A handful of German publishers took the fight against book piracy to a new level last week when they collectively filed suit against two newspapers simply for printing the name of a website that sells pirated copies of e-books.
Jennifer Weiner, who not long ago took the New York Times Book Review to task for not publishing enough women, is after the paper again, this time for its new Bookends column. In a series of tweets, Weiner lambasted the NYTBR for being too "literary" (that is, for excluding commercial writers), and characterized the first column as being “toothless, tepid, engineered.”
“Can you recite the dictionary definition of peruse from memory? Do you have the etymology of short-lived stored in the recesses of your brain, available at a moment’s notice for impromptu punctuation lesson purposes? Are you an expert on the difference between rebut and refute?” Slate offers a primer on how to spot a language bully.
The Guardian explains how the Kindle Single has fixed a problem that has existed in publishing for 500 years.
Though Edgar Allan Poe lived and died in Baltimore (and went to college in Virginia), he was born in Boston, and his hometown wants to make sure that more people know it. The city is inching towards its goal of raising $200,000 to construct a statue entitled “Poe Returning to Boston.”
At the Awl, “Mr. Adam Plunkett Freelance Writer” looks at the ridiculous rhetoric of online book marketing and wonders if anybody has ever been drawn in by offers of a "new breed of an erotic novel," "based heavily on sexting and mysterious hotel encounters," or anything “with a striking afterword by Jesse Ventura.”
