- It looks like Judith Regan and Rupert Murdoch have kissed and made up. Or something like that. Reading between the lines, it looks more to me like there's an evidence issue that nobody is talking about than there is any admission of anything by anyone. And whether Judith Regan is, or is not, "antisemitic" is beside the point: During her time there, she published an awful lot of antisemitic crap. Now all we need is for her replacement in the HC publishing hierarchy to emerge... certainly not Cordelia; maybe Goneril?
- Speaking of ungrateful children and ill-prepared parents, iUniverse is moving in with its new parent. I don't know what it is about central Indiana, but on a per-capita basis it has more dubious publishing-related operations than anywhere in the nation.
- In the meantime, over in the UK Amazon and Bloomsbury are tussling over terms. You don't think anyone will mention "consign," though, do you?
- And here's a truly startling event: A media conglomerate is selling off a major product line to a smaller company. That immediately sounds suspicious... until one looks at what is being sold by whom to whom. It's not a set of deep, dark secrets; merely a set of deservedly ignored minutiae.
- Last, this month's controversy over whether Americans are becoming less literate: Someone actually tries to do honest math (unfortunately, the input numbers themselves are not honest... for example, just ask the Book Industry Study Group what it defines as a "sale," or for that matter a "book"). Ursula Le Guin offers her own notes on the alleged decline of reading.
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Law and reality in publishing and entertainment (seldom the same thing) from the creator's side of the slush pile, with occasional forays into politics, military affairs, censorship and the First Amendment, legal theory, and anything else that strikes me as interesting. |
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