Category: words

“Printed books and newspapers have always been zero-rated for VAT but until now their digital equivalents – such as books from Amazon’s Kindle service or online subscriptions to news websites such as the Times or the Guardian – have been subject to the sales tax.” (Audiobooks will remain taxable, though.) – The Guardian

Miller, the survivor of the rape by Stanford athlete Brock Turner, received the autobiography award for her memoir Know My Name; Danticat’s Everything Inside: Stories won the fiction prize; Keefe’s Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland took nonfiction honors; Morgan Parker’s Magical Negro won the poetry award. – Los Angeles Times

“At the recent ALA Midwinter meeting in Philadelphia, Macmillan CEO John Sargent told librarians that he would come back in March with potential alternatives to the publisher’s controversial library e-book embargo. And this week, Macmillan made good on Sargent’s statement, with an email to a select group of librarians seeking feedback on three proposals that could inform new e-book license terms for public libraries.” – Publishers Weekly

The novel represented a maturation of storytelling—the adulthood of fiction, taking the reader into the interior of the human person. Now, the form is on its deathbed. Lingering readers are seeking in it something other—diversion, entertainment—than what the readers of Jane Austen or the Brontes, Dickens or Kafka, were seeking back in the day. – First Things

“The Echo library was founded in 2016, at the height of the refugee crisis, and relies on a 15-strong volunteer team alongside donations to stock its shelves and pay for the van’s fuel – costs that come to roughly £13,000 a year.” – The Guardian

After a huge project that involved picking over tens of thousands of example sentences, Oxford University Press (OUP) has been quietly replacing hundreds of those that “unnecessarily perpetuate sexist stereotypes” in Oxford Dictionaries, the dictionary source licensed by Apple and Google. Now the example given for anatomy is “people should never be reduced to their anatomies” – and the “lady customers” have been consigned to the past. – The Guardian

After Hachette canceled its original secretly arrived at plan to publish Allen’s memoir, the horror writer tweeted “The Hachette decision to drop the Woody Allen book makes me very uneasy. It’s not him; I don’t give a damn about Mr. Allen. It’s who gets muzzled next that worries me.”
That, not surprisingly, did not go over well. – The AV Club

One theory about why: “Pandemic fiction is about how people behave in response to acute, sudden-onset helplessness. When we’re confronted with that helplessness in real life, watching some version of it — any version of it, and ideally one where at least some people survive — is comforting. It’s a model for how we could respond.” – Vulture

Guess that’s “appropriate social distance.” (For more about how hard the book fair cancellation is hitting Germany’s, and the world’s, book industry, click this link.) – Süddeutsche Zeitung (Munich)

Author Rachel Vorona Cote: “Despite my best efforts, I am not chill, and will never be chill—I possess only meager crumbs of that coveted asset. So, I muddle on as best I can. Reading is a safe harbor, and it is also my pressure valve.” So she’s got a few recs for all of us who might be finding ourselves with more reading time (and more anxiety) than usual right now. – The Rumpus