“The internet is awash with unlicensed free digital copies of individual chapters, or in some cases, entire books. It’s hitting hardest the writers who write books that you dip in and out of: poetry, cookbooks, travel guides, short stories – books that you don’t have to read the whole of.”
Category: publishing
Writers’ Group Protests US Barring of Author
“Sebastian Horsley was questioned for eight hours on March 18 by Customs and Border officials at Newark Liberty International Airport, who barred him from entering the country on grounds of ‘moral turpitude’.”
The Blog And The Big Book Deal
“Readers discover stuffwhitepeoplelike.wordpress.com, like it and forward links to their friends, who forward them to lots more friends. And then on March 20 Random House announces that it has purchased the rights to a book by the blog’s founder, Christian Lander, an Internet copy writer. The price, according to a source familiar with the deal but not authorized to discuss the total, was about $300,000, a sum that many in the publishing and blogging communities believe is an astronomical amount for a book spawned from a blog, written by a previously unpublished author.”
Canada’s Oldest Bookstore Closes
“Canada’s oldest bookstore, located in Halifax, has come to the end of its final chapter and closed its doors on Saturday. The 169-year-old Book Room survived wars and the Great Depression, but couldn’t outlast the vagaries of today’s retail and economic realities.”
The Art And Science Of Literature
“One way to use science to approach literature (and art in general) is to view it as a behavior in evolutionary terms. Why do art in general and storytelling in particular exist as cross-species behaviors?”
Where Is Britain’s National Epic?
“This lack of a national epic has set a hare running among both readers and writers. The novel of national origins has now been relegated to mass-market fiction. But what has occupied more elevated practitioners and critics of the art is the novel of national life in a contemporary, or near-contemporary, setting. It has come to be called the “state-of-the-nation” novel, and it is currently all around us.”
Block Those Literary References (At Your Peril)
“Anyone who cares about books has at some point confronted the Pushkin problem: when a missed — or misguided — literary reference makes it chillingly clear that a romance is going nowhere fast.”
The Line Between Strong Criticism And Intolerance
Intolerance seems to take literary criticism into another arena, one in which the critics’ expression of their point of view, however trenchantly expressed, becomes confused with their view of the writer’s right to write what she has written. To take strenuous issue with a piece of work seems an entirely different matter from feeling that it shouldn’t have come into being at all.”
The Oddest Book Title Prize
“If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs” has won the Diagram Prize for the oddest title of the year, The Bookseller magazine announced Friday.
Report: What British Teens Read
“The celebrity gossip and news magazine Heat comes top when 11- to 14-year-olds are asked to name their favourite read, followed by teenage girls’ magazine Bliss, which comes joint second with reading song lyrics online. They are followed by reading computer game cheats advice online, and then reading your own blog or fan fiction.”