Category: words

“Even if we sometimes turn to fiction for help with our lives, we may also be reading for passages that pull us, as Mr. Siegel puts it, back into the infinite.”

“Why not just let books be books? The thing is that genre doesn’t have to be vexing. It can be illuminating. It can be useful for writers and readers to think in terms of groups and traditions. And a good genre system — a system that really fits reality — can help us see the traditions in which we’re already, unconsciously, immersed.”

Juliet Lapidos makes the case for why it’s good for you – maybe even important – to finish that book.

“Little more than a year after launching its all-you-can-read ebook service, the San Francisco startup Scribd has announced that the service now offers more than 30,000 audiobooks, including titles from big-name publishing houses HarperCollins and Scholastic as well as audiobook-specialist Blackstone. For $8.99 a month, you can not only read as many books as you can find on the service, but also listen to as many audiobooks as you can find.”

“What counts as slang? Where does it come from? And why does it exert such a powerful hold on the middle–class imagination?”

Germany’s largest news publisher, Axel Springer (Bild), wanted Google to pay licensing fees for showing the typical brief excerpts from its articles in search results. So, for two weeks, it barred the search engine from doing so. And how badly did that backfire?

Lydie Salvayre won the Prix Goncourt for Pas pleurer (“Don’t Cry”), “in which she interweaves the voices of her mother and a French writer during the Spanish Civil War. … The winner of the prize receives the nominal sum of 10 euros ($12) but can expect to see sales of around 400,000.”

“The Folio Society announced in 2013 that it would be launching a new literary prize, and one that would be open to all books written in English, whether or not the writers originated from England or the Commonwealth.” After just a year, the Society has added an annual high-profile lecture and a multi-day fiction festival.

The justices rejected an appeal by Arthur Conan Doyle’s estate, “which claimed that authors who wanted to publish stories about Holmes needed to pay the estate a licensing fee. This leaves intact a June decision by 7th Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Richard Posner, which held that most of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories are no longer protected by copyright.”

“The royalty arrangements went on for 35 pages. What if the film is distributed overseas? Pages of possible countries, rights and proceeds. What if the film becomes a TV show? More possibilities. What if the TV show goes into syndication? On cable? Network? Overseas syndication? And what if there are action figures?”