With the rise of ebooks, the issue of controlling territorial rights with booksellers — that is, making sure that booksellers are only selling books they have a right to sell within a given region — is becoming a hotter and hotter topic in the industry.…
Time travel is not only possible but the most important facet, the time machine itself, already exists. Or so say Russian physicists in an article for the once mighty Pravda. The machine they’re talking about is the Large Hadron Collider. Remember the LHC? The…
Libraries in Hawaii are alive and well, and engaging their constituents over a mile’s worth of them, standing shoulder to shoulder. Hawaii News Now reported that a “Book Brigade” of over one thousand people moved library books more than a mile: Well over 1,000 volunteers…
With talk of e-books dominating the conversation these days–everyone’s reading them, Amazon may or may not have sold some number of Kindles but no one’s sure, and look! now e-books are in color–a growing number of commentators (including Electric Literature‘s Andy Hunter, whose smart essay…
In 1879, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson–a.k.a. Lewis Carroll–published the classic “nonsense” poem, The Hunting of the Snark. Though often outshined by Carroll’s prose works like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Snark is beloved by Carroll fans and has been adapted in numerous iterations since it was originally…
“Hey! It sure looks like Extraordinary Renditions is getting a lot of press.” “Not any more, you idiot. No one cares about a book a month after it’s published.” Shelf Awareness directed us towards this humorous author-created move by Andrew Ervin to promote his debut…
Citing “news reports from India,” a report on English PEN says that Arundhati Roy, the author of the Booker Prize winning novel The God of Small Things, “will be arrested and charged with ‘sedition’ over comments she made on Kashmir.” Strangely, and frustratingly, however, the…
Looks like book bloggers, booksellers, and enemies of censorship in Massachusetts need to send a federal judge a thank-you note. In an article by Andrew Albanese at PW Daily yesterday we learned that U.S. District Judge Rya W. Zobel has blocked a new obscenity law…
In a follow up to an earlier MobyLives post regarding the CIA lawsuit against former CIA agent Ishmael Jones for his book, The Human Factor: Inside the CIA’s Dysfunctional Intelligence Culture, the New Yorker magazine has posted an interview by Gregory Levey with Jones on…
As the winner of the most recent Best Translated Book (BTB) prize for fiction — for our book, The Confessions of Noa Weber, by Gail Hareven — we here at Melville House were particularly proud to win an award that had been voted upon by…
Yes, it’s that time of year again. Last week, we asked MobyLives readers to vote for (or nominate) their favorite literary prize. One which was sadly missing from the list was the Literary Review’s “Bad Sex in Fiction” award, now in its eighteenth year. In…
Literary readings are fleeting things. Ten, fifteen, twenty people gather, they hear someone read too-fast or too-softly from a book, and then everyone disperses. In New York there are too many readings and we are always missing something interesting; in other parts of the country,…
I hesitate to even mention this because these kinds of reports about “the next big thing” about to come out amount to little more than rote transcriptions of press releases that include device specs and are finished off with a few points of analysis regarding…
Following up on our earlier stories about the Amazon astroturf effort, and even more particularly on yesterday’s post asking why no one ever questions the fact that Amazon, a publicly traded company after all, never offers actual numbers to back up its claims, we offer…
A University of Virginia investigation into the suicide last July of Virginia Quarterly Review managing editor Kevin Morrissey has resulted in “a weirdly inconclusive document that does little to clear up the confusion surrounding the strife at VQR that preceded Morrissey’s death,” according to a…
When her daughter brought home the new history book — Our Virginia: Past and Present — just handed out to her fourth grade class, as in other elementary school classrooms across the state of Virginia, College of William & Mary historian Carol Sheriff couldn’t resist…
Sadie Stein, at Jezebel, drew our attention to a new bibliophile-based dating site called Alikewise.com: “A cross between Goodreads and Match.com, it allows you to meet people based on literary taste. You had us at ‘Call me Ishmael’…maybe.“ Naturally, we were curious about the…
A MobyLives story yesterday detailed how Oxford professor Kathryn Sutherland examined 1,000 pages of handwritten manuscripts by Jane Austen and, finding lots of blotted ink and crossed-out words, concluded that Austen’s terrific precision, spelling, and punctuation were mostly due to an editor named William Gifford.…
A filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission by Amazon.com has revealed that in August, the state of Texas hit the company with a bill for a whopping $269 million for uncollected sales taxes on purchases made by state residents over the last four years.…
The folks over at Media Post have posted a question that I myself have wondered about on many occasions: If the Kindle is selling so well, why doesn’t Amazon back up its boasting with some actual dollar or unit sales instead of leaving analysts and…
On the heels of “Banned Books Weeks” comes a stark reminder of why we celebrate controversial books. Earlier this month, Irfan Sanci, the publisher of Sel books in Turkey, was honored by the International Publishers Association when they announced that the “2010 IPA Freedom Prize”…
Andy Hunter of Electric Literature stopped by Melville House recently and talked to us about some of his ideas concerning the future of publishing. There’s a lot of talk about how new technologies are changing the face of publishing, but there aren’t too many people…
A year after her death in 1817, Jane Austen‘s brother, Henry Austen, said of her work, “Everything came finished from her pen.” Au contraire, says an Oxford University professor who’s been preparing a large selection of Austen’s handwritten manuscript pages for an online archive of…
Ever the bomb thrower, on Saturday the Huffington Post published the latest long and thoughtful grenade lobbed by Anis Shivani (also published in the fall edition of Boulevard), this one comparing modern MFA creative writing programs with the medieval guild system. The long and short of his…
Last week, KCRW’s Bookworm interviewed Tom McCarthy, author of the Booker-shortlisted C, a book which host Michael Silverblatt describes as a “novel that wants you, and wants itself, to know as much as possible.” When asked, “Are you allowed to not read an important classical…
Robert Katz, the author and screenwriter “who incurred the wrath of the Vatican by accusing Pope Pius XII of failing to act to stave off a Nazi massacre of Italians in 1944,” has died in Montevarchi, Italy, due to complications following surgery for cancer. He…
In a column for TruthDig, Andy Borowitz, author of The Republican Playbook, tells what to do if Virginia Thomas, wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, calls you at home: 1. Start apologizing the moment you hear her voice. Remember, like a bear at a…
Time now for another episode in the “Non-Adventures of Wonderella” by Justin Pierce ….
Our recent posting about Amazon‘s new barcode scanner app brought in a ton of comments, including some from champions of the app who say the app encourages “comparison shopping.” But in a smart consideration posted at my3books.com, long-time indie sales rep John Mesjak notes some…
On Tuesday I posted a poll to determine what readers thought about J.D. Salinger‘s literary worth. In the post, I mentioned this YouTube video, which I described as “creepy.” Thursday morning I received an email from someone who asked to be referred to as “Nadar.”…
