Some news about books and ebooks from around the web:
- The 2009 Pulitzer Prize winners were announced on Monday. Some more about that: a guide to the winners from The Daily Beast; NPR discusses the New York Times‘s five wins; Slate, on the other hand, doesn’t care about the journalism awards; The Elegant Variation has some critcism of the criticism of the Prizes; and NPR again on little-known Pulitzer winners.
- Four operators of Bittorrent hub The Pirate Bay were found guilty Friday and sentenced to a year in jail and more than $3 million in fines. This led to a spike in membership in Sweden’s Pirate Party and some meatspace protests, which is a little surprising. Less surprisingly, it also led to lots of outraged Internet denizens; CrunchGear gathered some over-the-top reactions to the verdict here. For what it’s worth, I predict this will have almost zero impact on Bittorrent or piracy, even if The Pirate Bay shuts down. For one thing, you can also use Google to find torrents.
- At Sounds and Fury (via The Reading Experience), a post about the place of “polished” writing in the digitized world. While printed writing is no longer always better than online writing, print does have a higher floor for talent, in that the Internet has no floor at all. Along those lines, the first self-publishing expo has been announced; it will take place in New York in November. And here’s an interview in the Guardian with a HarperCollins exec about why print publishers are so slow in getting on the ebook bandwagon: they’re waiting for the hardware, she says. They better not wait much longer.
- Quick takes: Joe Wikert via TeleRead on E-Ink; also from TeleRead, a DRM system on steroids; Chuck Palahniuk announced a contest to design the logo (?) for his next book; a piece about writers marrying writers; one last thing on #amazonfail from Clay Shirky; more on Kindle’s kill-switch; a library in Brussels is getting on the ebook bandwagon in a major way; 5″ BeBook announced; and a study says piracy is good for the music industry.
- Random of the week: face-melting street BMX. Absolutely face-melting. Also from Afrojacks: go ahead and draft John Wall in your fantasy basketball dynasty league (disclaimer: I know less than nothing about basketball). Last: apparently my business card is crap. Thanks, Joel Bauer. I heard about this first on Mike Schmidt’s podcast (which is NSFW, if a podcast can be NSFW).
