LISNews: Librarian News

Lee Hadden writes: \"There is An Article in the April 26 issue of the Times about the
original of the concept \"If a million monkeys pounded away on a million
typewriters for a million years, would Shakespeare\'s works be reproduced?\"

They say Folklore ascribes the vision of a typing pool of monkeys to T(homas) H(enry) Huxley, But the notion is older than Huxley, and may go back to Cicero:

“If anybody believes that this is possible, I do not see why he should not think that if an infinite number of examples of the 21 letters of the alphabet, made of gold or what you will, were shaken together and poured out on the ground it would be possible for them to fall so as to spell out, say, the whole text of the Annals of Ennius. In fact I doubt whether chance would permit them to spell out a single verse!”

While Bezos claims Amazon\'s used book sales \"lead to higher sales of new
books\" [LISNews: \"Bezos
Bites Back.\"], and Authors Guild\'s Aiken responds, \"We don\'t assert
all used book sales hurt the industry.  We say that Amazon\'s particular
way of marketing used books is harmful for authors and for publishers,\"
AP reporter, Hillel Italie, points out that \"neither side has produced
numbers backing its argument.\"

\"Amazon
chief defends sale of used books.\" -By Hillel
Italie  -AP
via  -NandoTimes

Now if only there were a giant database keeping track of all those sales
so that Bezos could clearly show how recent releases are actually helped
by offering them side by side with used copies for a fraction of the price... 
/sarcasm: off

LISNews Keywords:
amazon

Bob Cox alerted us to History meets mystery, where they wonder Was \'The Bondwoman\'s Narrative\' written by a female former slave in the 1850s? Henry Louis Gates Jr. thinks it was.

\'\'I concluded,\'\' says Andrews, whose books include \'\'To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography,\'\' \'\'that either this person is the most unusual white writer I have ever seen from the mid-19th century or a black narrator who had not yet turned her writing into something that would be sufficiently conventional to be published. I think that there is a lot of evidence that the author was a black woman. But it\'s not an open-and-shut case.\'\'

From the NY Times:

Authors are rebelling against new efforts by Amazon.com (news/quote) to spur sales of used books, a practice that has become a major source of revenue for Amazon but pays nothing to writers or publishers.

The Authors Guild, a trade group for writers, yesterday sent an e-mail message to its 8,200 members, advising them to stop helping Amazon sell books by linking to it from their own Web sites, citing Amazon\'s \"notorious used-book service.\"

More.