Thursday Morning LitLinks
Free speech groups band together to condemn the dismissal of four members of a library board in West Bend, Wisconsin for refusing to remove controversial books from the library’s young adult section.
Is that a poem in your pocket… National Poetry Month closes out with ‘Poem in Your Pocket Day’.
PC World offers up 5 pros and 5 cons of the Google Book Search deal.
Sam Jordison recaps his night at the Arthur C. Clarke awards ceremony.
The Columbus Dispatch profiles Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet author Jamie Ford (see AuthorScoop’s interview with Ford here).
Why some of your favorite works won’t be released as e-books.
How Toy Styles built a business around “street literature”.
Obama grows “sick of briefing books” and settles into Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.
Today in Literature: On this day in 1642, Richard Lovelace presented the Kentish Petition to Parliament and was imprisoned, resulting in the composition of his famous poem, “To Althea, From Prison”.
AuthorScoop
April 30th, 2009 at 8:28 am
For authors holding out on e-books, the 25 percent royalty rate is a perfectly legitimate gripe. I wonder what kind of costs publishers are applying to the production and distribution of e-books. Net profits can easily become a mythical fairy tale.
The issue of the convoluted rights, bogged down in a sea of impenetrable contracts, only highlights the absurd state of rights and licensing (I have had movie studios tell me “I know it’s ours but the rights have changed hands so many times, I can’t prove it so I can’t license it to you”) and the incompetence of cogs in the wheel making busy work for themselves. (Please note that I am definitely not from the ‘lawyers are evil’ camp but many do seem to work against common sense and a fair trading perspective).
But that “I only like paper” or “technology is evil” shtick is silly. Rowling has no issue with movies. Clancy has no problem with video games. Why object to the technology of an e-reader?
People want to read you book and you are going to object because they want to do it off a screen from a legitimate, licensed copy? Must be nice to have the kind of residuals that can permit such a flaky perspective (for they surely would be singing a different tune as a new, unpublished writer).
April 30th, 2009 at 8:37 am
I still can’t get my head around all the issues of this Google Book Search situation.
There is good, there is bad, but the whole thing is just too damn big to consider.
There are huge chunks of the picture still missing here for me.
April 30th, 2009 at 8:40 am
“The patrons accused the library of promoting “the overt indoctrination of the gay agenda in our community” and demanded that the library add books “affirming traditional heterosexual perspectives.””
Whoo-hoo!
Am I reading that right?
Playboy’s in the kids library!
April 30th, 2009 at 12:23 pm
excellent insights re: the reluctance to go to e-book format, michael. and funny stuff on the library situation.
April 30th, 2009 at 2:20 pm
Obvious, but still needing to be said: why is having books available on the shelves for those who choose to read them “overt indoctrination”? And what, precisely, is an affirmation of “traditional heterosexual perspectives”? Barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen? Maybe Michael’s got it right — Larry Flynt’s illustrative publication in the “new arrivals” display in the foyer of the West Bend public library.