paper trail

Mar 8, 2013 @ 12:01:00 am

Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes.

Are literary novelists too embarrassed by the prospect of writing seriously about sex to give it a real shot?

Not only does Amazon want to be the world’s biggest book retailer, it also wants to control the .book internet domain. The Association of American Publishers took Amazon to task for the move in a letter to ICANN, the organization that oversees the distribution of internet domain names. In the letter, a lawyer for the AAP protested the application, concluding, “in short, Amazon makes clear that it seeks exclusive control of the “.book” string solely for its own business purposes, notwithstanding the broad range of other companies, organizations and individuals that have diverse interests in the use of this.”

Does Sherlock Holmes belong in the public domain? A new lawsuit takes up the question.

At The Awl, Choire Sicha notes that the acknowledgements page for Sheryl Sandberg's new book runs to seven-and-a-half pages and thanks more than 140 people. When did elaborate acknowledgements become the norm? According to Claire B. Potter, while they used to be rare (or minimal), “by the 1980's, the acknowledgements section increasingly became a telephone book of family members, one’s graduate student cohort...every person who laid eyes on any piece of the manuscript, ever, from proposal stage to indexing, and everyone who cooked or cleaned for the author.”

Fan letters written to Mark Twain between 1863 and his death in 1910 are going to be published as a book. Dear Mark Twain: Letters from His Readers will include correspondence as well as letters he annotated but never replied to.