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A CEO is named for the new Penguin International subsidiary; Columbia and Cornell announce a joint library project; the Kiwi canon gets digitized; Barnes & Noble will shutter its B. Dalton stores; Britain’s Society of Authors says e-book royalties are too small; and other news.
A German company is launching an “open-source” e-reader; Random House will release a graphic novel coauthored by Michael Jackson; a Scottish MEP is fighting to keep a famous dictionary from leaving home; a church plans a Halloween book-burning; and other news.
Shakespeare’s oeuvre gets a little bigger; unpublished Vonnegut makes an appearance in Vanity Fair; Penguin China announces a new English-language list; a survey of international publishers says digital will overtake print in 2018; and other news.
Neil Gaiman collaborates with the crowd via Twitter; Pennsylvania libraries suffer cuts; Harvard will digitize its Chinese collection; a new report says book-buying is more popular in Britain than in the US; and other news.
A famous trilogy is getting a sixth installment; Aussie industry groups are opposing new book import rules; filming of the latest García Márquez novel has been delayed by protests; B.C. literary organizations fight back after losing government funding; and other news.
English PEN says U.K. libel law puts free speech at risk; a three-day conference devoted to the Google settlement revision begins today in New York City; John Steinbeck has inspired a Chicago ballet; Canadians are still without a Kindle to call their own; and other news.
Justice Department officials supervise the new Google Book Search settlement; independent booksellers in the U.K. claw market share from high street chains; the new permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy says Nobel deliberations are too “Eurocentric”; and other news.
New York City plans a fitting memorial for Frank McCourt; the Kindle may finally debut in the U.K. this month; Disney rolls out an electronic storybook site; Paige M. Gutenborg starts work at Harvard; and other news.
A small print-on-demand firm can go ahead with its antitrust suit against Amazon; the EU ponders its answer to Google Book Search; Shakespeare’s grave gets a much-needed overhaul; Banned Books Week leaves its mark on the best-seller lists; and other news.
In the first major overseas legal challenge to its massive book-scanning project, Google’s French division was hit last week with a copyright infringement lawsuit. Publishing group La Martinière, backed by the editors association Syndicat national de l’édition (SNE) and the writers union Société des gens de lettres (SGDL), is asking a Paris court to force the Internet giant to halt its digitization of protected works and to levy a fine of eighteen million euros (about $26 million) as well as a per diem fine of one hundred thousand euros ($146,000).
