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Margaret Atwood plans to keep it green as she tours in support of her latest novel, an environmental calamity tale titled The Year of the Flood, forthcoming from Nan A. Talese next month. The Booker Prize-winning author will travel by train where possible, carry minimal luggage, eschew bottled water, and require that venues serve only fair trade, bird-friendly coffee.
Barnes & Noble expanded its publishing program yesterday with the launch of a new imprint dedicated to republishing out-of-print books. The Barnes & Noble Rediscovers project will reissue noteworthy works of history, literature, philosophy, and science as redesigned, specially priced hardcovers.
Despite a circulation boom, public libraries in Ohio are scrambling to close branches, reduce hours, and lay off staff—all in an attempt to cope with an unprecedented drop in state funding. According to the Ohio Library Council, reductions approved last month to the Public Library Fund, along with declining tax revenues, are expected to shrink library budgets by as much as 30 percent.
Literature-craving commuters in New York City can now enjoy their own version of a program first launched in the London Underground six months ago—a free book exchange. Choose What You Read NY, a volunteer-run nonprofit, has begun setting up camp near major subway stations on the first Tuesday of each month to collect and redistribute donated books.
A team representing Saint Paul has won the twentieth annual National Poetry Slam (NPS) in West Palm Beach, Florida. The Minnesotans beat out sixty-seven other teams from across North America to claim the two-thousand-dollar grand prize on August 8. Rounding out the final standings were, in order, teams from Albuquerque, San Francisco, and New York City.
Google kicked off a new program yesterday that will allow authors who have released their books under the Creative Commons license to distribute them free through Google Books. Participants will be able to select from among seven versions of the Creative Commons agreement, which lets rightsholders make works openly available while still specifying how they may be used or altered.
Sony announced the latest in its series of attempts to shake Amazon’s dominance of the e-book market today, saying it will scrap its proprietary e-book format in favor of the ePub standard. Unlike Amazon’s Kindle format, the ePub standard—developed by an industry group that includes HarperCollins and Random House—allows e-books to be accessed and shared across a broad variety of devices.
As the extended deadline for the Google book settlement approaches, industry professionals still disagree about how the massive book-scanning project will affect authors. After one of the country’s largest agencies issued a memo last week advising its clients to opt out of the deal, the Authors Guild, which supports the settlement, released a rebuttal on Monday. The Guild will host an open conference call tomorrow afternoon to address what it calls “a series of erroneous conclusions” drawn by the agency.
In a bid to position itself alongside social networking phenomena like Facebook and Twitter, online publishing service Scribd unveiled a host of new social features yesterday. Users can now create personal reading lists, connect with those who share similar interests, and subscribe to instant updates from favorite authors, publishers, and even other readers.
Theatre producer and former professor Rocco Landesman was confirmed by the Senate on Friday as the new chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts. Also confirmed by the Senate last week was former congressman Jim Leach, tapped to head up the National Endowment for the Humanities. Both men are expected to be sworn in within a few days.
