says that “Google had looked at buying a newspaper but was ‘trying to avoid crossing the line’ between technology and content … More broadly, he added, Google had concluded that potential acquisition targets were too expensive or carried excessive liabilities.”

“Tavern on the Green is being sued by a publisher left waiting for a check. The restaurant’s boss, Jennifer LeRoy, and her mom, Kay, owe Workman Publishing $218,426.19 plus interest for allegedly going back on a deal to buy 10,000 copies of their own book, ‘Tavern on the Green,’ the suit claims.”

“Sherry Jones, author of a controversial novel about the child bride of Muhammad, has accused British publishers of being too afraid to publish her book in the wake of a firebomb attack on the office of Gibson Square, the London-based publisher which had been set to release it last year.” In the U.S., “The Jewel of Medina” did find a new publisher after Random House dropped it on warnings of violence, but reviews were poor.

“In a move that could blunt some of the criticism of Google for its settlement of a lawsuit over its book-scanning project, the company signed an agreement with the University of Michigan that would give some libraries a degree of oversight over the prices Google could charge for its vast digital library.” Under the agreement, the university could “object if it thinks the prices Google charges libraries for access to its digital collection are too high, a major concern of some librarians.”