At the beginning of the week it looked like the London Book Fair would be the story of the week. But by mid-week a tsunami had swept through the book world and there was only one story dominating the headlines. Read more
Some weeks there's just too much news for us to cover in a short column and this is one of those weeks, so for now the latest moves in the ongoing Google Settlement saga (see News Review 27 April 2009 and 16 November 2009) have to take precedence. Read more
Åsne Seierstad, the author of The Bookseller of Kabul, has been ordered to pay more than £26,000 in punitive damages. As Conor Foley in the Guardian put it, this news will be greeted 'as either a blow to artistic freedom of expression or a victory for the world's misrepresented and powerless poor. Read more
The estate of Adrian Jacobs, author of Willy the Wizard, has now widened its claim against Bloomsbury for plagiarism in the Harry Potter books to include J K Rowling herself, previously thought to be protected by a statute of limitations. Read more
You may be thoroughly bored with the Google Settlement (see last week's News Review) but it has a significant impact on authors' rights so it's worth making the effort to understand what it's all about. Read more
The New Google Settlement (see News Review 7 September) looks like a reasonable resolution of a thorny set of problems. Bowing to pressure from foreign governments and the US Department of Justice, the revised Settlement presented to the district Court in New York shortly before midnight on Friday limits the scope of the scheme to works registered with Read more
Stieg Larsson has been continually in the news ever since publication of his first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. The third part of the Milennium trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, has recently been published in the UK and the US. Read more
After a slow start, objectors have finally been getting their arguments against Google's plans in before the closing date of last Friday, 4 September. Read more
J D Salinger is suing the pseudonymous author who is planning shortly to publish a sequel Salinger's famous novel Catcher in the Rye presents what looks like a strong case of invasion of copyright. Read more
Google's recent class action settlement in the US will award sweeping rights to manage and sell digitised versions of every work published or made available in the US. The settlement allows Google - which has already digitised more than seven million books - the non-exclusive right to digitise every book published before 5th January this year. Read more
‘My father was a playwright so I grew up with reverence for writing. The sound of his typewriter clacking was one I grew to love. What I didn't know was how disappointed he was by the failure of his work to reach the West End. Later, I realised not all writing careers end in disappointment, and it was worth trying to make mine a success...
Organizers of the United Kingdom's TS Eliot Prize had planned to hold its shortlisted poets' readings at London's Royal Festival Hall on January 10 and an awards ceremony on the 11th. Read more
Over the weekend fanfiction website Archive of our Own went down, to the dismay of fanfic readers everywhere. While it's not the result of any one fic, despite what some fans thought, it's a reflection of how much the pandemic has changed our fanfiction reading habits.
When COVID-19 hit in early 2020, the press coverage was overwhelming. The trusted book publishing media, including Publishers WeeklyInternational news website of book publishing and bookselling including business news, reviews, bestseller lists, commentaries http://www.publishersweekly.com/, Publishing Perspectives, Publishers Lunch, The Bookseller in the U.K. and Quill & Quire in Canada, each did a fine job of monitoring developments within publishing and bookselling. Read more
There are a ton of book-to-movie adaptations coming our way this year, even exceeding this list. Those that do not have set dates yet we've omitted, such as YA sequels To All The Boys: Always and Forever, Lara Jean, After We Fell and crime action flick Tom Clancy's Without Remorse starring Michael B. Jordan. Here's just about every major movie you might want to crack open a book for in 2021
While I was planning my current novel and annotating that plan, I asked myself a series of questions in the annotations. I know I'm not the only one to make notes on a draft in the form of questions, but until recently I wasn't aware that I was creating problems for myself by not categorizing the questions.
Bernardine Evaristo, the Booker prize-winning novelist, is heading a major project to republish books by black British writers that generally disappeared without trace before they could receive the recognition they deserved. Read more
From Michael Hansen's perspective, the textbook industry is having a Spotify moment.
The chief executive of Cengage, a leading publisher, brought up the music streaming service on an investor call last month, in reference to a question about the future of physical textbooks. Read more
Book burning has not historically been considered an anti-fascist gesture. But in the wake of the storming of the Capitol Building in Washington DC by crazed Trump supporters, perhaps that's set to change. Read more
'If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they're happy.'