After several well-publicized cases involving writers buying or manipulating their reviews, Amazon is cracking down. Writers say thousands of reviews have been deleted from the shopping site in recent months.
Amazon has not said how many reviews it has killed, nor has it offered any public explanation. So its sweeping but hazy purge has generated an uproar about what it means to review in an era when everyone is an author and everyone is a reviewer.
Since November, the Harvard Labrary—a temporary ‘pop-up’ space in an empty storefront in the middle of Harvard Square—has been a public gallery for design student projects on the future of libraries. The projects come out of this fall’s semester-long Library Test Kitchen (LTK) seminar at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. With an open door every Monday through Saturday, the Labrary invites passersby to come in, interact with the projects, or just sit and work.
The decline of books for the visually impaired is no small loss. Piece by Oliver Sacks.
Even without best sellers on the scale of last year’s Steve Jobs biography, owners of independent bookstores say sales are good, and that Kobo e-readers have been a boon.
Oxford University Press, the publisher of the Oxford English Dictionary, has apologized for what it called “a coincidence of the worst kind” after the dictionary’s Web site named “bloodbath” as its word of the day on Tuesday, after last week’s deadly shootings in Newtown, Conn.
Comic showing the 22 steps needed to check out an audio book at the library.
In the first of two parts about the new realities of publishing and public libraries, Forbes contributor David Vinjamuri discusses whether the right battle is being fought:
“The solution to the current pricing problem lies in understanding that the argument publishers and libraries are having is the wrong argument. It is based on the paradigm of the printed book and as such presents a series of intractable challenges for both publishers and libraries. By changing the model for pricing an eBook, both parties could find a clear and equitable resolution to the current impasse.”
They used to call it the “vanity press,” and the phrase itself spoke volumes. Self-published authors were considered not good enough to get a real publishing contract. They had to pay to see their book in print. But with the advent of e-books, self-publishing has exploded, and a handful of writers have had huge best-sellers.
TV blogger Alan Sepinwall’s self-published book, The Revolution Was Televised, came out just before Thanksgiving. Within two weeks he had a review in The New York Times — a positive review — by the widely read and often critical Michiko Kakutani, who also named it one her favorite books of the year. This is what book publicists and their writers dream of, and Sepinwall didn’t even see it coming.
Full piece on NPR
WPRI reports: One year after donating $10,000 to Central Falls’ Adams Memorial Library in Rhode Island, Alec Baldwin sent another $5,000 check to the library in response to its year-end fundraising appeal.
“I am overwhelmed with gratitude,” said library board president Bruce Kaplan. “A year ago, Alec’s donation helped us keep the doors open. This year he’s helping us expand hours of operation and community programming.”
Funding for the Adams Memorial Library was cut in the wake of Central Falls’ bankruptcy. It was forced to close its doors for several months in 2011, until a group of volunteers raised enough money to reopen the library.
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