“Goblinproofing One’s Chicken Coop by Reginald Bakeley and Clint Marsh attracted 38 percent of 1,225 online votes to beat craft manual How Tea Cosies Changed the World with 31 percent to win the 35th annual Diagram Prize.”
Category: publishing
Bad Reviews, 50 Years Later (What It Says About The Critics)
“These bad judgments (bad in every sense) are amusing because the distance of time makes their witty writers look smug and whiny and narrow-minded. It reminds us that recent critical judgments may look equally dopey in 50 years.”
Study: Our Writing Got Less Emotional In The 20th Century
“A new study finds that, in a large dataset of English-language books, the use of terms expressing six basic emotions steadily decreased over the course of the 20th century.”
Author Submits Published New Yorker Story To Lit Pubs, Gets Rejected
“This poor story, like the sly dude chosen by the dance-floor starlet, thought he had it all. Here he was convinced that he could effortlessly charm the panties off of any university-based handout with “Review” in the title. What the hell happened?”
For Books To Survive, They Must Adapt
“It is the Exceptionalists, the ones who claim the mantle of defender of the book, who undermine the book by claiming that it is a world unto itself, in need of special protection, that its fragility in the face of the behemoth or barbarian du jour… requires insulation, like the skinny kid kept away from the schoolyard and its bullies.”
Fact-Checking In Cold Blood
Ben Yagoda found the notes of the fact-checker who reviewed Capote’s work for The New Yorker, where In Cold Blood was initially serialized.
“Variety” Goes Online, Ceases Daily Print
“The venerable Hollywood trade magazine Daily Variety published its last printed edition on Tuesday, ending an 80-year era by beckoning readers to a recently revamped website and announcing plans to launch a new weekly version of the publication.”
Oxford Librarian Fired Over Harlem Shake Video
Calypso Nash, reports Oxford student paper the Cherwell, was sacked after 30 students made a Harlem Shake video in the college library. They’ve been fined by the college, but Nash, the librarian present at the time, lost her job.
Are Magazines Dead? (Do We Even Know What A Magazine Is, Anymore?)
“If a magazine still is what it’s been for almost three centuries–an ink-on-paper “storehouse” of writing, published on a regular schedule–then the “media industrial revolution” (to use Tina Brown’s awkward phrase) is surely in the process of rendering many of our magazines obsolete.”
Could A Resale Method For EBooks Kills Used-Bookshops?
” The abstract describes a way for the owner of an ebook, say one of titles in the wildly popular Hunger Games series, to sell the digital file to someone else. It could go to a friend or possibly Amazon itself. Amazon would earn a fee on the sale, or perhaps resell the digital file from its website. Amazon’s main competitor in digital goods, Apple Computer, filed a patent application on March 7 for a similar method.”