Literary Scouts

Tracy Chevalier has earned a place of distinction among historical fiction writers for her beautifully imagined, meticulously detailed novels, including Girl with a Pearl Earring (1997), The Lady and the Unicorn (2003), and The Last Runaway (2013). Her latest novel, A Single Thread (Viking, Oct.), takes place in and around Winchester Cathedral during the early 1930s.

Describe your current job in one sentence.

I am the managing director and a founder of Nosy Crow, an independent, multi-award-winning publisher for children aged 0-12.

Increasingly, people of the book are also people of the cloud. At the Codex Hackathon, a convention whose participants spend a frenetic weekend designing electronic reading tools, I watch developers line up onstage to pitch book-related projects to potential collaborators and funders.

One day not long ago in a college class I was teaching, some of my students couldn't find the page I was talking about in the reading. And it dawned on me: There was only one required text in the class, an anthology of writing about the natural world called "American Earth." And they were reading pirated copies - versions downloaded free from some dubious "provider" on the internet.