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Philadelphia’s fifty-four public libraries—along with its court system, rec centers, and thousands of public employees—were granted a reprieve last Thursday afternoon when the State Senate approved a $700 million relief package for the city. The funding forestalls mayor Michael Nutter’s “Plan C” budget, which, among other cuts, had called for the indefinite suspension of all library services on October 2.
Online book club LibraryThing announced yesterday that it will revamp its site to comply with new requirements from Amazon. The retailer, which supplies LibraryThing and countless other affiliates with valuable book data, has begun insisting that its partners’ primary pages link solely to Amazon.
In two weeks, the city that once enjoyed the largest book circulation in the world could find itself entirely without public libraries. The Free Library of Philadelphia announced earlier this month that unless the State Legislature approves the city’s budgetary requests, all branch, regional, and central libraries will close their doors and suspend programming effective Friday, October 2.
On October 5, the Huffington Post will unveil a new books section and kick off an Oprah-style book club, the New York Observer reported yesterday. According to Arianna Huffington, the site will feature essays and articles culled from the New York Review of Books alongside material contributed by HuffPo readers, a mixture designed to highlight “the best of the old and the best of the new.”
PEN American Center, the U.S. branch of the international literary and human rights group, announced yesterday that it has been awarded a twenty-five-thousand-dollar grant by Amazon. The money will support PEN’s Freedom to Write Program, which advocates on behalf of imprisoned or persecuted writers worldwide, as well as its Campaign for Core Freedoms, which opposes censorship in the United States.
Online writing community Protagonize—a platform for collaborative, interactive fiction—announced last week that it will begin implementing an optional subscription system. While core services will remain free, paid accounts are set to include, among other features, ad-free browsing, personal blogs, and reader statistics.
After more than four decades in business, one of Britain’s most intrepid independent publishers is closing its doors. Marion Boyars, which counts Georges Bataille, Ken Kesey, Hubert Selby Jr., and Nobel Prize-winner Kenzaburo Oe among its authors, announced yesterday that it will begin winding down operations after the release of its fall catalogue.
The first book and only novel by memoirist Augusten Burroughs is coming to television. Screenwriter Bryan Fuller (Heroes) and director Bryan Singer (The Usual Suspects) are partnering to adapt Sellevision (St. Martin’s, 2000), which focuses on four characters linked by a fictional home shopping channel, as an hour-long comedy-drama series for NBC.
More than six weeks after it remotely erased unlicensed copies of George Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm from an undisclosed number of Kindle devices, Amazon is still trying to make amends. Last Thursday the company sent an e-mail to affected customers offering to either replace the deleted e-books or provide restitution in the form of a gift certificate or check for thirty dollars.
A court in New York City is considering whether the U.S. publication of Fredrik Colting’s 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye, originally billed as an “unauthorized sequel” to The Catcher in the Rye, could cause irreparable harm to author J. D. Salinger. During oral arguments at the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals on Thursday, two members of the three-judge panel questioned whether a lower court had collected enough evidence before issuing a preliminary injunction against Colting in July.
Online publishing platform Smashwords has signed a distribution deal with Barnes & Noble. The e-book publisher announced last Friday that titles from its new “Premium Catalog” would be made available through the Barnes & Noble eBookstore as well as through digital retailer Fictionwise, which was acquired by the bookseller in March.
The ePub format continues to gain traction as an e-book standard. Last week, Google Books announced that it now has more than a million public domain titles available as free ePub downloads. The format, developed two years ago by the International Digital Publishing Forum, makes e-books accessible across a wide array of devices and platforms.
Legend Press imprint Paperbooks is pursuing an unusual scheme to “promote novel writing” in the U.K. this fall, publishing a half-finished book and inviting readers to complete the story. Only the first ten thousand words of A Novel Ending by author Gary Davison will be written; the remaining pages will be left blank. The publisher is asking aspiring authors—one of whom will score a contract with Paperbooks—to fill in and submit their own endings.
Given that paper accounts for a quarter of all landfill volume, it should probably come as no surprise that a recent study touted e-books as more environmentally friendly than traditional publishing. A report released this month by the San Francisco-based Cleantech Group found that Amazon’s Kindle device could generate a net savings in carbon emissions—a savings that increases as print consumption is displaced.
Both opponents and supporters of the Google Book settlement are closing ranks as the September 4 deadline for court filings approaches. This week saw attacks on the deal from the Open Book Alliance—a group comprising Amazon, Microsoft, and Yahoo, among others—as well as sharp criticism from the Urban Libraries Council. Meanwhile, Sony filed documents on Wednesday praising Google’s massive book-scanning venture as a boon for consumers.
Preparations are underway for the seventeenth National Arts and Humanities Month, a country-wide smorgasbord of public events, open houses, and media coverage coordinated each October by the nonprofit advocacy group Americans for the Arts.
The 2010 Dodge Poetry Festival will be held after all. Seven months after Dodge Foundation CEO David Grant announced the suspension of the popular biennial event, citing shrinking assets and increasing venue costs, the New York Times reports that the organization is on track to secure a new hosting partner by September.
Plans are underway in Lowell, Massachusetts for the seventh annual Jack Kerouac 5K Road Race, a 3.1-mile run through the city where the eponymous Beat writer was born and eventually buried. Proceeds from the event, scheduled for Sunday, September 27, will fund the Jack Kerouac Scholarship, awarded each year to a graduate of Lowell High School, the author’s alma mater.
A coalition of organizations representing artists and cultural workers has entered the national debate on healthcare reform. Americans for the Arts, in conjunction with twenty other national nonprofit groups, has called on Congress to enact a public health insurance option for individual artists, along with measures making it easier for cash-strapped cultural organizations to provide adequate coverage for employees.
Margaret Atwood plans to keep it green as she tours in support of her latest novel, an environmental calamity tale titled The Year of the Flood, forthcoming from Nan A. Talese next month. The Booker Prize-winning author will travel by train where possible, carry minimal luggage, eschew bottled water, and require that venues serve only fair trade, bird-friendly coffee.
Barnes & Noble expanded its publishing program yesterday with the launch of a new imprint dedicated to republishing out-of-print books. The Barnes & Noble Rediscovers project will reissue noteworthy works of history, literature, philosophy, and science as redesigned, specially priced hardcovers.
Despite a circulation boom, public libraries in Ohio are scrambling to close branches, reduce hours, and lay off staff—all in an attempt to cope with an unprecedented drop in state funding. According to the Ohio Library Council, reductions approved last month to the Public Library Fund, along with declining tax revenues, are expected to shrink library budgets by as much as 30 percent.
Literature-craving commuters in New York City can now enjoy their own version of a program first launched in the London Underground six months ago—a free book exchange. Choose What You Read NY, a volunteer-run nonprofit, has begun setting up camp near major subway stations on the first Tuesday of each month to collect and redistribute donated books.
A team representing Saint Paul has won the twentieth annual National Poetry Slam (NPS) in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Minnesotans beat out sixty-seven other teams from across North America to claim the two-thousand-dollar grand prize on August 8. Rounding out the final standings were, in order, teams from Albuquerque, San Francisco, and New York City.
Google kicked off a new program yesterday that will allow authors who have released their books under the Creative Commons license to distribute them free through Google Books. Participants will be able to select from among seven versions of the Creative Commons agreement, which lets rightsholders make works openly available while still specifying how they may be used or altered.
