Tuesday News: Tarantino sues Gawker, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde converse, digital publishing is growing in India, successful books are vivisected, and more questions emerge about new Adobe DRM strategy

JanetPublishing NewsAdobe / Audre Lorde / book reviewing / digital books / DRM / Gawker / gender / HarperCollins / India / infographic / intellectual property / James Baldwin / RaceComments Off on Tuesday News: Tarantino sues Gawker, James Baldwin and Audre Lorde converse, digital publishing is growing in India, successful books are vivisected, and more questions emerge about new Adobe DRM strategy

Quentin Tarantino sues Gawker for circulating ‘Hateful Eight’ script – Well, this might be interesting. I say “might” because who knows if the case will ever see the inside of a courtroom. There’s a lot going on here, beyond the question of intellectual property rights. Tarantino’s camp obviously wants to put Gawker — and contemporary journalism — on trial in the public eye, which makes me wonder how serious they are about really pushing for any legal action beyond a settlement. The case put me in mind of when The Nation published some excerpts of Gerald Ford’s as-yet-unreleased memoirs.

“Tarantino’s lawyers filed a lawsuit that said: ‘Gawker Media has made a business of predatory journalism, violating people’s rights to make a buck. This time they went too far. Rather than merely publishing a news story reporting that Plaintiff’s screenplay may have been circulating in Hollywood without his permission, Gawker Media crossed the journalistic line by promoting itself to the public as the first source to read the entire Screenplay illegally.'” Los Angeles Times

Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde – A conversation published in Essence Magazine in 1984 between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, this is one of those exchanges that makes you (or, at least, me) wish for the triumphant return of the public intellectual. We need more discussions like this posted online, and more exchanges of this caliber in general to be happening now, in 2014, in our shared cultural spaces.

“If we can put people on the moon and we can blow this whole planet up, if we can consider digging 18 inches of radioactive dirt off of the Bikini atolls and somehow finding something to do with it – if we can do that, we as Black cultural workers can somehow begin to turn that stuff around – because there’s nobody anymore buying ‘cave politics’ – ‘Kill the mammoth or else the species is extinct.’ We have moved beyond that. Those little scrubby-ass kids in the sixth grade – I want those Black kids to know that brute force is not a legitimate way of dealing across sex difference. I want to set up some different paradigms.” MoCADA Museum

‘Reviewers not objective, go after popular names only’ – More evidence of the global growth in digital (and, by extension, more diversified reading patterns). In addition, V.K. Karthika, chief editor and publisher of HarperCollins India, spoke at the Hyderabad Literary Festival, and indicated that professional reviewers are no longer considered the gold standard for book reviews in India. Instead,

“‘We have therefore started reaching out to bloggers with a significant audience. They are definitely more unbiased and objective in their feedback,’ Karthika said as she stressed the growing reach of social networking in particular and the World Wide Web in general in today’s context. ‘It is intriguing to see the rising demand for e-books. For instance, our own survey shows that an e-book that made Rs 25,000 a few months ago is now generating revenue of about Rs 1.25 lakh,’ she noted.” Times Of India

The DNA of a Successful Book: INFOGRAPHIC – Some interesting “facts” here, including the finding that a 300-page book has the best ‘completion rate,” while 30% will only read the first fifty pages of a book, and (no surprise), the $3.99 price point generates the most revenue, even though the .99 books sell at a higher rate. Anyway, check it out. GalleyCat

Brave New World: Adobe Accept ACS4 Broken? – More on the new Adobe DRM, from the perspective of the Booksellers Association of the UK and Ireland. Some good questions here, including the implicit, how is Adobe going to be supporting its older ebooks? One of the most frustrating things for me with Adobe is that periodically I’ve lost use of older Adobe-DRM’d books, simply because the platform changed. Again, not an incentive for me to leave the Kindle-sphere (and I wonder if these issues impact the question of digital retailer loyalty?).

“Perhaps Adobe should have adopted a more long term and integrated approach by embedding both encrypted and later watermarked solutions within InDesign and collected the money in the upstream development. They could have still offered the downstream licence operation but would have probably achieved greater control of the market. Files could have been automatically exported in multiple formats all offering the publisher multiple channels and retailers an incentive to do what they do best – price and sell. Also it should be noted that as Adobe move towards the subscription based licencing of all their tools, this simpler approach could have been bundled in as a value added incentive to publishers.” Brave New World

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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