Newsday: Literary Edition

[RottingCorpse]

It was more like, "Really? Didn't he say he was retiring seven years ago?"

The Stand and The Shining are really his two true classics. A sequel to Christine or Salem's Lot would be accepted.

[nacho]

This is really big...


http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2011/11/30/DDU91M5JM9.DTL

New York --
  At age 91, Ray Bradbury is making peace with the future he helped predict.
  The science fiction/fantasy author and longtime enemy of the e-book has
finally allowed his dystopian classic "Fahrenheit 451" to be published in
digital format. Simon & Schuster released the electronic edition Tuesday
at a list price of $9.99.
  First published in paperback by Ballantine in 1953 and as a hardcover by
Simon & Schuster in the 1960s, "Fahrenheit 451" has sold more than 10
million copies and has been translated into 33 languages. It imagined a
world in which the appetite for new and faster media leads to a decline in
reading, and books are banned and burned. Bradbury himself has been an
emphatic defender of traditional paper texts, saying that e-books "smell
like burned fuel" and calling the Internet nothing but "a big
distraction."
  "It's meaningless; it's not real," he told the New York Times in 2009.
"It's in the air somewhere."
  A phone call to Bradbury was not immediately returned. A recorded
voice-mail message, a woman's voice, warned that the author doesn't
usually check his messages.
  Bradbury's agent, Michael Congdon, said Tuesday that rights for Bradbury's
book were expiring and that the growing digital market, estimated at 20
percent or higher of overall sales, made a deal for e-books inevitable. A
wave of former holdouts have changed their minds recently, notably "Harry
Potter" author J.K. Rowling.
  "We explained the situation to him (Bradbury) that a new contract wouldn't
be possible without e-book rights," said Congdon, who added that six
publishers had been interested. "He understood and gave us the right to go
ahead."
  In a statement released Tuesday, Simon & Schuster Publisher Jonathan Karp
said the new e-book was "a rare and wonderful opportunity to continue our
relationship with this beloved and canonical author and to bring his works
to new a generation of readers and in new formats."
  Simon & Schuster also announced that a new paperback edition of
"Fahrenheit 451" would go on sale in January. New paperbacks of two other
Bradbury favorites, "The Martian Chronicles" and "Illustrated Man" will be
available in March.

[RottingCorpse]

Something wicked this way comes, eh?

[RottingCorpse]

Hadn't heard of either of these places until this piece, but it seems to be noteworthy considering the links GS has to the publishing world.

http://torrentfreak.com/book-publishers-shut-down-library-nu-and-ifile-it-120215/

Book Publishers ‘Shut Down’ Library.nu and iFile-it

The book download portal Library.nu and cyberlocker ifile.it appear to have ‘shut down’ voluntarily after a coalition of book publishers managed to get an injunction against the two sites. According to the complaint, the sites offered users access to 400,000 e-books and made more than $11 million in revenue in the process.

libraryDuring the past week users of the popular book downloading portal Library.nu started to notice that the site no longer carried links to files.

Today delivered another surprise when the site suddenly began redirecting to Google books.

Initially it was unclear what motivated the site’s owners to take these drastic actions, but a statement by a coalition of the world’s largest book publishers including Cambridge University Press, Harper Collins, Elsevier and John Wiley & Sons, seems to have cleared up the mystery.

The publishers obtained an injunction against Library.nu and the cyberlocker ifile.it from the regional court in Munich. They claimed that both sites were operating an unauthorized “internet library” that made available more than 400,000 high-quality e-books. In addition, the publishers said the sites made $11 million in revenue.

The court agreed with the publishers and the owners of the sites were served with an order to halt their infringing activities.

As a result, both sites have voluntarily pulled their services offline. Library.nu now redirects to Google books and ifile.it has put up a message stating “no upload servers currently available.”

However, this doesn’t mean that the picture painted by the book publishers is accurate. TorrentFreak spoke to the owner of ifile.it who told us that they can barely cover the server costs with the revenue they make.

“The site only had premium accounts since November 2011. It was free since 2006 and still is free for those who want to use it for free,” the owner told us.

The legal team of the publishers estimated the revenue based on page impressions as well as estimated income from premium accounts, but this figure is laughable according to the ifile.it owner, which makes sense considering the site’s modest size.

The owner further said they always try cooperate with publishers and that the site is still fully operational for registered users.

Responding to the news, the book publishers declared victory.

“This action reflects our commitment to protecting secure, safe, and legitimate use of the Internet,” said Stephen M. Smith, President and CEO of John Wiley & Sons.

“It is also evidence of the growing strength of the international community of content creators and providers taking all available legal measures against large illegal platforms,” he added.

Jens Bammel of the International Publishers Association, the umbrella organization responsible for tracking down the owners of the two sites, described the file-sharing sites as criminal outfits.

“The global publishing industry has once again shown that it can and will stand up against large-scale organised copyright crime,” Bammel says commenting on the news.

“We will not tolerate free-loaders who make unearned profits by depriving authors and publishers of their due compensation. This is an important step towards more transparent, honest, and fair trade of digital content on the Internet,” he added.

Despite the preliminary success, there are no guarantees that both sites will remain inactive. ifile.it, for example, is still working as usual for registered users.

Update: response added from the ifile.it owner, who noted that they only shut down anonymous uploads.

