LISNews: Librarian News

Roughly two weeks ago, the popular e-book lending site LendInk was taken offline thanks to a group of terrified authors who couldn’t be bothered to read the fine print. LendInk was a website dedicated to helping book lovers lend books to each other through features implemented by Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The site’s only purpose was to serve as a front end — it hosted no e-book files, linked no torrents, and never directed users to a file locker.

Last month the History News Network voted David Barton’s book “The Jefferson Lies” the “least credible history book in print.” Now the book’s publisher, Thomas Nelson, has decided to stop publishing and distributing it.

The book, which argues that Thomas Jefferson was an enthusiastic orthodox Christian who saw no need for a wall of separation between church and state, has attracted plenty of criticism since it appeared in April, with an introduction by Glenn Beck. But the death knell came after Jay W. Richards, a senior fellow at the Discovery Institute and the author, with James Robison, of “Indivisible: Restoring Faith, Family and Freedom Before It’s Too Late,” began to have doubts and started an investigation.

More from The New York Times.

Houghton Mifflin Harcourt hasn’t said what it plans to do with all the copies of Imagine, Jonah Lehrer’s sullied best seller on the science of creativity, that it has yanked from shelves. But most book people agree that the copies will eventually be pulped, or dissolved into a milky liquid and reconstituted as clean paper. In this regard, at least, Imagine has plenty of company. Every year, millions of books are sent to the “cruel machines,” as one young editor calls them, simply because their sales didn’t meet projections. The process is tidily symmetrical: from the vat to the store and back to the vat.

In the Babel that is New York City, where nearly 200 languages are spoken and read within the public school system and nearly 40 percent of the population was born abroad, literary tastes among immigrant cultures turn out to be as different as their cuisines.

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