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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.
Small Press Points highlights the happenings of the small press players. This issue features Wolverine Farm Publishing in Fort Collins, Colorado.
Literary MagNet chronicles the start-ups and closures, successes and failures, anniversaries and accolades, changes of editorship and special issues—in short, the news and trends—of literary magazines in America. This issue's MagNet features Annalemma Magazine, Oxford American, Ninth Letter, Opium Magazine, the Iowa Review, Slice Magazine, Poet Lore, Fence, and Electric Literature.
Associate director Martin Riker speaks about developments at Dalkey Archive, the independent press that recently announced a new distribution deal with Norton and the launch of a new European fiction anthology this fall.
BookCrossing, the online community whose members tag, release, and then track books in 160 countries, recently joined Better World Books, a socially conscious Indiana-based retailer, in a partnership that highlights the literary, social, and environmental missions of both sites.
