News & Notes is a weekly Saturday post featuring book- and publishing-related news, links to interesting articles and opinion pieces, and other cool stuff
Book News
- AllRomance.com’s sudden closure hits authors hard. (The Guardian) The genre ebook distributor and publisher closed with only 4 days’ warning, and authors’ royalties on the last quarters’ sales will be slashed to the bone.
- National Book Foundation, HUD launch nationwide effort to turn “book deserts” into literary oases (LATimes)
- Virginia teachers may have to warn parents of any “sexually explicit” reading (The Guardian)
- Backlist publisher Open Road Media performs “tremendously” in 2016 (Publishers Weekly) (Full disclosure: I buy a fair number of Open Road books via their Early Bird discount newsletter, and I am auto-approved for their titles on NetGalley. Personal experience aside, though, Open Road offers a unique service to both authors and readers: they republish backlist titles whose rights have reverted to the author, giving established authors an alternative to self-publishing and readers the opportunity to read or reread some terrific titles that have gone out of print. If you enjoy older or backlist titles, and you like ebook bargains, sign up for their Early Bird newsletter.)
- Free Speech Groups Defend S&S Yiannopoulis Deal. (Publishers Weekly) I’m all for intellectual freedom and freedom of speech, but readers likewise have the right to boycott a title, individually or collectively. I’m not sure that in the case of books, that should extend to boycotting the entire publishing house, though.
Worth Reading
- Curiouser and Curiouser: Books that Trigger Curiosity is really as much about curiosity — why we need it, how to feed it — as it is about books that trigger it. (Kristen McQuinn, BookRiot)
- Automated book-culling software drives librarians to create fake patrons to “check out” endangered titles (Cory Doctorow, for BoingBoing)
- A Fine, Fine Line… talks about 3 troubling issues in romance novels: race, class, and consent. (Free-For-All, the blog of the Peabody Institute Library in Peabody, MA)
- In Praise of the Backlist: On (Maybe) Reading More Not-Brand-New Books in 2017 (Claire Handscome, BookRiot) Claire writes, in part, “I read a substantial number of good books in 2016 — four-star books, books that were a perfectly pleasant way to pass the time, but books, nonetheless, that I’d expected to be blown away by, based on what I’d heard about them. Instead, I could have been making my way through the list of books that I really do want to read one day, if only I could stop being distracted.” YES. And that’s precisely why I came up with The Backlist Reader Challenge.
- Romance Trope Subversion Requests (Dana Rosette Pangan, BookRiot) All three. PLEASE.
For Writers & Bloggers
- 4 Things Every Writer Thinks While Working on a Book (Jon Acuff, for Signature)
Awesome Lists
- 5 Great Places to Donate Your Old Books (Read Brightly)
- Top 10 Unreliable Narrators (Sarah Pinborough, The Guardian)
- 10 Essential Books for Parents of Transgender Children (or friends, teachers, etc.) (Publishers Weekly)
- Read Harder Recommendations: A Character of Color Goes on a Spiritual Journey (BookRiot)
- This year’s biggest book adaptations – and which ones are worth reading first (The Guardian)
Really Cool / Just for Fun
- Mindwebs was a radio show in the ’70s which offered “semi-dramatized” readings of great science fiction stories. 153 of those episodes are available on the Internet Archive; they include stories by SF writers like Harlan Ellison, Theodore Sturgeon, Ursula LeGuin, Philip K. Dick, Arthur C. Clarke, but also some by writers we don’t usually associate with SF, like John D. McDonald and John Cheever. They’re free to listen to online or to download.
Bookish Quote
Graphic by randoms. T-shirts, wall art, and more available on Redbubble.
That’s it for this week!
Stephanie Jane
So much to mull over, thank you for collating these articles 🙂
I’m absolutely in favour of reading older as well as new books and do a ‘decade challenge’ each year to encourage myself to search out backlist titles. If only there were more hours in a day!
Stephanie Jane recently posted…The Map Of Love by Ahdaf Soueif
Lark_Bookwyrm
A “decade challenge” sounds interesting. How does that work? Do you look for books that are more than 10 years old, or exactly 10 years old?
Stephanie Jane
The Decade Challenge is to read 1 book from each decade from 1900 to the present day, so 1 from the 1900s, 1 from the 1910s, 1 from the 1920s etc.
It’s run by the BookCrossing group on Goodreads and this year’s challenge is here: https://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/18207780-decade-challenge-sept-1-2016—sept-1-2017
I get most of my books by swaps and chance so I find it always starts out easy, then August is coming around and I am still two decades short!
Stephanie Jane recently posted…The Man With The Golden Mind by Tom Vater
Lark_Bookwyrm
Interesting! Sounds like a good challenge. Maybe I’ll try it some year!
Berls
Allromance.com’s announcement really was shocking. Even more stunning is what they’re doing to authors though! I’m surprised they have the legal right to strip royalties so harshly 🙁
I always enjoy reading your notes – thanks for keeping me up-to-date!
Berls recently posted…My TBR List | January 2017 Voting
Lark_Bookwyrm
I suppose the authors could band together and sue for full royalties, but if AllRomance is out of money, it’s hard to see where the royalties would come from. It’s not clear from the article, but I think the reduced royalties are just for authors published by AllRomance, not traditionally published authors whose books were sold by AllRomance. Those authors should get their royalties from their own publishers (who might have a better shot at squeezing their payments out of AllRomance, or not.)
I’m glad you enjoy this feature! Every time I consider dropping it (because it really is a time-sink!), someone says something nice like that, and I realize y’all appreciate it. 🙂
Lexxie @ (un)Conventional Bookviews
ARe caught everyone by surprise, I think! And I find it to be very strange that they can legally do what they’ve done. Both to authors who haven’t been paid, and to readers who can’t access the books they’ve paid for. It’s really bad.
Thanks for sharing so many things that have happened this week, Lark.
I hope you’re enjoying your weekend 🙂
Lexxie @ (un)Conventional Bookviews recently posted…Weekend Wrap-up #169
Lark_Bookwyrm
I agree that it’s strange they can leave everyone in the lurch like that. But if they’re out of money or in debt, it’s hard to see how they could pay authors what AR owes them. As for the readers, AR didn’t give them very long to download their books (and I gather the servers kept crashing), but they did let the readers know and gave them at least a little opportunity to download. (Not nearly enough, though.)
I ran into this twice myself, once when the Sony Reader bookstore closed (they transferred readers’ books to Kobo) and once when BooksOnBoard was in financial difficulty and shutting down. It’s part of why I switched my ereading to Kindle; I figure Amazon is more likely to stick around. And it’s why I try to download all my ebooks to my computer… just in case.
Rita @ View From My Books
Great post today, and so relevant to how I’ve been feeling. The article, In Praise of the Backlist, could’ve been written by me! I was nodding my head as I read it, agreeing. That’s also why I joined your challenge. So many book titles go hurtling by me and I lose track of them. It’s also a great way to save some money, because these titles are likely to be in a library or used bookstore or available online, for sale.
And thanks for the link for the Early Bird newsletter from Open Road Media. I joined up and appreciate it 🙂
Lark_Bookwyrm
I’ve been getting the Early Bird emails for at least a year or so, and I love them. Often there is nothing I want, but when there is, I jump on it, because the books are only on sale for that day. I picked up a bunch of Katherine Kurtz’s books that way the Deryni novels. And they recently released some of Madeleine L’Engle’s memoirs, which I loved when I was in my 20s.
You’re absolutely right that reading older books is less expensive, because you can so often find them at the library or on sale, whether new or used.