Category: publishing

A Turkish court has dropped charges against a prominent writer for “insulting Turkey” after the government declined to accept the charges. “Brussels had described the case as a litmus test of Turkey’s EU membership credentials. The European Union’s Enlargement Commissioner Olli Rehn said the court’s decision to drop charges was “good news for freedom of expression in Turkey”. But he warned that Ankara must tackle loopholes that restrict freedom of speech in other cases.”

As much fun as it may be to debate the seriousness of James Frey’s literary crimes, it’s really not as big a deal as many are making it out to be, says Simon Caterson. In fact, America’s literary history is chock full of scandals and hoaxes, and sometimes, it even seems that the entire inustry is powered by near-constant controversy.

E-books have been touted for years as the next big thing in literature and technology, but they’ve never caught on with the reading public in a big way. Later this year, though, Sony will attempt to succeed where others have failed with a new generation of electronic readers featuring a high-tech screen utilizing tiny “microcapsules… that look far more like ordinary paper than a liquid crystal display… The E Ink technology also conserves batteries because current is used only when pixels need to change their color — between virtual page turns, the Reader consumes no current at all.”

The Turkish government won’t approve charges of “insulting Turkey and Turkishness” against Orhan Pamuk, the country’s most prominent author, leaving the decision to a local court that could drop the case.

A man has been jailed for 4 1/2 years for stealing pre-release copies of Harry Potter las summer. “Aaron Lambert, 20, stole two copies of Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince from a secure distribution centre on June 2 last year, six weeks before the JK Rowling novel’s much awaited publication.”

James Joyce’s classic 1922 novel Ukysses tops a poll selecting the most valuable books of the 20th Century. “According to the poll, which was published in this month’s issue of the Book and Magazine Collector magazine, the 1922 first edition of Joyce’s account of Bloom’s day in Dublin is now worth £100,000.”

“This much can be said with certainty: The CAN$25,000 2006 Charles Taylor Prize for Literary Non-fiction, the richest prize of its type in Canada, will go to a book with a tragic story at its core. The four short-listed nominees, announced yesterday in Toronto… include James Chatto’s The Greek for Love: A Memoir of Corfu; Laura M. Mac Donald’s Curse of the Narrows: The Halifax Explosion of 1917; J.B. MacKinnon’s Dead Man in Paradise; and John Terpstra’s The Boys: or, Waiting for the Electrician’s Daughter.

The beloved library at Trinity College Dublin has discovered that the city’s torrid building boom is damaging its books. “The university has discovered to its dismay that a quarter of a million books, many of them irreplaceable and dating from the earliest days of print, have been damaged by building dust. The new Ireland is thus having a detrimental effect on the old, since this side-effect of Dublin’s extraordinary building boom will cost millions to put right.”

Wholphi is a new magazine. But not a traditional magazine with old-fashioned pages. It comes in the form of a DVD crammed with features. Why might it work? “We’re sick and tired of words — endless words marching one after another in horizontal line after horizontal line in paragraph after paragraph in article after article in magazine after magazine. In other words, we’re sick of reading. We long to join the rest of our fellow Americans sitting on the sofa with beer and Doritos, basking in the glow of a TV screen. And now Wholphin enables us to do just that.”

“No one wants to read an 8,000-page memoir that pores over each waking moment. But now, the controversy surrounding James Frey’s bestselling memoir, “A Million Little Pieces,” is raising questions about how factual even the most carefully written memoirs are. The memoir is a strange kind of performance. It’s halfway between fiction and testimony. ‘Anybody in his right mind knows that a memoir is unreliable’.”