Melville House and MobyLives are closed for the holidays. The Melville House Bookshop is closed, too. That means you can’t take advantage of our insane, Amazon-like sale at our online store. Well, you can, because we didn’t have the time to figure out how to…
Two days after French president Nicolas Sarkozy — as a Reuters story reports — “pledged nearly $1.1 billion … toward the computer scanning of French literary works, audiovisual archives and historical documents” as a counter to Google Book Search, “A Paris court on Friday found…
Three major American library associations have asked the U.S. Justice Department “to oversee Google’s plans to create a massive digital library to prevent an excessively high price for institutional subscriptions,” according to a Reuters wire story. The American Library Association, the Association of College and…
Finally: much hullabaloo is being made of the fact that, at an “ebook summit” staged by Mediabistro, someone said what MobyLives has been saying since we started, which is that Amazon.com is breaking the law. Okay, Bob Livolsi, founder of the ebookstore Books on Board,…
“Google is facing a fresh hurdle to its digital books project as a Chinese court prepares to hear a case brought against the US internet company by a Chinese novelist for scanning her works,” reports Kathrin Hille in a Financial Times story. The report says…
Think it’s ok to let that library book linger on the to-be-read pile? Not so terrible you accidentally shelved it with your own books? Got it in the backseat of the car to drop off the next time you go by the library? Well, not…
Milorad Pavic, the Serbian writer “whose novels upended the traditional relationship between reader and text, taking the form of dictionaries, crossword puzzles and much else,” has died in Belgrade from a heart attack at the age of 80. As a New York Times obituary by…
C. D. B. Bryan, whose 1976 book Friendly Fire about a family’s attempt to prove that their son was killed in the Vietnam war by errant fire from his fellow troops caused a sensation and became an enduring standard of American reportage, and who was…
Did a bad review kill John Keats? As a Wikipedia bio of the great poet observes, his friends were so certain of it that they defied his wish for his gravestone to read only “Here lies one whose name was writ in water” by having…
This is the last installment in the two-week series What Bolaño Read by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read…
In a combative editorial, the Financial Times‘ “chief business commentator,” John Gapper, takes it to critics of publishers for their stance against Amazon, starting with hacker collective NYC Resistor co-founder Nick Bilton for complaining in the New York Times that “publishers seem to be picking…
“This is meta,” says Mackenzie Schmidt in a Village Voice report: “Any day now, Shoplifting at American Apparel, the self-proclaimed ‘controversial’ novella by much-hyped young Brooklyn writer Tao Lin, will go on sale. . . at Urban Outfitters.” While the report gets a couple of…
There is a lot of talk these days about the cost of e-books, when they’re going to be released, etc. but there is also a lot of anger towards publishers: Matt Stewart over at the Huffington Post rants against us, asking “why do you treat…
Bad news at Black Rock, book fans. According to this report in the Associated Press, “The final chapter has been written for the lone bookstore on the streets of Laredo. With a population of nearly a quarter-million people, this city could soon be the largest…
With the report that follows, Melville House author Zachary German continues his occasional reviews of unusual book events… this time, covering readings in the form of a film: This past Saturday night, Chelsea’s PPOW Gallery (quickly becoming a hotbed of NYC literary activity, this year…
This is the tenth installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all…
Add another of the New York big six to the list of publishers standing up to Amazon‘s severe discounting of book prices: Macmillan — owners of Farrar, Strauss, Giroux, Henry Holt, and Picador, among others, says not only will it be delaying the publication of…
The Author’s Guild may have sold their clients out to Google, but they’re not selling them out to Random House – at least not if the organization’s response to Random CEO Markus Dohle‘s letter on ebook rights on old contracts (see the earlier Moby story)…
Barely a month after finding itself in hot water for having no women on its best books of the year list, Publishers Weekly magazine found itself embroiled in another controversy over a cover (see image, right) that many are calling racist. Or, as a headline…
The Huffington Post has an appreciation commemorating the 40 year anniversary of the publication of Dee Brown‘s important history of the American West, Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee, written by Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, and the publisher of Native Sun News. At the…
This is the ninth installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The series celebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all…
While the center of action last week was over confronting Amazon over its slash-and-burn attitude over price discounting (as per this Moby story), over the weekend it shifted to whether publishers controlled the rights to ebooks made from books originally contracted in the years before…
At Boing Boing, Corey Doctorow tells the disturbing story of “My friend, the wonderful sf writer Peter Watts” who “was beaten without provocation and arrested by US border guards” last week and now faces a serious felony rap for “assaulting a federal officer.” Another sf…
A story at the Literary Saloon calls our attention to a literary scandal in the Czech Republic involving Vietnamese teenager Lan Pham Thi, who won a prestigious prize for a novel called Bílej kůň, žlutej drak (The White Horse, the Yellow Dragon). The book described the difficult…
Attention, frog lovers! Simon and Schuster has announced a recall 142,000 copies of Monday the Bullfrog, a plush book for children. According to this Associated Press report, “the plush frog’s plastic eye can detach, possibly posing a choking hazard to young children. The company received…
This is the eighth installment in the two-week series “What Bolaño Read” by former Shaman Drum Bookstore manager Tom McCartan. The seriescelebrates the publication of Roberto Bolaño: The Last Interview & Other Conversations, which is just out from Melville House. Click here to read all…
PublicAffairs founder Peter Osnos posted some notes on the publication of Sarah Palin‘s Going Rogue last week on The Atlantic ‘s website. “From all accounts, this is her book,” Osnos writes. ”It is not insignificant that Lynn Vincent, the writer, doesn’t get an author credit.”…
A day after Oxford University announced (as per this Moby story) that it’s re-written the rules for attaining its poetry chair — so as not to embarrass any more poets the way its last contest embarrassed Derek Walcott! — than does Walcott issue a kind…
This report by the Associated Press asks, “Can a Barcelona truck driver be expected to speak like a Buenos Aires banker? Can rules be imposed on a language spoken by 400 million people stretching from Madrid to Manila?” Apparently, yes: “The academic overseers of the…
Not only is there life after writing, but this page from German eBay — or is it Austrian eBay? — indicates that for some writers, there’s even life after life: It’s for someone selling a Suzuki Samurai that once apparently belonged to Thomas Bernhard, complete…
