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
- Libraries and Archivists Are Scanning and Uploading Books That Are Secretly in the Public Domain (Vice.com)
- Tennessee School Bans Harry Potter Books Because the Spells Could ‘Conjure Evil Spirits’ (Mental Floss; also in The Tenneseean)
- Librarians Launch National Campaign to Oppose Macmillan’s Library E-book Embargo (Publishers Weekly)
- Resale of E-books Ruled Illegal in EU (Publishers Weekly)
- Turkish author jailed for life nominated for £50,000 book award (The Guardian)
- “Literature Locked Up” Supports an End to US Prison Book Bans for Banned Books Week (Book Riot)
- Amid Changes, BookExpo Limits Exhibit Hours to Two Days (Publishers Weekly)
Worth Reading/Viewing
- Toni Morrison: Tell City Leaders to Invest in Libraries (NYPL, from 2018)
- Audiobooks or Reading? To Our Brains, It Doesn’t Matter (Discover magazine)
- A pair of articles debates the recent trend in illustrated/comics-style covers for romance novels. Kelly Jensen asks, As Illustrated Covers Trend in Romance, What Is Being Said About Women’s Interests? (Hint: she sees the trend as sexist and infantilizing.) Jessica Pryde counters that Illustrated Covers Aren’t a Conspiracy to Belittle Readers. (Book Riot; click article titles to read.) Frankly, I think both women make some good points.
- Do Publishers Suddenly Hate Libraries? Why the tension between libraries and publishers is ramping up in the e-book market—and why we must tamp it down (Joseph Janes, Publishers Weekly)
- How Beatrix Potter Pioneered the Art of Merchandising (Mental Floss)
Awesome Lists
- The Ultimate Fall 2019 Books Preview (Literary Hub)
- 50 Shades and More: 11 Published Fan Fiction books (Book Riot) Or rather, books that originated as fanfic. The list completely ignores the obvious “published fanfics” that were traditionally published from the start—Sherlock Holmes pastiches like Laurie R. King’s Mary Russell series, for example, or fairytale-inspired books like the Lunar Chronicles. Instead, the books on this list were actually first posted on fanfic sites, then further edited and modified for publication.
Nicole @ Bookwyrmknits
Seriously? The Harry Potter books are going to summon evil spirits? Well, I suppose book banning counts as an evil spirit, right? So this is self-fulfilling.
I love that my “audiobooks are reading” mantra has now been acknowledged in a scientific study. Nice links!
Nicole @ Bookwyrmknits recently posted…Goodreads TBR Declutter #24
Lark_Bookwyrm
That HP article had me shaking my head. And people think kids can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality?