Snippets
By Kathleen Bolton | October 5, 2009 |
Writerly news from around the interwebs.
In yet another indication that the YA market remains strong, publisher Sourcebooks has announced that they are launching a new YA imprint, Fire.
SOURCEBOOKS FIRE will officially launch in spring 2010 with seven titles, including a bestselling paranormal romance series from the UK, a novel based on the true life story of teenage sisters who invented the séance in 1848, a romantic mystery set against the backdrop of the civil war, and a YA supernatural thriller set in New York City, among others.
Spearheading the venture is Dan Ehrenhaft, who came over to Sourcebooks from Alloy Entertainment this spring. For those who don’t know, Alloy Entertainment media is responsible for unleashing juggernauts Gossip Girls and the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, among other heavy hitters in the YA market. This is an exciting development for those who write YA.
In another instance of Amazon=eeeevil, the online retailer can apparently delete books on their Kindle without notifying customers first. But in one recent instance, the high-handedness came with a price:
Amazon has agreed to pay $150,000 in a lawsuit filed by Justin Gawronski, who sued the online retailer after George Orwell’s novels “1984” and “Animal Farm” were deleted from his Kindle, along with his homework.
<snip>
People who’d gone to bed in the middle of reading “1984” found, upon waking, that the book had gone missing from their devices.
I find it distasteful that Amazon can delete books from Kindles whenever they want to.
File this under “whatever” in publisher desperation to cash in on digital publishing – the first Vooks are now available to be downloaded onto an iPhone or digital reader. Dunno what a vook is? It’s a video book (get it?). EW has the deets:
Releasing Thursday and priced at $6.99, the two fiction and two nonfiction titles are meant to represent a range of experimentation with the form, which embeds original video clips within a browser-based version of a digital book.
Sadly, the fiction titles don’t work quite as well. The first, a Jude Deveraux romance set in 19th-century South Carolina, tries to use video clips to provide atmosphere, with fluttering shots of cernuous willows and Southern manses set to the book’s narration. But since the text was produced separately from the videos, the clips feel a little redundant and even distracting.
The other novella, a thriller by Richard Doetsch, does a better job at integrating the two media, and the video’s content actually advances the narrative. Unfortunately, the clips are still too few and far between (and at some points cheesier than a Wisconsin state fair) to make you feel like you are experiencing something especially different or revolutionary. It certainly has potential, but it also has a ways to go before realizing it on the fiction front.
I’m going to ask our mulitmedia guru and new contributor JC to weigh in on this one.
ETA: Our own Therese Walsh was interviewed by Intrepid Media! Check it out HERE!
ETA2: The FTC has just ruled that bloggers must disclose payments for any reviews they do (read HERE). For those curious, we don’t review books at WU, nor do we get paid for interviews, posts or any other activities related to the webste. We don’t sell advertisement, either. We’ve decided it isn’t worth the hassle and we like the way we look without ads on our site.
Write on, friends.
Cool image by hoppipopi.
Kathleen Bolton is co-founder of Writer Unboxed. She writes under a variety of pseudonyms, including Ani Bolton.
She has written two novels as Cassidy Calloway: Confessions of a First Daughter, and Secrets of a First Daughter–both books in a YA series about the misadventures of the U.S. President’s teen-aged daughter, published by HarperCollins, and Tamara Blake, for the novel Slumber.
Erm… I hesitate to speak up because I know it’s a controversial issue, but… I don’t think the deletion of 1984 should have been as big a deal as it was.
(There, I said it!)
The copies those people had were ILLEGAL. They were refunded their money. If they needed the book, they could have immediately purchased a LEGIT copy and had it delivered to their Kindle via Whispernet or whatever right away.
Yes, the incident raises some questions about ownership in a digital age, but we download music and movies, we subscribe to cable networks, etc., and so far no catastrophic abuse of power has occurred. I feel that, once the kinks in the system are ironed out, digital books will be no different.
As for vooks, I think v-books would have been a less silly sounding name. I’m curious but not excited about them.
And YAY for more YA imprints! :D
.-= Kristan´s last blog ..Attention all artists! =-.
Hey, don’t ever hesitate to comment on anything posted here, Kristan or any readers! But I thought the “1984”that the Kindle readers had was purchased in good faith from Amazon, unless I’ve misread the article (totally possible), but it was Amazon who hadn’t worked out the copyright issue. Then when the realized their mistake, they deleted the book without notifying customers, and the student’s homework along with the deletion.
Regarding Amazon’s deletion, I will paraphrase someone else’s comment from another forum (not sure where I read it or I would give due credit):
It’s one thing to take it off the market. It’s another thing entirely to delete items already purchased in good faith.
Had that student purchased a hard copy of the book, Amazon could not have come to his house and snatched it from his desk in the middle of the night!
Wrong. Just wrong.
In looking for a different old comment, I saw this one and wanted to clarify: Amazon’s Kindle publishing platform allows pretty much anyone to register and upload their content to be published to the Kindle. What happened was someone (not Amazon) uploaded copies of Animal Farm and 1984 that they didn’t have the US rights to. When Amazon was notified, they pulled those copies.
It happened with Twilight and Harry Potter too, but I think those were reported and dealt with much more quickly. (I also think those were more obviously bad people trying to make a quick buck; with Orwell’s stuff, I think it was a legit company who didn’t have US rights.)
So it wasn’t even really Amazon’s doing, it was just their system that allowed it to happen, and thus their responsibility to fix it.
.-= Kristan´s last blog ..Books by the Banks =-.