Amazon and Hachette have announced that they’ve reached an agreement following their months-long dispute: Hachette will now be allowed to decide its own e-book prices. Michael Pietsch, the CEO, sounded satisfied with the outcome, calling it “great news for writers.” But the New Republic argues that Hachette ought to have kept up the fight for longer: What was getting fought over was bigger than e-book pricing, and the consequences of Amazon’s strong-arming of Hachette will continue to reverberate: “If Amazon continues to interfere in publishers’ pricing decisions, publishers will be forced to produce more and more high-revenue yielding books, which means decisions about who gets published and who doesn’t will trend even further toward who can sell a lot of books and who can’t.”
The editor in chief of The Intercept, John Cook, will soon leave the newsmagazine to return to Gawker, where he’ll be deputy editor of investigations. The position will give him oversight over all eight of Gawker Media’s sites, including Jezebel, Lifehacker, Deadspin, and Gizmodo. Glenn Greenwald said, in an Intercept post yesterday, that the search for a replacement for Cook is “already underway.” But the loss of Cook—whom Greenwald recognizes for “tripling” the number of staff staff and “significantly increasing” the number of pieces they publish—is a blow for First Look, The Intercept’s parent company, which has lately been struggling. Matt Taibbi, who was to head up the as-yet unlaunched political satire site Racket, left last month after management disputes.
Choire Sicha talked to Capital New York about the Awl’s redesign, which took effect the day before yesterday. The editors care more about how well the site works, he said, than how it looks, but they knew they didn’t want it to look precious: no “fussy fussbudget garbage” or “magazine-ing.” The main purpose of the new design is prosaic—i.e., to “make more money.”
Louise Troh was engaged to be married to Thomas Eric Duncan, the only Ebola victim to die in the United States. Now Troh has agreed write a memoir for Weinstein Books about what happened.
Are writers less likely to publicly feud today than they used to? At Prospect, Elaine Showalter thinks so. It’s a pity: Literary feuds are more interesting than literary friendships.
Kenneth Goldsmith is teaching a course called “Wasting Time on the Internet,” if you feel like wasting time by reading about it.