Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
- It’s awards season. Judges for the Man Booker Prize announced finalists, including E.L. Doctorow, V.S. Naipaul, Alice Munro, and Joyce Carol Oates. The Orange Prize for women’s fiction released their longlist, including Toni Morrison, Allegra Goodman, and Samantha Hunt. Seamus Heaney has won the David Cohen Prize for his lifetime in letters. Salvatore Scibone has won the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award. The National Magazine Awards announced finalists; we learn that The New Yorker has a smaller circulation rate than Martha Stewart Living. And a survey of French writers found Marcel Proust their favorite author and Proust’s monster seven-volume novel A recherche du temps perdu (Remembrance of Things Past) their favorite book.
- In the world of econtent: Publishing website Scribd.com has grown its list of publishing partners. Also, Sony has partnered with Google to make half a million public domain books available through Sony’s terrible eBook Store. The University of Michigan Press is planning to go primarily digital, with print-on-demand available. And HarperCollins will no longer print an ink-and-paper catalog.
- Via TeleRead: The Christian Science Monitor published an article about the Kindle bringing down society. Shades of Stephen Carter in The Daily Beast, an article I strongly disagreed with. The CS Monitor, though, just has a problem with Kindle’s DRM and proprietary format, concerns I share.
- Short takes: G.W. Bush gets a book deal; documentary about The Pirate Bay coming soon; NY Times goes nuts about the copyrights of pictures, presumably because they didn’t get paid for them; Sylvia Plath’s son killed himself nine days ago; a fascist new copyright law was repealed in New Zealand (where blood and free stakes are still bullish); Picador launched a Twitter book club; the Vatican might pointlessly boycott the next Dan Brown movie; here’s Shepard Fairey on his ongoing (ludicrous) copyright struggle with the AP; Samsung is releasing a new touchscreen ereader called the Papyrus; and Project Gutenberg is experimentally releasing books as ePubs.
- Random of the week: Animal Rescue Camel Caravan; a site about a couple of itinerant Australian animal rescuers/goddess clothing makers, who travel by camel-pulled wagon across the desert. Outstanding. Alas, there is no blog, but there’s word of a book to come. Buy their clothes here.
