Tag: publishing industry
Read our first book, THE AUTOMATION, on the Internet Archive for free:
People who value Wikipedia should rise to the defense of the Internet Archive, a core resource in accessing information that was once posted to the web, but later deleted. And also troves of out-of-copyright books. Not to mention the lending program for copyrighted books.
— Pete Forsyth (@PeteForsyth) June 11, 2020
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People like to draw a line between predatory publishers and regular publishers, but in a capitalist system, publishers are still stealing wages from authors no matter how “good” they are. /
— Anarchists Care About Books 🦇🌈 (@_WildeAtHeart) June 15, 2020
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and many people see ebook licenses as not honoring the right of first sale anyway. Their model is not so different than Google Books or HathiTrust, especially considering that people do not get to keep the books. /
— Anarchists Care About Books 🦇🌈 (@_WildeAtHeart) June 15, 2020
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In my experience (25 years in the industry), many publishers are grateful to libraries bc they’re such large purchasers and supporters of books and authors, hold events and readings, etc. He certainly isn’t, though! Major chip on that shoulder
— JaneAustenDance (@JaneAustenDance) July 28, 2020
BookTuber Tuesday – Books I Never Should Have Read
BookTuber Tuesday – Jenna Marbles is producing a web series of “James Patterson’s” Maximum Ride
For someone who doesn’t want to be controlled by the corporate world and protect her freedom, she’s participating in corporate publishing and stifling honest writers — promoting a book that James Patterson didn’t even write. We feel like she can do better.
For more of our opinion on this, see this essay.
#BLAThoughtOfTheDay: What’s the deal with Lionel Shriver?
Recently, Lionel Shriver, author of We Need To Talk About Kevin, was the topic of this post by Yassmin Abdel-Magied, who walked out of Shriver’s speech — a speech which deliberately brushed aside cultural appropriation and all the problems therein.
Shriver has been a childfree voice (if her book Kevin isn’t enough to convince you to not have children, I don’t know what is), which our own views align with, and we’ve featured her on BookTuber Tuesday.
However, her response to the controversy seems to be the worst part:
Of course people can tell their stories. But if “telling your story” is the equivalent of shouting to the wind, there is inequality of platform here.
Gabbler makes some more good points here:
Indeed, when self-publishing is spoken about as the only way some diverse authors can get their voices in print, there is something wrong with the system.
I leave you with this quote from Amy Hungerford:
“Sometimes scholars will need not just to silently make their choices without acknowledging the choices forgone, but to refuse, in a reasoned and deliberate way, to read what the literary press and the literary marketplace put forward as worthy of attention. This requires a distinctly nonscholarly form of reasoning: One must decide, without reading a work, whether it is worth the time to read it or not…” [Via]
We are entering a time where we must refuse the scholarly conversation of literature–at least until the time when “scholarly conversation” can include all voices. Until that time, it’s not very objective. Which isn’t very scholarly at all.