Do you enjoy page-turning simulation that happens when you "flip" through a book on an e-reader? If so, we hope you own an iPad, because under a patent that was granted this week, Apple now owns the exclusive rights to that effect.
If fundraising efforts work out, a very low-budget adaptation of Tao Lin’s Shoplifting from American Apparel may be coming to a theater near you.
The San Francisco-based literary magazine McSweeney's has commissioned writer Richard Parks to write an hour-long radio drama about Flaming Lips frontman Wayne Coyne. Well, sort of: The event will be a "continuous-play radio drama in the style of Mercury Theatre's War of the Worlds, about an imaginary tumor in the shape of a head, that happens to be growing in Wayne Coyne's leg.” In addition to the Flaming Lips, the event will feature musicians Bill Callahan, Nico Muhly, Okkervil River, Oneida, and others. It will be broadcast on Los Angeles’s KCRW on November 24 and 25 at 5 p.m. Pacific time.
Penguin is loosening its grip on digital books. Under a pilot program that will begin this year, the publishing giant—which recently merged with Random House—will start e-book lending programs with public libraries in Los Angeles and Cleveland.
The Atlantic Wire reports that 83-year-old writer, Hungarian Holocaust survivor, and Nobel Laureate Imre Kertesz is putting down his pen for good. According to a French news item translated from the Hungarian, Kertesz is retiring due to complications from Parkinson’s disease, and because he feels that he has said all he has to say about the Holocaust.
If a Life of Pi sale at the e-commerce site Gilt is any indication, filmmakers have devised a new method of getting rid of the detritus that comes with making a movie—selling it online. For $40,000, a lucky buyer can walk away with a 25-foot raft used in the movie, while signed movie posters and costume jewelry from the Yan Martel adaptation are going for less. Proceeds will be donated to charity.
