Thursday Midday Links: “Beauty and the Beast become a single character”

JanePublishing NewsAmazon / digital lending / lawsuits / Library / Multifunction-Device16 Comments

A federal judge in Austin has ruled that the Texas anti littering slogan does not apply to Christie Craig’s Don’t Mess With Texas. The decision (which I have not read) reportedly cites First Amendment issues and costs in denying the preliminary injunction request. Rogers v. Grimaldi, 875 F.2d 994, 999 (2nd Cir. 1989) set forth a two pronged test wherein artist expression trumps commercial speech (commercial speech being the slogan). I am assuming that is the basis for the federal judge’s ruling yesterday.

The TxDOT could try for an appeal to a higher court because the federal judge that ruled the Rogers rule applied isn’t likely to change his mind so moving forward with the trial doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense.

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Nate at the Digital Reader reports that rumors indicate the Amazon Tablet will come in two flavors: 7″ and 10″. Man, I would be so tempted by the 7″ one.

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This is a fantastic review of Virginia Kantra’s selkie book, Sea Witch. (We’ve reviewed Kantra here).  Margred is the female protagonist in this romance and she is a selkie and needs sex often.

Margred is both a gorgeous woman and an animal. She has, for example, no sense of humor, and she occasionally flashes her teeth in a way that is not at all friendly. More than anything, though, Kantra reminds us of her character’s animal nature by making Margred a creature of almost feral sensuality. Beauty and the Beast become a single character, and this allows for some wonderful inversions of gender expectations. When Margred alights on that moonlit beach and meets Caleb Hunter, her hand is on his fly before they even exchange names. While it would be an overstatement to say that the duo present a perfect inversion of the typical dynamic between romance heroes and heroines, they come awfully close. In Margred, the animal has long been awakened, and Caleb doesn’t offer her a sexual initiation; instead, he introduces her to such mundane phenomena as coffee, lobster rolls, and dishwashing.

I love that phrase “Beauty and the Beast become a single character.”  Who wants to read Sea Witch, raise their hands?

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Speaking of Ms. Kantra, she and a few other authors are offering up critiques to raise money for their fellow author and ovarian cancer sufferer, Heather.  Read more about their efforts here.

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Hachette is considering new business models that will bring its frontlist books back to libraries in digital format.

Hachette Book Group has been doing a lot of legwork in recent months as part of an effort to decide whether it should increase its exposure to the library ebook market, reversing a previous decision that has kept Hachette’s frontlist ebook titles out of library hands since July 2010.

Interestingly, the end of the article says that the boycott against HarperCollins due to is 26 limit cap has dwindled.

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Reader Tessa sent me this link on digital texts and higher education.  There’s more to publishing a digital text than merely replicating the print version:

A carefully done e-text is an awesome thing, but right now publishers and book sellers are so eager to jump into this growing market that they’re pushing all sorts of crap out there, with a lot of problems from the mildly annoying to the infuriating. So, for instance, any book that relies on static pages and page layout to make sense — say, for example, anything with marginal glosses or footnotes or sidebar text-boxes — is going to be unreadable, to some degree or another, in a scalable font e-text if it’s been hastily scanned for the Kindle/Nook market without careful re-editing and re-designing to include hyperlinks instead of the static layout.

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The Kobo Touch is available in select Best Buy stores.  I was hoping to pick one up in the store, but my local Best Buy’s don’t show in stock availability. I may have to break down and order one.

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The September Coming Soon catalog is updated.  Or at least the cover version is. I will hopefully get the sortable table updated today. There is a lot of purple covers this month and next.

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Have questions about the editing process?  Want to know why mistakes slip through the cracks? Why a book can’t be cancelled? Why certain books are purchased and others are rejected?  Sarah Wendell is hosting an “ask the editor” piece.  Send in your questions and her anonymous editor has agreed to answer questions about the mysterious editing process.

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And while yesterday’s picture links were about happiness, today’s picture link is poignant and depicts the dog of one fallen Navy SEAL’s laying at the feet of the casket of his former master.

Jane

Jane Litte is the founder of Dear Author, a lawyer, and a lover of pencil skirts. She self publishes NA and contemporaries (and publishes with Berkley and Montlake) and spends her downtime reading romances and writing about them. Her TBR pile is much larger than the one shown in the picture and not as pretty. You can reach Jane by email at jane @ dearauthor dot com

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