Thursday News: Barnes and Noble does it again, the graphic novel gets a NY show, and a funny Bachelor parody

JanetPublishing NewsAuthor Solutions / Barnes and Noble / DRM / graphic novels / Nook / parody / The Bachelor / theater7 Comments

Barnes & Noble’s Dirty Little Secret: Author Solutions and Nook Press – So Barnes and Noble continues to disappoint, this time via the author services it started advertising a few months ago. What they did not reveal at the time (nor presently, for that matter) is that they are outsourcing those services to Author Solutions. David Gaughran and Nate Hoffelder have been working on uncovering the truth about B&N’s relationship with Author Solutions for a while, and they finally found the smoking gun. Why is this bad? Gaughran does a great job of explaining some of the main problems with this deal:

Also, Barnes & Noble fails to disclose Author Solutions’ involvement to authors purchasing these services. The Nook Press Author Services site goes into great detail about these services but never once mentions that Author Solutions is fulfilling them. In fact, the way the FAQs on the site are worded makes it sound like Barnes & Noble/Nook Press carries out the work itself – which is extremely misleading.

Finally, authors who use Nook Press Author Services are not informed that their personal details are shared with Author Solutions, along with explicit permission to use those personal details to upsell Author Solutions’ infamous marketing packages. –David Gaughran

B&N Changes Nook DRM Key, Further Proving That They Don’t Want Your Business – In more B&N related news, apparently they have changed the DRM key to the Nook, which is bad news for anyone who hasn’t downloaded and stripped the DRM from their digital Nook books. Fortunately it’s not that difficult to do so, even with the new key, but it does take a few extra steps.

I feel like someday Barnes and Noble is going to be a case study in what not to do as a bookseller.

If you have a Nook app, you can still download and read your ebooks (for now). But if you want to protect your ebooks from B&N’s future bungling by removing the DRM, that’s going to require a little additional work.

To start, you’ll need to download, install, and activate NookStudy (get it here). You have to use it to download Nook ebooks. After you’ve downloaded a Nook ebook, NookStudy will have a copy of the new encryption key. (And once you have the key, you can use the usual workaround to bypass B&N’s block on downloading your Nook ebooks.)

You can find the key in one of NookStudy’s log files, and get this: NookStudy stores the key in plain text. –Ink, Bits & Pixels (aka The Digital Reader)

WORDLESS! Art Spiegelman and Phillip Johnston on the Birth of the Graphic Novel – If you’re going to be in New York City on March 13th, you might want to check out WORDLESS!, featuring Art Spiegelman, and Phillip Johnston (artist and composer) at Columbia University. WORDLESS! traces some of the history and evolution of the graphic novel, and also includes new work by Spiegelman. Flavorwire conducted a really engaging interview with Johnston and Spiegelman, who talked about their approach to the show, their collaborative process, and how this work differs — for Johnston — from creating a musical score for a film:

Phillip, How does this compare to doing live film scores?

PJ: Well I think the biggest difference is the difference between a film and a book — the film is made to go at a certain speed, which is determined by the director. But a book everybody reads at their own pace. Once you turn a book into a public performance, then you have to dictate a speed, but once you do that you’re sort of making a sacrifice for people on both sides, slow or fast. The only tool you have left in the experience of doing it, because of course we also have Art’s lecture, is music to try to accommodate that in a way that is going to serve the work itself the best. So the music has to be very involved in setting the pace, calling attention to certain things that are in it.

AS: But also — it’s not just comics, it’s music.

PS: It’s got do both. It’s got to be entertaining. It’s got to storytell. It’s got to harmonize with the historical and philosophical and political view of the individual works. So it has to do a lot of things at the same time, yet at the same time you don’t want to be literal with everything, you want to have a certain amount of elasticity in your relationship to them. So you’re always kind of juggling all those things, and you constantly have to juggle one to the other to the other. I remember the process because when we were doing the music and editing there was a lot of back and forth — there was just so much detail work.

AS: Here it’s like: let’s slow down these pictures because it’s just too much take in. –Flavorwire

All-pup ‘Bachelor’ parody shows the dog-eat-dog side of the dating world – Need a lift or a laugh? Mashable’s description of this Funny or Die bit says it all:

Scott Eastwood, son of actor Clint Eastwood, stars in a Funny or Die spoof of The Bachelor, featuring a line up of adorable dogs. Scott must follow his heart if he’s going to find his true “man’s best friend.” –Mashable

Janet

isn't sure if she's an average Romance reader, or even an average reader, but a reader she is, enjoying everything from literary fiction to philosophy to history to poetry. Historical Romance was her first love within the genre, but she's fickle and easily seduced by the promise of a good read. She approaches every book with the same hope: that she will be filled from the inside out with something awesome that she didnʼt know, didnʼt think about, or didnʼt feel until that moment. And she's always looking for the next mind-blowing read, so feel free to share any suggestions!

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