[nacho]

Oh, yeah. It's a pebble in the ocean. With the ebook revolution so piracy has followed. All my sites now have sections devoted to ebooks, and every ebook is available in every format. It was inevitable... And it's impossible to police.

[RottingCorpse]

Who wants to bet this tanks?

J.K. Rowling's next book: 'The Casual Vacancy'

LONDON (AP) — It may lack wizards and witches, but J.K. Rowling and her publisher are hoping her first novel for adults, "The Casual Vacancy," will have the magic touch.

The book's title was announced Thursday by Little, Brown & Co. along with a brief plot synopsis and publication date.

The publisher said the "blackly comic" tale of rivalry and duplicity in a small English town would be available worldwide on Sept. 27.

The book will be Rowling's first post-Potter effort. Her seven-volume saga about the adventures of a boy wizard became one of the most successful fictional series in history and led to a series of extremely popular films.

The new book, aimed at a grown-up audience, will be set in a seemingly idyllic English town called Pagford which is described as far more menacing than its pretty facade would indicate.

It opens with the sudden death of a popular man whose unexpected demise shocks the town. The battle for his seat on the local council sets off "the biggest war the town has yet seen," with rich people fighting poor, parents battling their teenagers, and wives in conflict with their husbands.

The publisher said the 480-page novel will be sold as an e-book and audio download as well as in traditional hardback form.

The seven Harry Potter novels have sold 450 million copies and have been translated into 74 languages.

Rowling's final Potter offering, "Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows," was published in 2007. She published a short Potter spin-off collection of stories, "The Tales Of Beedle The Bard," in 2008.

Rowling said earlier this year she wanted to reach an adult audience, but kept the book's name and publication date secret until Thursday.

In the past, many successful children's writers have struggled to remake themselves as adult authors. Winnie the Pooh creator A.A. Milne, a successful playwright in his early years, once confessed that he was forced to say "goodbye to all that" after his beloved books about the bear and friends.

But Rowling has one advantage: the Potter books had a huge adult, as well as child, audience.

Jon Howells of British book store chain Waterstones said "The Casual Vacancy" would likely be the year's best-selling novel.

He said the synopsis came as a surprise and suggested similarities to the work of popular mystery writer Alexander McCall Smith and Mark Haddon, a children's writer who had a huge adult hit with "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time."

"We were all expecting some sort of crime or mystery novel, but she has, refreshingly, surprised us all," Howells said.

"The plot sounds like it will have hints of Mark Haddon and McCall Smith, and the promise of black comedy is very beguiling."

[nacho]

Who wants to bet it makes untold millions because the words "Harry Potter" will be on the cover?

[Reginald McGraw]

I think people will try it, but will write reviews on Amazon telling her to "stick with the boy wizard novels," and "I was expecting at least some magic."

[nacho]

Yeah, but the publisher's bottom line doesn't care about that. This will be their last money grab, and they'll get it. And, of course, she never has to worry about money again. Win-win no matter what she does.

[nacho]

According to the Book Industry Study Group's (BISG) latest installment of the "Consumer Attitudes Toward E-book Reading" report, e-book consumers are reading more print books than they did a year ago. The percentage of those who mainly purchase e-books or buy them exclusively has dropped from 70 percent in August 2011 to 60 percent in May 2012. The number of consumers who have no format preference, or who buy certain genres digitally and others in print, increased nine points, to 34 percent.

 

The study also updated their device ownership figures, saying Amazon's Kindle Fire tablet has dethroned Apple's iPad as tablet of choice among e-book readers; roughly 20 percent of tablet owners have a Kindle, while iPad owners continue to comprise 17 percent of the total. Other tablets are lagging behind, most notably the Barnes & Noble Nook tablet and the slew of available Androids.

 

"Device ownership is an important factor in predicting the future. In previous studies, changes in levels of device ownership have presaged changes in e-book buying behavior," said Angela Bole, BISG's deputy executive director.

 

There is an ongoing decline in dedicated e-reader usage, with Kindle still the most cited primary device (35 percent), down from its August 2011 high of 48 percent. Black-and-white and color versions of the Nook dropped from 17 percent in August 2011 to 13 percent in May 2012.

 

The full press release, along with previous installments of the report, is available on the BISG website.

 http://www.bisg.org/news-5-779-press-releasee-book-consumers-diversifying-their-format-preferences-says-new-bisg-study.php

[RottingCorpse]

Power of books, man. I think subconsciously people understand that the digital written word is somehow susceptible to tampering and deletion.

Plus, books are personal items, far more than so than DVDS or CDs/Records/8-Tracks* etc. I just don't want to go back and read Stephen King's "Christine". I want to read *my* copy of "Christine".

(*I do accept that music moreso than movies have that personal attachment, but the album covers and media itself is still far less important than the actual music.)

[nacho]

For the first time in a very long time I succumbed to the hype and ordered The Martian: A Novel

It's a one hit self-published freakout that got picked up and reissued by a proper publisher, written by a software engineer who was just fucking around with an app he made:

http://www.wired.com/underwire/2014/02/the-martian-software/

It's one of those novels that everyone is talking about -- not just the sci-fi geeks, but it went cross genre the instant Crown picked it out of the sewage of self-published stuff.

It ships today! After the (still amazing Red Moon) I'll dive right in...