The Virginia Quarterly Review convincingly reproduces a number of incidences in Chris Anderson’s new book FREE: The Future of a Radical Price that reproduce nearly verbatim portions of a number of Wikipedia articles. Anderson admits fault via e-mail, saying “all those are my screwups after we decided not to run notes as planned, due to my inability to find a good citation format for web sources.” He intended to “do a write-through” of “source material without an individual author to credit (as in the case of Wikipedia),” and says that “obviously in my rush at the end I missed a […]
Free
People: BN.com Names New Executive, and More
Jamie Iannone will serve as evp, shopping for Barnes & Noble.com & Barnes & Noble Digital, “responsible for meeting the buying needs, and shaping the shopping decisions, of visitors to Barnes & Noble.com. He reports to BN.com president William Lynch. Iannone was at eBay, where most recently he was vp of global search. Mary Faria is joining Simon & Schuster as director of mass merchandise/dsrm, children’s sales, reporting to Mary Marotta. Faria has held various sales positions at Harper Collins, Abrams and Little Brown. Also at S&S Children’s, Katherine Devendorf has been promoted to associate managing editor. Random House UK […]
People
In the UK, longtime head of Random UK’s Century Mark Booth has resigned after 21 years at the imprint. He says in the announcement, “I’ve had a wonderfully happy twenty one years, but I think I’ve done as much as a chap can do. I pride myself on being a bit unpredictable and I hope that the plans I am going to reveal shortly will raise a few eyebrows.” Susan Sandon adds “Mark understandably has not yet revealed all of his immediate plans but writing, journalism and other publishing projects will no doubt form part of his portfolio.” Arrow publishing […]
Awards
Italian author Claudio Magris, best-known for DANUBE and MICROCOSMS, has been given the annual Frankfurt Booksellers Peace Prize. The AP notes he is “often considered a contender for the Nobel prize in literature. AP In Australia, Tim Winton has won the country’s top fiction prize, the Miles Franklin Award, for the fourth time, for his novel BREATH.
Economy and Currency Pull Down Wiley Results
Sales fell 6.7 percent at Wiley in their fourth quarter, at $403 million and earnings per share decline 14.3 percent, with “continued softness in professional/trade and a decline in higher education.” The company says results rose on a currency-neutral basis. For the coming year, the company says “we anticipate revenue growth on a currency neutral basis” but “top-line results will be highly dependent on economic conditions around the world.” For the full fiscal year, revenue fell 3.7 percent to $1.6 billion reflecting a $120 million negative effect from foreign exchange (principally the declining British pound), and earnings per share declined […]
Salinger Defendants Claim "Commentary and Criticism"
Attorneys at Frankfurt Kurnit Klein & Selz filed papers on behalf of Fredrik Colting and his distributor asking the court to deny JD Salinger’s request for an injunction blocking publication of 60 YEARS LATER — Coming through the Rye. They claim the book is ” a complex and undeniably transformative exposition” about JD Salinger and “his best known creation Holden Caulfield” that is “protected parody, containing important commentary and criticism.” Now that he has a lawyer, Fredrik Colting has backtracked on how he positions the work, saying that “while my earlier book cover and some promotional material characterized 60 YEARS […]