Wednesday News: Macmillan joins Scribd, the “Great American Novel,” 3-d print prosthetics, and “cult books”
Publishing Newsbest of lists / classics / cult books / digital technology / Literary fiction / Macmillan / Scribd / subscription service12 Comments
We’ve added more than a thousand new titles from Macmillan – For $8.99 a month, you can have access to more than 500k eBooks and 30k audiobooks from three of the big 5 publishers. The newest publisher to join the Scribd service is Macmillan, and below you can read some language from the official announcement. The link to this story will take you to the Scribd subscription page, where you can sign up for a free month of service.
MACMILLAN JOINS SCRIBD
Today’s a great day at Scribd (to be fair, most days at Scribd are great, but this one especially so), because we’re partnering with Macmillan to bring more than a thousand of their books to Scribd. Macmillan is home to some of the greatest and most beloved writers around—from Sci-Fi and Fantasy luminaries Ursula K. LeGuin, Elizabeth Bear, and Orson Scott Card to Nobel Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa to celebrated social critics Greil Marcus, Louis Menand, and Michel Foucault—and they’re all available to read right now on Scribd.“We’ve had a great relationship with Macmillan for more than a year,” says our very own Trip Adler, “and we’re really excited to welcome them to our subscription service.” –Scribd
Why Are We Obsessed With the Great American Novel? – Perhaps the most interesting thing about this discussion between Cheryl Strayed and Adam Kirsch is the way approaches to the Great American Novel (if there is such a thing) seem to break down by gender. For example, Kirsch seems to take the concept more seriously, while Strayed mentions the likes of Franzen whose work has arguably aspired to the title, without apparent irony. Is the difference as simple as male (often white) privilege? Probably not, but it definitely seems to play a role in how some male novelists might believe they can capture the essence of Americanness in a single work of fiction. As Strayed argues:
But art isn’t a footrace. No one comes in first place. Greatness is not a universally agreed-upon value (hence there’s no need to email me to disagree with my admiration of Franzen, or to offer advice about whether I should include Luke Skywalker in my next novel). America isn’t one story. It’s a layered and diverse array of identities, individual and collective, forged on contradictory realities that are imbued with and denied privilege and power. Our obsession with the Great American Novel is perhaps evidence of the even greater truth that it’s impossible for one to exist. As Americans, we keep looking anyway. –New York Times
WATCH: Kid gets new 3D-printed prosthetic StormTrooper arm – Super cool video of a seven-year-old boy who, thanks to 3-d print technology, is fitted with a prosthetic storm trooper arm. I always wonder how this kind of technology might partner with digital reading technologies. –Boingboing
50 best cult books – From The Fountainhead to Dr. Spock’s Baby and Child Care, to Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird, here are the top 50 so-called “cult books.” What’s a cult book, you may ask? Supposedly, you’ll know one when you see one…
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (1967)
Satan live and in person, a mansized black cat, a magician and his helpmeet, Pontius Pilate… Classic text of dissident magic realism, banned for years under Stalin: now you’ll struggle to find a Russian who hasn’t read it. Essential stuff, and with the finest description of a headache yet committed to paper. –The Telegraph
Oh, I have a friend who works with E-NABLE who do the prosthetic hands. It’s very cool. Because they’re so cheap to produce, it’s ideal for kids who are growing and need new prosthetics on a regular basis to fit them. And they come in all kinds of fun colours and designs.
MacMmllan’s now on Oyster too actually. . .
“Master and Margarita” rocks if you ask me. :)
@Sirius: OMG, yes! I adore The Master and Margarita. I liked all of Bulgakov’s books, but that one is my favorite.
Just wish that Macmillan would allow ebooks for public libraries.
I LOVE the use of 3D printing for children’s medical needs. I recently watched a news report on how the medical field is using 3D printing to replace heart valves, prosthetics, etc. as children grow, increasing not only their survival rate but their quality of life. Truly amazing!
@Lynnd: They do now, actually — just at a ridiculous price with onerous restrictions (like the rest of the Big 5).
I think that the rise of subscription services is a good thing for readers with the means to take advantage of them, but a very very bad thing for public libraries. It removes the incentive for our well-off and tech-savvy patrons (the only ones likely to have any clout) to support librarians in our struggle to offer ebooks to the public on any sort of reasonable terms.
Master and Margarita has the distinction of being both the only book I’ve ever read the entirety of in the original Russian and the only play I’ve seen in Russian. (I took three years of Russian, a long time ago, and of all the excerpts we read and translated, the start of that one is the one that made me want to read the rest and go to the trouble of finding it in the original. And it just so happened that a Russian theater company was performing it in Chicago that year)
Unrelated to this posting but I found this ironic, there is an Ellora’s Cave ad under the sponsors banner…
Huh. I was looking for Master and Margarita last night. The universe is telling me something, it seems.
Seems to me the cult-book certificate is “This book has sold a million copies, spawned a zillion imitators, and its readers quote it to this day.” I liked the lack of snobbishness in compiling the list, (“Chariots of the Gods”), but God does it give precedence to English-written books.
Which is a very long way of saying; Where’s GGM and Cortázar? Should I be, as Latinamerican, happy that the list deigned to mention Borges?
@Mercy, is Master and Margarita short and easy to read? I keep thinking I should start reading classics in Russian.