paper trail

Apr 5, 2011 @ 9:00:00 am

Javier Marias

Bookstores used to put frequently stolen books (Abbie Hoffman, Jack Kerouac, Charles Bukowski, et. al.) behind the front counter, but what will publishers do to stop e-book piracy? At the Boston Globe, Alex Beam investigates, finding that filching a new book is as easy as illegally downloading an album. He reports that publishers are “not too worried. Allow me to worry on their behalf. Free is still a price that is hard to beat.”

From the Electronic Book Review, Lydia Davis interviews Lynne Tillman.

The Huffington Post Union of Bloggers, which is made up of HP contributors past and present, has launched a website. Highlights include “Why Huffington Post ‘Fired’ Me.”

For a series of articles on the New Europe, The Guardian has asked editors at papers from France, Germany, Spain, and Poland to write about what people are reading in those countries today. Most of the articles nod to a thriving literary culture (in Poland, a biography of Ryszard Kapuscinski; in Spain, the forthcoming novel by Javier Marias). But some of the bestsellers look pretty familiar: Proving that the appeal of vampires and teenagers cuts across cultures, Germany’s top-five-selling books includes a title by Stephanie Meyer.

The New York Observer recaps the recent ascension of Cary Goldstein, the new publisher of Twelve Books.

Advice from fiction writers. Martin Amis: “You have to be slightly innocent to be a novelist. You can't have too much nous. It gets in the way, somehow.” Jennifer Egan (who just won the Morning News’s book tournament): “All that matters, and the hardest thing, is to do some decent work, and to keep getting better.”