Friday Morning LitLinks
James Kelman goes off on Scotland’s literary culture, saying if the country were in charge of handing out the Nobel prize, it would go to “a writer of fucking detective fiction” or a book about “some upper middle-class young magician”.
Kunati Books folds after two years in business, most of which was plagued by controversy.
Joe Quirk says to turn down that big advance.
Kelly Jane Torrance, writing for the Washington Times, chronicles the recent successes of dead authors.
26 year old former fact checker Amelia Lester is now the new managing editor of The New Yorker.
Sam Jordison examines the first book on the Guardian’s ‘Not the Booker’ prize shortlist, A Kind of Intimacy by Jenn Ashworth. More about the Not the Booker prize here.
Google announces a million public domain books for download in open EPUB format. First person to read them all wins a candy bar.
U.S. District Court clears the way for BookLocker’s antitrust lawsuit against Amazon by denying a motion to dismiss.
Stephanie Giancola chats it up with erotic romance novelist Debra Glass.
Today in Literature: On this day in 430, Saint Augustine died at the age of seventy-five.
AuthorScoop
August 28th, 2009 at 6:26 pm
Saint Augustine died while the Vandals were sacking his city. Surely “Today in Literature” should know that. It must mean something.
August 28th, 2009 at 9:47 pm
Picture this: Amelia decides to visit the poetry editor (what is his name anyway, the new guy?) next Wednesday, exactly 62 days after Mag emailed her five finest examples of poetic residue to the last-best-hope of literary cognation. As the lovely and youthful Amelia chats, she fiddles with her latte and thus a few errant drops splish-splash with enough force to cause the Enter key (on the editor’s ergonomic keyboard) to active Mag’s long dormant email. As the editor hastily daubs at the keys, the print command is activated and lo! you-know-who is presented with 5 pages of some of the best poetry this side of Lake Titicaca. It Could Happen!
August 29th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
I am having trouble seeing how Amazon’s decision to run their book-on-demand service through one specific publisher.
This is a strategic decision involving a very specific and unique business model and it seems understandable if they seek to control the scope of it in-house.
Just because Amazon offers authors/publishers an opportunity to sell through them via print on demand, it does not mean that they need to do via any and every print on demand service that is in business. Since these books are being sold by Amazon directly, they have a vested interest regarding the quality of the service.
Amazon is not the only place that sells books and it seems like many options are available:
1) don’t sell on Amazon at all
2) don’t sell on Amazon DIRECTLY (I assume they can do it as a third party sale)
3) take the traditional approach of doing a print run and get Amazon to carry the book
Filing a lawsuit is not the answer simply because things are not exactly the way you would like them to be.
August 30th, 2009 at 11:50 am
the whole thing is weirdly inconsistent. my book of poems is fulfilled through lulu. when they notified me it would be available on amazon, there was initially a pretty substantial markup. this was lifted after a couple of days and now it is available on amazon for the same price that is available on lulu. go figure.