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What does it mean that the New York Times Book Review is no longer listing bestseller prices? Having recently taken the helm of the New York Times Book Review, Pamela Paul recently charted her first series of course corrections. Most curious among them: book prices are no longer to be printed… Read more »
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Interview: Rudolph Herzog, author of A Short History of Nuclear Folly In A Short History of Nuclear Folly, Rudolph Herzog presents a devastating account of history’s most irresponsible uses of nuclear technology. From the rarely-discussed nightmare of “Broken Arrows” (40 nuclear… Read more »
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Nuclear Folly Locator In honor of Rudolph Herzog’s excellent A Short History of Nuclear Folly, we built this handy “Nuclear Folly Locator,” so you can browse a few of the strange (and sometimes horrifying)… Read more »
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Charlie Rose to host new primetime show Unless you’ve written a heartfelt book about a cute dog that changed your life or seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, it’s difficult for an author to… Read more »
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Bookseller sculpts unwanted books into art This week, the British Academy is celebrating Literature Week, five days of events including an evening of William Shakespeare at the Globe Theatre, lectures, and poetry readings. Throughout the week,… Read more »
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Copyright reform discussions underway, first punches being thrown When the current Register of Copyrights Maria Pallante called for an overhaul of the copyright system back in March, the House listened. And last week, hearings began in the Courts,… Read more »
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Academic publisher sues librarian blogger for millions “Beall’s list”, created by University of Colorado metadata librarian Jeffrey Beall, collates the academic journals which he regards as questionable. His hard work on outing journals whose business and academic… Read more »
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Eleven tactics to keep your reading choice a secret Over at the Literary Saloon Michael Orthofer discusses the secrecy with which the Nobel committee must read over the works that have been nominated, lest the names of those under consideration… Read more »
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Baltimore’s Poe House to reopen this fall Last year was a tumultuous one for Edgar Allan Poe’s onetime home in Baltimore. The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum had its funding from the city cut off in… Read more »
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Senator Claire McCaskill fights for plane readers’ rights If you travel with an ereader, you’ve encountered that moment on a plane when you’re required to shut off your device during take-off. The reason that airlines cite for this… Read more »
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‘Just a joke’: Amazon gets more money from UK government grants than it pays in tax In the continuing saga of Amazon’s tax dodging (see here and here for just a couple of our reports on this), it was revealed this week that the company’s UK operation made £4.2bn in sales… Read more »
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DOJ calls Apple “ringmaster” in pretrial filings Two weeks before United States of America vs. Apple Inc., the infamous e-book price-fixing case originally brought against Apple and five of the Big Six publishers, goes to trial, the… Read more »
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How to redesign a classic, or, The Bell Jar strikes back Book designers are used to working quietly behind the scenes. If authors are the star athletes in publishing, designers are more like the training staff—there to make sure the stars… Read more »
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First Publishing Hackathon to be held in NYC and judged at BEA Hackathons have become common in the tech industry as a way to bring bursts of creative and programming energy to solve a problem in a short amount of time. According… Read more »
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Community Bookstore to open Terrace Books UPDATE: the new Astoria Bookshop Community Bookstore in Park Slope, Brooklyn plans to open a new store in Windsor Terrace. Called Terrace Books, it will carry used titles and occupy the space that used to… Read more »
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Amazon employees strike in Germany More than 1,000 staffers at two German Amazon warehouses walked off the job Tuesday in a one-day work stoppage. The workers are seeking higher pay and collective bargaining agreements, which are… Read more »
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Gatsby & the great green light: MobyLives goes to the movies Alex: Hello again, old sport. Dustin: Is that how we’re doing this, Alex? Because no amount of jokes can salve the wounds this movie inflicted on me. Chiefly on… Read more »
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Editor Drenka Willen wins new international literature prize These past few years have been good ones for awards honoring international literature: prizes have mutated in and out of sponsorships fairly successfully, gained traction and publicity, honored translations and… Read more »
