Category: publishing

The Catholic Church is launching a new website to dispute The Da Vinci Code. “The Catholic Church’s website includes biographies of the saint and contains numerous links to sites disputing The Da Vinci Code’s assertions.”

The new Harry Potter book is available in dozens of languages, but J.K. Rowling and her publisher appear to have forgotten to market to one key demographic: technogeeks. The lack of an officially sanctioned eBook version of Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince infuriated some readers, and a pirated version of the book sprang up within hours on BitTorrent, thanks to an impressively coordinated effort by hundreds of readers.

At the moment, the internet is a consumer’s paradise, with endless mountains of information and entertainment available to anyone with a connection, absolutely free of charge. But will all that content really stay free? Not likely, say some observers. “The only thing slowing down the move away from free content is the sorry state of micro-transactional software. Once all the bugs are worked out, the free internet gateway in which publications generate revenue from ads will slowly morph into another, more-lucrative business model: gated content.”

What I notice as I sit listening with children is how much harder they concentrate on a heard story than a seen one. They can’t cheat and follow the pictures to make sense of it, so they listen acutely. They ask questions, too: always relevant, though sometimes tangential. You can almost see their brains working.

“Where will the library ghosts go when all the books have been made immaterial and antiseptic through digitization? What is the message of this new medium? What does it mean when the University of Texas at Austin removes nearly all of the books from its undergraduate library to make room for coffee bars, computer terminals, and lounge chairs? What are students in those “learning commons” being taught that is qualitatively better than what they learned in traditional libraries?”

When the town of Salinas, California threatened to close its public libraries to save money, residents rallied. So did inmates at a local prison. “Prisoners in San Quentin’s inmate-to-inmate tutoring program sponsored something of a bake sale for literacy, selling doughnuts, pizza and fried chicken to other prisoners. Today, they will present a $1,000 check to the ailing Salinas Free Library, plus another $500 for literacy services in Marin County. Those sums are nothing to sniff at, given that an inmate with a high- paying prison job makes $56 a month.”

The former heads of the Colombian drug cartel are in US prison, where a the government won’t let them pay for their defense with drug money. What to do? Write a book. “Such a book could contain explosive revelations about past connections between the political establishment and the drug trade in Colombia. Former Colombian president Ernesto Samper’s time in office was tainted by claims that the Cali cartel contributed six million dollars to his 1994 electoral campaign, though the congress eventually cleared him of the charges. During its heyday in the 1980s, the Cali cartel controlled 80 percent of the cocaine smuggled into the United States, according to US authorities.”

This week marks the 80th anniversary of the publishing of Mein Kampf. But discussion of the book is still complicated. “It remains a unique artifact – loathed yet collected, mocked yet feared, ignored by many but a best-seller in some Muslim societies.”

“Since 1939, Canada Post has offered libraries across the country a subsidized shipping rate of less than $1 per book when sending books back and forth for inter-library loan programs. Under a new plan proposed to take effect April 1, 2006, libraries will be charged commercial rates, which can be as much as $14 per book. If this change goes ahead, many rural libraries won’t be able to afford to take part in the service and many Canadian readers will have access to fewer books.”

This year’s Forward Prize for poetry attracted more than 11,000 entries. It has been, say the judges, an excellent year for poetry. “The judges add that several long-established poets on the £5,000 best collection shortlist are “producing work that was not just the best in the year, but the best work of their poetic careers”. They single out the poet and librettist David Harsent, 63, and Alan Jenkins, 55, the deputy editor of the Times Literary Supplement.”