paper trail

Mar 20, 2013 @ 12:46:00 am

New Yorkers: If you’re free tonight, the New School is hosting what promises to be an excellent panel about “the cultural phenomenon of the middlebrow.” The event features critics (and Bookforum contributors) Ruth Franklin, Christopher Beha, and Christine Smallwood, as well as New York Times Book Review editor Jennifer Szalai.

Thanks to a Supreme Court ruling, an international war over copyright and the right to resell books may have just been averted. In a 6-3 decision on Tuesday, the court determined that a Thai student who had been legally buying cheap copies of American textbooks in Thailand then selling them for a profit to students in the U.S. was protected under what is known as the “first sale” doctrine, which states that a person can do whatever they want with a book after purchasing it.

Philip Roth has turned eighty. Flavorpill celebrates by rounding up ten of his grumpiest quotes.

The innovative indie publisher Richard Nash has penned a smart and comprehensive essay for the Virginia Quarterly Review about the history and evolution of bookselling, and all the business models that have risen and fallen to support it.

The BBC has announced that it will sell its popular Lonely Planet travel guide series to a Nashville-based media company owned by “a reclusive U.S. billionaire.” Originally founded in Australia in the seventies, the BBC bought Lonely Planet seven years ago for more than $200 million—and agreed to sell the series this week for the bargain-basement rate of $77.8 million.