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Jaron Lanier offers to save the book business, but even his own publisher doesn’t listen Jaron Lanier has been called an “internet pioneer,” a “digital visionary,” and a “technology humanist.” He shaped the internet as it was being formed, later criticizing Web 2.0 for making… Read more »
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W.H. Auden’s “lost” journal recovered, 75 years later One of three known journals written by W.H. Auden has been recovered nearly 75 years after it was written. This journal dates between August and November 1939. Auden died in… Read more »
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No Nooks in England: ereaders sell out after “unprecedented demand” Well, it can’t all be bad news, I guess. After dropping the price of their Nook Simple Touch (I’m pretty sure it’s called the Nouk Simple Touch across the pond) from £79 to… Read more »
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Dan Brown causes price wars, bookshops party like it’s 1999 There are loads of things we predicted the new Dan Brown novel would bring: clumsy, soul-destroying prose, translators cast into working conditions resembling the pits of hell, Tom Hanks looking… Read more »
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Plans unveiled for NYC’s Donnell Library The New York Public Library officially unveiled the architectural plans today for the long-left-in-limbo Donnell Branch on 53rd Street. The good news is that it’s nice and airy-looking. The bad… Read more »
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Ernest Hemingway’s Cuban archives finally available in the US Ernest Hemingway wrote some of his most enduring works from his estate in Cuba, where he lived off and on from 1939-1960, but until now most of his papers from that… Read more »
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Clive James on Dan Brown: “I pity him deeply” Have you heard that Dan Brown published a book called Inferno? Well, one of our best and most searing critics, Clive James, certainly did. James recently translated the original Inferno, which was… Read more »
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A user’s guide to Amazon Coins As we discussed back in February, Amazon has been working on a digital currency specifically for the Kindle Fire, and now it’s finally here. Only three questions remains: how fast… Read more »
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Amazon launches “Kindle Love Stories” podcast and Goodreads book club, eats itself You didn’t think that Amazon would just leave Goodreads alone did you, after subsuming it into its gaping maw earlier this year? No, rather than maintaining Goodreads as the user-generated… Read more »
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Bread & Roses and Little Rebels: radical books recognized Last month, we reported on the the brand new Little Rebels Children’s Book Award, which “recognises fiction for ages 0-12 which promotes or celebrates social justice and equality.” On Saturday, the… Read more »
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Charlaine Harris faces nutty fans, death threats with the conclusion of the Southern Vampire Mysteries Ending a long-running series with a huge fan following is an endeavor fraught with peril. The television finales from Seinfeld and Lost sparked outrage from viewers who were unhappy with the way things… Read more »
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“Give” and 22 other words that haven’t changed since the last Ice Age Linguists generally believe that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years, but a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that… Read more »
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Newspaper copyright troll Righthaven finally conquered Copyright trolls, no longer simply lurking under bridges, have taken to the internet, using threats of legal action to make quick money. The trolling technique has proved so popular in… Read more »
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What will the “Big Library Read” reveal about the potential for ebook marketing in libraries? At the American Library Association’s Midwinter Meeting in January 2013, Eric Hellman, the founder of GlueJar, a start-up devoted to relicensing ebooks under the Creative Commons license, presented an idea… Read more »
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Canadian writers’ union to make decision on self-published authors Matt TenBruggencate reported for the CBC last week that the largest association of writers in Canada is set to make a decision as to whether to reverse its long-standing policy… Read more »
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A year of Librotraficantes: where to read Arizona’s banned books It’s been a little over a year for Librotraficantes, a movement that came out of the passing, in May 2010, of HB 2281, an Arizona bill that prohibited school districts… Read more »
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Slideshow: Interpreting the stoop books of Brooklyn My new favorite blog (as of half an hour ago, after The New Inquiry Sunday Reading pointed me there—and yes I’m using the word ‘favorite’ pretty loosely) is Stoop Books… Read more »
