Sorry for the late post today. I had to finish editing a book and now I have a bit of a headache. No time to upload photos or read today’s news.
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Manga Giant TOKYOPOP Enters Young Adult Fiction Market:
In a plan to do for teen fiction what they have already done for manga, leading youth-oriented publisher TOKYOPOP is pleased to unveil the latest addition to its rapidly growing publishing family-an innovative line of serialized international teen novels, launching under the new TOKYOPOP banner Pop Fiction. Priced between $7.99 and $10.99 (SRP), TOKYOPOP’s Pop Fiction novels lead with a top-notch group of engaging critically acclaimed multicultural tales ranging from fantasy stories to psychological adventures.
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Starbucks Looks To Books After Taking on Music and Movies. I admit I don’t really like Starbucks (I don’t drink coffee), but they’re pretty clever with their marketing. People go crazy over the CDs they sell, and imagine where Cranium would be without Starbucks. So what’s their marketing secret? I think it’s sugar. Why else would they make their drinks that sweet?
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Gunmen ‘kill two’ at Jaffna paper.
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Media holds its own in trust poll:
More people around the world trust the media than trust their governments, according to an international poll.
Hmm.
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Nextbook’s got the scoop on Aciman vs. Khoury at PEN.
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Philip Roth Wins PEN Award.
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On Friday April 27 from noon to 1:30 I read at the Maison Francaise of NYU. I read in French from Retour au Fumier [my new novel nominated for Le Prix Grandgousier given by La Societe des Grands Vins de France because it was found to be a praise of hedonism], then I read My Toes from My Body in Nine Parts, and then I was asked to read from Le Livre de Sam — the book I am writing about Beckett. I was warmly applauded, but that meant nothing to me. I only signed two books. But after the reading I was taken to a fancy restaurant in the Village and I ordered the most expensive item on the menu and had two beers instead of my normal one beer. The reason for that is because so few people bought my books. I like signing books — I always put something funny with the signature. For instance when I signed a copy of My Body in Nine Parts to a young lady who bought the book after the reading I wrote in the book — For Sylvie [that was her name] who can now abuse my body.
Well, Federman, if I had been there, I would have asked you to sign some books (I have a few by you) and I would have bought at least one, too. Rest assured.
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Small Publishers Book Big Rewards:
Not beholden to the same economic models and restrictions as large houses, small presses are creating their own paradigm for success. Taking advantage of technology, they can publish a comparatively much smaller run of copies, a practice deemed too costly for the large houses, who must sell large volumes of copies to earn back their advances and stay in the black. And they have deployed innovative marketing strategies in order to penetrate a fickle market.
(via the Literary Saloon)
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Check out the Alibris Donate-A-Book Program.
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Nineth Wave Designs has the new 2007 Moleskine Planners in stock.
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Rite in the Rain sells writing tools that work regardless of sunshine or rain.
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A Pencil Is a Gardener’s Best Friend
(via Pencil Revolution)
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Wisconsin always has cool public radio and television programming, or at least that’s what I’m always hearing. I recently read about a tv special called “Living on the Wedge: Wisconsin’s Dairy Artisans,” but I can’t watch it because I’m not in Wisconsin.
Anyway, Wisconsin radio has the Conversations With Kathleen Dunn show. On April 21st, her guest host interviewed Lynne Truss, author of “Eats, Shoots & Leaves.” You can listen to the interview here (scroll down to 4/21).
(via Father Inch)
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Listen to Newsroom Poetry on NPR:
Poet David Tucker is the assistant managing editor of The New Jersey Star Ledger and was part of the team that won the Pulitzer last year for breaking news. His new collection of poems is called Late for Work.
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The Pleasure and Pain of Owning Books:
Why do I have all these goddamned books? Why does anybody? They’re expensive, they weigh you down, they’re cumbersome. Writing them, reading them, treasuring them. This day and age, it feels antiquated. Quaint. Especially now, with all the information in the world a click and a digital beep-boop-bop away, why all these ponderous rows of bound paper? What’s the illness, and what’s the cure?
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Obit: Henriette D. Avram, Modernizer of Libraries, Dies at 86.
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FAMU’s Neyland leaves behind a stack of history books:
By himself and with others, Neyland has written eight books, including a history of the nation’s 17 state-funded black colleges and a novel about his experiences as a young man in segregated America, “Unquenchable Black Fires.” The youngest of eight children, born to a Mississippi farmer/sawmill worker and his wife, Neyland had rich material for his novel.
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Princeton Library acquires archives of prominent literary magazine:
Joyce Carol Oates, the Roger S. Berlind ’52 Professor in the Humanities at Princeton, recently observed: “Like the Paris Review, Antaeus and Kenyon Review, and very few others, Hudson Review is a literary magazine that has helped to shape American literature of the 20th century.”
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Old-fashioned bookbinding thriving in small Kansas town:
The Koerperich brothers have taken advantage of some advanced technology, but most of the machines used for bookbinding are the same, or similar, as their dad began using back in 1969. The gold letter embossing for the covers is even done with hot lead Linotype, which started being replaced by photo typesetters in the mid-1970s.
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The Access Principle by John Willinsky is now available as an open access pdf.
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Open Peer Review & Collaboration:
This brief presentation summarizes my present view on the transformative potential of a fully open access approach in the area of peer review. While a great deal of research has been done on peer review per se, as Peggy Dominy and Jay Bhatt discuss in the same series, progress in science depends not just on incremental progress, but also on periodically reexamining our most basic assumptions. It is timely to do this with peer review – a long-standing tradition which may have evolved from the time of the Inquisition, as Peggy and Jay point out – not an optimal approach for Galileo, and perhaps not an optimal approach in our day and age, either.
I’m looking forward to the day when people care enough to apply all this in the Humanities. And hopefully they do apply it, as opposed to reinventing the wheel.
(via Open Access News)
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Open Source Software for Publishing E-Journals makes me want to publish something… because I can! I’m not the first American to feel that way.
(via DigitalKoans)
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Ooo, ooo! Check out UC Berkeley’s free class podcasts here and here. And see what The Chronicle has to say about it.
I can’t decide. Foundations of American Cyberculture or Crossroads of Earth Resources and Society?
(via Open Access News)
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From The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics:
Congrats to U.S. Senators Cornyn & Lieberman for setting the standard for open access policy, with their “Federal Research Public Access Act of 2006″, introduced in the U.S. Senate today, May 2, 2006.
