Authors, agents and publishers were surprised to learn earlier this week that reading subscription service Scribd — a retailer account for publishers — had helped itself to creating 500 short text and audio write-throughs of a swathe of high-profile nonfiction in the name of “discovery.” Did Michelle Obama, Daniel Pink, Elizabeth Gilbert, Phil Knight, Seth Godin, John Carreyrou, Eric Ries, Brene Brown, Steven Hawking, Chip Heath, Joshua Foer, Sheryl Sandberg, Yuval Noah Harari and countless others need a tech startup to rewrite in their own new copyrighted words short versions of “the key insights, the key themes, the tone, the […]
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People, Etc.
Amara Hoshijo has been promoted to editor and rights manager at Soho Press. Ashley Yepsen has been promoted to publicist at The Experiment. Profiled: Editing By Ear Judith Gurewich, publisher of Other Press, was profiled in the NYT, with emphasis on her “uniquely aural editing process.” She has authors come to her home in Cambridge, MA and read aloud their manuscripts. “It’s not because I’m smart” that she find this process works, Gurewich says. “It’s because I’m incredibly primitive.” As she listens, “I forget who I am. I’m gone in the text.” Author Isaac Bailey said of the sessions, “At […]
Oni Press/Lion Forge Merger Leads to Controversial Layoffs
Since comics publisher Oni Press merged with Lion Forge and its parent company Polarity on May 8, critics charge that layoffs disproportionately targeted marginalized employees, especially queer women and women of color. The Daily Beast reports that those fired included editor-in-chief Andrea Colvin and associate editor (and Eisner award-winning cartoonist) Christina “Steenz” Stewart. In total, nine people were laid off, including Oni’s only black editor and two employees who had requested accommodations for their disabilities. Online criticism began when the merger was announced in the NYT. Editor Desiree Wilson posted on Twitter, “I, the only black person at Oni, just got […]
Hachette Book Group Introduces Metered Model for Digital Sales to Libraries
Hachette Book Group announced it is changing its model for digital product sales to libraries. Starting July 1, the publisher will shift from perpetual ownership of e-books and digital audiobooks to “a two-year metered model.” In their version, those materials can be lent, an unlimited number of times, on a one-user-per-copy basis, for two years before the access expires. (Some publishers limit the total checkouts as well.) HBG says the change “will result in lower prices for the vast majority of our titles to the library market,” though as with other publishers the library pricing will still be significantly higher […]
People, Etc.: Wein to Avid Reader, and More
Lauren Wein will join Avid Reader Press as editorial director on June 24, where she will acquire both fiction and nonfiction, and will oversee a fiction program for the new imprint. She has been executive editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. Erin M. Berger will join Scholastic Trade as senior vice president of marketing, starting June 17. Most recently she was vp, creative marketing director at Penguin Children’s. Sue Berger Ramin will join Brandeis University Press in the newly created position of director, starting July 1. She was previously associate publisher at David R. Godine. Stephanie Winter has been promoted to […]
Errors & Omissions: Naomi Wolf, Moby
Last week on May 23, author Naomi Wolf learned in a live BBC radio interview that her new book Outrages: Sex, Censorship, and the Criminalization of Love (6/18, HMH) contains errors based on her misunderstanding of the 19th century legal term “death recorded.” Some of Wolf’s book is premised on the idea that “several dozen” men in England were executed for having sex with other men in the 19th century, weighing on many Victorian poets, such as John Addington Symonds. But interviewer Matthew Sweet explained to Wolf that the term “allowed judges to abstain from pronouncing a sentence of death on […]