News about books and ebooks from around the web (despite the date, these are real):
- Detroit newspapers made serious cuts to their dead-tree circulation Monday. Beginning this week, only abridged hard-copy versions of the papers (called “express editions”) will be available at newsstands on Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Saturdays—and they won’t be delivered to homes at all on those days. Customers will be instead be directed to the papers’ websites. A newspaper-ereading pilot program for Detroit was announced some time ago, but that won’t start until fall at the earliest. Also, Slate’s Jack Shafer says newspapers aren’t necessary for democracy. And from TED, a talk about newspaper design, and whether it can save the medium.
- J.K. Rowling and other writers are complaining that digital copies of their books are available on Scribd.com, the “YouTube for books” on which users upload documents. I don’t have much sympathy for Rowling, because she has refused to make her novels available as ebooks, period. If they get Harry Potter off Scribd, you can still find the full series here (for Sony Reader only, but maybe Calibre can convert it for you).
- GalleyCat turned me on to the awesome blog Contrariwise, which documents tattoos of literary quotes or characters. Be careful, you can lose a morning at Contrariwise before you know it. (P.S. How psyched is this guy for Where the Wild Things Are?)
- Twitter writings (twitings?): novelist R.N. Morris is releasing a novel through Twitter; it’s called A Gentle Axe, and you can find it here. I tried it for a while, but I don’t have the constitution for reading long-form narrative in 140-character spurts. Perhaps more appropriate to the medium, Ben Okri is releasing a poem on Twitter (find it here). Oh, and he won the Booker prize. Take that, old media! By the way, can I put “Ben Okri follows me on Twitter” on my resume?
- Quick takes: The Tournament of Books has crowned a champion; Cory Doctorow on DRM and the hidden issues of Amazon’s text-to-speech reversal; reading fiction helps your brain; Richard Ford wrote a great piece in the Guardian about his Bascombe novels, evidently he wrote a whole book about writing them; here’s a new story by Nick Harkaway, I really liked his novel; also a lost Walker Percy story is being released; and a publishing exec writes that the ebook revolution might (eek!) change things.
- Random of the week: Vince Noir and Howard Moon will be bringing their love games and garlic naan to the U.S. as The Mighty Boosh will be airing on American TV, specifically in Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim block. You probably either love the Boosh, or have never heard of it; or someone sent you a link to a nameless video, and you both love it and have never heard of it. Despite what the Boing Boing guy said in that link, “The Legend of Old Gregg” is the best Boosh episode ever. You can see the best bit of it here.
