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
- Apple Loses Appeal; E-Book Decision Is Upheld (Publishers Weekly)
- The OED adds about 500 new words, including cisgender, jeggings, and twerk. Read about some of the new words here, or check out the complete list.
- Scribd cuts waaaay back on romance and erotica titles. It seems they underestimated just how many books romance readers can devour in a month. (Publishers Weekly; more at The Bookseller: FutureBook, The Guardian, and Smashwords.)
- Amazon Changes Terms for KDP Select [Kindle Unlimited], Will Now Pay Authors Based on Pages Read (The Digital Reader)
- Funding Increased for New York City’s 3 Library Systems after 150,000+ patrons wrote letters in support. (GalleyCat)
- E.L. James Held a Twitter Q&A And It Went Horribly, Horribly Wrong (Buzzfeed)
- Go Set a Watchman: mystery of Harper Lee manuscript discovery deepens It may have actually been discovered by a Sotheby’s book expert three years ago. (The Guardian)
- The World’s 57 Largest Book Publishers, 2015 (Publishers Weekly)
Worth Reading
- Could the Nomination of the Next Librarian of Congress Spark a Political Battle? (Andrew Albanese, Publishers Weekly)
- Hearing words, writing sounds: examining the author’s brain (Richard Lea, The Guardian)
- The Resurgence of Golden Age Crime Golden Age mysteries are making a comeback, from Christie and Sayers to Allingham and Crispin. (Stuart Bache, The Bookseller)
- Scoring Your Reading: Pairing Books with Music (Sean-Patrick Burke, BookRiot)
- Dune, 50 years on: how a science fiction novel changed the world (Hari Kunzru, The Guardian)
Great Blog Posts
- How do you find “under-the-radar” books? (Lory at The Emerald City Book Review; from June 2)
For Writers & Bloggers
- High Tea, Afternoon Tea, Elevenses: English Tea Times For Dummies. (NPR) Do you write (or read) fiction set in Britain, and find yourself confused by the various uses of the word “tea”? This article will set you straight.
Book & Movie Announcements
- Neil Gaiman to Write [Some] Episodes of ‘American Gods’ (Variety)
- Tamora Pierce confirms graphic novel of First Test, the first book in the Protector of the Small quartet. On her Facebook page, the writer announced, “The editor has cleared it: We can announce that the script for the FIRST TEST graphic novel is finished, and that the project is moving forward, publication date TBA!”
Really Cool / Just for Fun
- ‘Harry Potter’ fan designs fantastically detailed Marauders’ Map dress (The Daily Dot)
- Sherlock Holmes: examining the evidence – in charts. A series of infographics in The Guardian examines the data contained in the Holmes stories – the number of each kind of crime committed, the various types of clients, the most common clues, and so on. Fun to look through! Incidentally, did you know that Holmes has appeared on the screen (film or tv) at least 292 times – a feat bested only by one other fictional character? (I do wonder whether each episode of a tv show counted separately.)
Bookish Quote
That’s it for this week!
Lory @ Emerald City Book Review
Some fun stuff here! I love the teatime and Holmes articles. Thanks for mentioning my post! 🙂
Lory @ Emerald City Book Review recently posted…New Release Review and Giveaway: The Wild Girl
Lark_Bookwyrm
You’re welcome – it was a great post!
Katherine @ I Wish I Lived in a Library
Great links! The title on the one about Scribd cutting back on romances made me laugh and I’m so curious about Go Set a Watchman and the explanation of tea. I’m excited about the resurgence in Golden Age mysteries. Hopefully that will make some hard to find titles available.
Katherine @ I Wish I Lived in a Library recently posted…My Favorite Summer Foods
Lark_Bookwyrm
I wondered if Scribd and other services were going to run into trouble with that. Romance readers tend to plow through a lot of books! As for the Golden Age mysteries, I’ve been noticing a lot of titles being re-issued as ebooks. Open Road Media has done some, particularly Catherine Aird (not Golden Age but she just as well could be) and some of the lesser-known British authors. And someone has reissued almost all the Campion mysteries by Margery Allingham, again as ebooks. I think publishers and estates are catching on: there’s a lot less financial risk in ebooks, so it makes financial sense to bring back older “classic” titles and authors.
Bea @Bea's Book Nook
Oh Scribd, a textbook example on how to give yourself a black eye and lose customers. They could have handled the situation in a much better manner.
I’ll have to check out the tea article, it sounds like fun.
Bea @Bea’s Book Nook recently posted…Bea Reviews Top Dog: The Story of Marine Hero Lucca by Maria Goodavage
Lark_Bookwyrm
They could have, indeed. And they also probably should have done a little more market research ahead of time. Any romance reader could have told them that a lot of romance readers plow through 6-20 books per month.
R_Hunt @ View From My Home
Lol @ the article about romance readers. I’m not a huge one myself but I know how addictive and fun they can be for some people. It seems they handled this wrong though.
I liked the EL James twitter fiasco (if you can’t handle the heat get out of the kitchen…or… if you can’t imagine how many people didn’t enjoy your version of “sexy” degrading of women, now you know Ms. James).
I did enjoy the tea article. I’ve read books where the characters have tea in the afternoon and also have tea at dinnertime, or serve the children their “tea” and then have their own more formal dinner.
Thanks for sharing all these fun articles!
R_Hunt @ View From My Home recently posted…Weekly Wrap-Up, Even Though I Was “Gone”
Lark_Bookwyrm
Glad you enjoyed the links, Rita!
Two of the stories this week seemed to involve miscalculations. Scribd clearly misjudged the reading appetite (and capacity) of romance readers. And I can’t imagine what E.L. James’s publicist was thinking. I know the books are immensely popular, but they’re also immensely unpopular, and many of the people who don’t like them are passionate and vocal about why. Opening her up to public criticism like that was a really bad idea. Buzzfeed actually didn’t show some of the crueler tweets, which is why I went with that article over some others I saw. On the one hand, it’s book news so I felt I should include it, but on the other hand, I didn’t want to be party to bashing the author as a person any more than I could avoid by posting an article. It’s reasonable to criticize the work itself, but some people got very, very nasty toward her personally, and that’s neither kind nor courteous. She’s a human being with feelings; I think a lot of tweeters forgot that.
R_Hunt @ View From My Home
Good reply!
I would not read any Fifty Shades books, just not my personal genre, and my eldest daughter wanted to see what the hype was about last year, but put it down with an “ugh” after a few chapters.
However, I don’t believe in censorship of books, so whoever wants to read them… go for it, and hope you enjoy them, truly I do. I made my somewhat snide comment to point out that Ms. James must understand that there are folks who are miffed by her series and will say so since her plot is controversial.
Freedom of speech, appropriate for July 4th. That being said, those comments are downright cruel and they shouldn’t have crossed the line that they did. She gave many people a fun time reading her books and she made money doing it. Nothing wrong there. I don’t like her books’ plot, but would never make such a comment to someone who was able to follow her dreams and become a famous author. How would we all feel if in her shoes?? Someone dropped the ball by allowing this “Q & A” to take place. I originally thought it was her idea, but if it wasn’t… then, oops.
Thanks for the give and take, Lark.
R_Hunt @ View From My Home recently posted…Weekly Wrap-Up, Even Though I Was “Gone”
Lark_Bookwyrm
Agreed, on all counts!