Ebooks suck for learning – Baldur Bjarnason has written a relatively short but pithy post that brought to mind those articles claiming that digital books are making us stupid, blah blah blah. Bjarnason focuses on the way physical books are formatted to cue us in directions that allow us to ... more >
Authors & Publishers, Take Note: Amazon’s Rooftop Media Acquisition is About Platform, Not Content – Nate Hoffelder argues that Amazon’s acquisition of Rooftop, of which they were already a client, is more about platform than content, specifically in the way of “ACX crossed with KDP crossed with Youtube,” such that ... more >
Fair Use Victory in HathiTrust Litigation – So this is the one about how the Author’s Guild sued the HathiTrust and lost. The HathiTrust — comprised of more than 80 academic and research institutions — created a digital library (the HathiTrust Digital Library) and then digitized more than ten million ... more >
Do Critics Make Good Novelists? – This week’s Bookends column — between Daniel Mendelsohn and Leslie Jamison — is a pretty interesting contemplation of the relationship between literary critic and novelist. Mendelsohn seems to suggest that critics are unsuited to writing fiction, while Jamison suggests that the prejudice against critics ... more >
Comic Artist Yumi Sakugawa On Friend-Love, Identity And Art – Although not publishing news, per se, this is a really lovely interview with Yumi Sakugawa, whose work investigates, among other things, the kinds of relationships we have with people who are not romantic partners, but who, nonetheless, contribute substantially to ... more >
In Hookups, Inequality Still Reigns – Women don’t really find sexual satisfaction from hookups per this article but for some, the trade off is worth it. “For Kim Huynh, a 29-year-old filmmaker in San Francisco, sacrificing a reliable orgasm for sex without the burden of commitment was a conscious decision. After a ... more >