Wednesday Links: 7-29-09

In the world of book and ebook news this week: prizes, rumors, debates, and highly anticipated book reviews.

• The Man Booker Prize longlist has been announced.

• Some first reviews of highly anticipated soon-to-be-released books, specifically, Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 (via), and Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice (via).

• There’s a story in the Financial Times about the upcoming Apple tablet. 9to5Mac focuses on the news that Apple’s tablet might be out by the Christmas shopping season (which could be as early as September). Macworld, meanwhile, trumpets the news of Apple’s proposed new music management/interaction system. And that system might lead to Apple getting into ebooks. In the same device class is the Crunchpad, which will supposedly retail for less than $300 (!), and will be available any day now. The problem for both of these, from an ereading perspective, is battery. A few hours with a book is a whole lot different than a few days.

• The dustup about Amazon unselling ebooks appeared settled after Jeff Bezos wrote an apology to Kindlers (a purple paragraph about decision-making scar tissue). Not so fast! David Rothman at TeleRead explains in detail how and why this was a first-class Amazon pooch-screw. Even the New York Times is getting into the act, with a piece about how you can’t own DRMed media. The one defender of Amazon’s move is a law professor who says it was an efficient way to enforce copyright law. Orwell, author of the unsold books in question, died in 1950, so…. speaking of ridiculous, corporation-sponsored copyright laws, Ars Technica has a long piece up about the goals of the Pirate Party, and how a reduction of those ridiculous copyright terms might actually hurt copyleft. Here’s a piece in the Millions about copyright and remixed work. And, finally, file-sharing is still not fair use.

• Speaking of Amazon, Nicholson Baker’s grumpy Kindle article was largely dismissed as the tech-unsavvy complaints of a “print defender.” Yesterday, Kassia Krozser came to Baker’s indirect defense with a piece at Booksquare about bad ebook formatting (one of Baker’s big complaints) as a symptom of the more systemic problem of lack of quality control in publishing.

• Quick takes: Popcorn Fiction is a new bare-bones lit mag of sorts that features short stories by screenwriters; the CyBook Opus is now available for purchase, and Samsung has unveiled its new ereader in Korea; David Cronenberg’s making the movie version of Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis; this bookselling tactic makes me sad; the AP wants DRM for their content―yikes; and a vision of an Espresso Book Machine bookstore.

• Randoms of the week: evidently caffeine makes you smarter (I am officially a genius); flying 1500 mph with no roof; and a Daisy Fuentes sighting.