Readers Respond
On April 15, the Supreme Court declined to take up the Authors Guild v. Google case, bringing to an end the ongoing digital-age copyright battle. One reader heartily agreed with SCOTUS:
“The courts are right! As a biographer of a person who died 50 years ago, I have found Google Books immensely helpful—far more so than Wikipedia or Google’s main search engine—leading me to published sources that I would otherwise never have found. And when the quoted ‘snippets’ suggest that the book contains further useful information, I buy it....”—Tim Johnson
On Thursday, we reported Amazon’s latest expansion: into the education segment, by way of a deal struck with the New York City Department of Education. Through the agreement, Amazon will be selling e-books to New York City students through an internal marketplace. Amazon Kindle hardware is not part of the deal, and our readers are surprisingly in favor:
“Students have the choice of which reading device they wish to use, which makes this a fair-sounding deal at that level, although it will require kids to have e-readers of some kind, and the question is how affordable they will be for low-income families. The inexpensive ones are about $50, [Amazon’s] Fire, and there are probably others that are competitively priced.”—Joyce Dade
From the Newsletters
Ten best true crime books picked by Laura Tillman, author of The Long Shadow of Small Ghosts (Scribner).
There’s a new book coming in the Dragonology series, Dungeonology; we get the scoop.
Three common mistakes indie authors make, and how to avoid them.
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The most-read review on publishersweekly.com last week was The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen (Grove).
Blogs
How the authors of Sweet Pea & Friends: The Sheepover (Little, Brown) are giving back to the Vermont indie bookstores that helped make the book a success.
Podcasts
PW senior writer Andrew Albanese recaps the just-concluded Google Books case and looks ahead to the next phase of the battle: in the policy realm.
The More to Come crew discusses the 2016 nominations for the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards, and the winners of the Lynd Ward Graphic Novel Prize and the Glaad Meda Award for best comic.
Terry Roberts discusses his new novel, That Bright Land (Turner), a whodunit set against the background of a turbulent post–Civil War South.
Did you miss our webcast on the big Spanish-language titles publishing this spring? No problem: you can watch it on demand.
Richard Zacks discusses his new book, Chasing the Last Laugh: Mark Twain’s Raucous and Redemptive Round-the-World Comedy Tour (Doubleday).
