Wednesday News: Apple settlement disbursed, B&N’s murky future, and the end of the period?
Publishing NewsAmazon / Apple / Barnes and Noble / ebook settlement / Literary fiction / punctuation15 Comments
Amazon is Sending Out Emails for eBook Settlement Credits Today – Nate Hoffelder reports that emails from Amazon regarding ebook refunds from the recent Apple settlement are finally being disbursed to readers. Amazon has sent out an email, and word is that Barnes and Noble has also informed consumers of available refund credits.
Any US consumer who bought an ebook between 1 April 2010 and 21 May 2012 should be eligible to receive a pro-rated refund equivalent to $6.93 for each ebook which was on the New York Times best-seller list, and $1.57 for all other ebook purchases. Given the large number of ebook sites which have closed over the past few years, that refund is less than certain, but the major ebook retailers are following through. – The Digital Reader
Pulp Friction – Probably the most interesting thing to me about Alex Shephard’s piece on how the demise of Barnes and Noble will kill literary fiction (what he dubs “the so-called ‘serious’ works that get nominated for Pulitzers and National Book Awards”) is that Shephard doesn’t really talk about his previous gig as digital media director for Melville House publishing. His former job certainly explains the ‘Barnes and Noble as the SAVIOR OF HIGH FICTION’ nonsense, although the irony of trashing commercial fiction from the pages of the New Republic sort of undermines the moral imperative.
In a world without Barnes & Noble, risk-averse publishers will double down on celebrity authors and surefire hits. Literary writers without proven sales records will have difficulty getting published, as will young, debut novelists. The most literary of novels will be shunted to smaller publishers. Some will probably never be published at all. And rigorous nonfiction books, which often require extensive research and travel, will have a tough time finding a publisher with the capital to fund such efforts. – New Republic
Period. Full Stop. Point. Whatever It’s Called, It’s Going Out of Style – So apparently the period is being pummeled by the ubiquity of instant messaging. Or something. And look how clever the NYT was in its use (or disuse) of the punctuation in question. You know, I could, if pressed, make a case for the abandonment of the Oxford comma, but it’s difficult to imagine that the period is going to disappear from fully realized (and spelled out) prose. Just imagine how much more space on a page you would need to differentiate complete thoughts for a reader.
Geoffrey Nunberg, a linguist who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, noted that the 140-character limit imposed by Twitter and the reading of messages on a cellphone or hand-held device has repurposed the punctuation mark
“It is not necessary to use a period in a text message, so to make something explicit that is already implicit makes a point of it,” he said “It’s like when you say, ‘I am not going – period’ It’s a mark It can be aggressive It can be emphatic It can mean, ‘I have no more to say’ – New York Times
Kobo credited my account, but of course being Kobo there was no email notification.
According to the message recording at the phone number on the ebook settlement website, checks will be going out on the 23rd (tomorrow) for Sony, other stores, and for people who requested checks rather than store credit.
I thought the written word was going away all together at least according to Facebook. I can’t take stories like this seriously. #teamoxfordcommaforever
@library addict: The AP Stylebook tweeted against the Ox yesterday, and I unfollowed them. I don’t need to see that kind of trash in my timeline.
Honestly, I must have some sort of punctuation OCD because I seldom text without adding punctuation at the end. It just feels weird not to do so.
I wonder if the Oxford comma is a generational hot button? Has there been a study looking at that? I was taught to use it, my daughter was taught not to use it. We aren’t English majors nor do we write for a living, yet we’ve actually had heated arguments over it.
I don’t know how I earned such a large settlement from Apple, because to my knowledge, I never bought anything from them. But, I mean, it’s a LARGE one! No wonder my TBR pile is spilling out of its electronic cloud, heh.
I got a whole $3.14 from Apple- I definitely plan to splurge soon.
I got a whopping $3.14 from Amazon who I rarely order books from. I haven’t seen anything yet from B&N who should, hopefully, be a decent amount….hopefully.
The NYTimes got the story wrong on the full stop. Here’s the original source disputing the NYTimes’ spin.
https://david-crystal.blogspot.com/2016/06/on-reported-death-of-full-stop-period.html
I got $445.45 from Amazon. I’m not sure what that says about my reading habits.
@sandra: I personally know two book buddies who got over 400 dollars as well :). I got 100 dollars and change :-).
@Sirius. We may have the start of ebooks anonymous. Hi. My name is Sandra and I read 6 books a week. :)
@sandra: Nice to meet you heee. I am at four or five I think as an average, however these days only two or three of them are novels, others have to be shorter so I can finish them on the subway ride home.
I got a notice from B&N, but haven’t received my credit yet. I’ve stopped buying ebooks from B&N but I suppose I will find something to spend my credit on :)
I got $533 from Amazon. I guess I buy a lot of books!
I will hold on to punctuation until the day I day, whatever the medium. If a comma or period is too much for Twitter, there are other, less important, ways to trim what I have to say. This is my line in the sand. Period.
No one’s going to pry the Oxford comma out of my hands! But I think @BevQB has it right that it has become a generational thing. I was also shocked to discover that younger people were being taught to use only one space after a period (while we still have such a thing) rather than two. But I was trained on the GPO Style Manual so I’m even more of a dinosaur than most.
I’m not even telling my family the amount of my settlement credit for fear they’d have an intervention for me. It was quite a lot. ::cough::