NEA Chair on National Tour, Google Makes New Enemies Overseas, and More

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:

National Endowment for the Arts chairman Rocco Landesman is embarking on a six-month tour designed to highlight how “art works” in communities across the country (Press Release).

E-reader manufacturer IREX is planning to let publishers sell directly to consumers through an “e-book mall” (Digital Book World).

News from this week’s Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco includes the launch of BookPrep, a print-on-demand service from Hewlett-Packard (PC World). The company will offer paperback versions of over 500,000 out-of-copyright works housed at the University of Michigan, which signed a similar (non-exclusive) deal with Amazon earlier this year (Associated Press). Meanwhile, HP has also added a new partner to its print-on-demand magazine service MagCloud: the online community-building platform Wikia (Associated Press).

Musician Paul Zukofsky wants writers to think twice before they quote his father, the late Objectivist poet Louis Zukofsky, and has posted some strictly worded guidelines for anyone inclined to do so (Z-site).

The China Written Works Copyright Society (CWWCS) has accused Google of digitizing nearly eighteen thousand protected Chinese books without permission or compensation (Forbes).

Taking issue with a scene in which an eight-year-old girl is raped, a school district trustee in California is seeking to ban Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (Los Angeles Times).

Patti Smith, John Ventimiglia, and Tom Waits have lent their voices to a new documentary about author Jack Kerouac, One Fast Move or I’m Gone: Kerouac’s Big Sur (NPR).

In the wake of major e-reader announcements from competitors, Amazon has knocked $20 off the price of its “International” (sorry, Canada) Kindle reading device (Bookseller).