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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.
