by Edward Nawotka In today’s lead story Mark Mills discusses how he found the inspiration for his novel The Information Officer in book about the World War II siege of Malta he uncovered in a junk shop. What is interesting to note is that this might never have happened had we been living in a world entirely populated with e-books. …
Spain Lowers Tax on E-books, Opens Digital Library
By Emily Williams A very important — and positive — development for the incipient Spanish e-book market took place this week. On Tuesday the Spanish Minister of Culture, Ángeles González-Sinde, announced that the government would set the value added tax for e-books at 4%, the same as for paper books. E-books had previously been in the same category as software, …
Are Prepub Reviews Irrelevant?
By Edward Nawotka In today’s lead story about the demise of Kirkus Reviews, former Kirkus managing director Jerome Kramer asks “whether the industry still needs advance reviews the way it used to?” Kirkus was known among the major journals that published pre-pub reviews—Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, and Booklist—as the “mean” one. Kirkus didn’t sugarcoat its reviews, which may, in the …
What’s the Buzz: E-Rights and No-Compete Clauses; Adobe Flash Does Multi-Touch; Library 101
By Hannah Johnson At PubRants, literary agent Kristin Nelson writes about electronic rights and no-compete clauses in book contracts. According to Nelson’s interpretation of standard no-compete language, “even if you are able to reserve your electronic rights so as to as to set up your own deal with Kindle or Scribd (or whoever), your publisher could make an argument that …
German Buch News: New Alternatives for German Digitization; Buch.de’s Sales Up
By Siobhan O’Leary Projects to digitize library collections, like Europeana, have found new life after the Google Book Settlement, but the debate has continued in Europe about the status of “orphan works”—books that are not yet in the public domain but whose rights holder cannot be determined. Though those books are currently not allowed to be digitized, Buchreport writes that the …
STM Publishers Face Some Old, Some New Challenges, Especially the Bugaboo of “Free”
By Richard Lampert At first glance, STM publishing (Scientific Technical Medical publishing) resembles most other segments of the book publishing industry. It’s still dominated by commercial publishing companies plus a few scholarly houses, and new titles still appear at regular intervals supported by marketing to the book trade, individuals, and institutions. And the familiar challenges are there as well — …
Bonus Material: Using Library Books to Tell a Story
By Edward Nawotka Since 1993 artist Nina Katchadourian has been rearranging library books to tell their own very short short stories. There are now 130 examples, some of which she’s posted online. Check out the samples below and smile.