Category: words

One hundred years after the last massive, worldwide pandemic, Yeats’ poem feels close at hand. “I would scarcely call ‘The Second Coming’ a holiday poem. But it makes you feel that that a page of history is about to flip: one epoch is about to give birth to another.” – NPR

Readers could return an audiobook if they’d bought it less than 365 days earlier, and the royalties from the audiobook would come out of the author’s next paycheck. What the heck? Some authors say it’s more like a library – but without any library royalty payments. Audible has changed the time limit to seven days. – The Guardian (UK)

Easily the worst is the kind that steals from a shared heritage in libraries for private sale or just adoration. “It denies everyone the opportunity of having access to that book. Even a rare book bought (or stolen) from a bookshop will end up having just one owner, whereas in a public library that same book is available for anyone who wishes to read it.” – The Guardian (UK)

The men in romance novels – whether straight or gay – seem obsessed with open plans. Open plans, big TVs, big sofas. Blame Canada. (Seriously: Blame Canada for HGTV, which led directly to … this.) – Slate

On the prize committees, those who should feel disgraced give a shrug. Why should they care? “François Busnel, the host of La Grande Librairie, France’s most important television literary program, compared prize juries to the southern Italian mafia. ‘It’s a camorra, particularly the Renaudot,’ he said in a recent interview.” – The New York Times

Penguin Random House, the largest book publisher in the United States, is owned by the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann. Adding Simon & Schuster, the third largest publisher, would create a book behemoth, a combination that could trigger antitrust concerns. – The New York Times

The sale of S&S will be the largest acquisition in North American trade publishing since HarperCollins bought Harlequin in 2014. It will also be one of the few recent transactions in which the revenue of the target company is public and the purchase price may also become public. – Publishers Weekly

“The notebooks were last seen in November 2000 after ‘an internal request’ to remove them from a special manuscripts storeroom to be photographed. They were taken to a temporary studio, … [and] it was only during ‘a routine check’ two months later that it was discovered they were missing.” Librarians at the time evidently assumed the notebooks had been misshelved; they’ve now concluded that the items were stolen. – BBC

Why are novelists not naming this man? The reasons will naturally vary author to author, but it is not fear or superstition, as far as I can tell. – The Guardian

“Men and women both write every possible kind of book—and yet, when you toss a book out into the marketplace, it will generally find more readers of one sort than the other. Publishers know this and market accordingly. And, if I’m honest, I did get some early indications of where on the spectrum my own book would fall. Over the years, I noticed who brightened up when I described what I was working on and whose eyes tended to glaze over.” – The American Scholar