paper trail

Mar 28, 2013 @ 5:13:00 pm

Goodreads, now brought to you by Amazon.

Citing "a crisis of conscience” after the death of internet activist Aaron Swartz, the the editor-in-chief and the entire editorial board of the Journal of Library Administration have announced their resignation from the publication. The Journal had been working with owner Taylor & Francis towards an agreement which would have removed the paywall surrounding articles, but negotiations ultimately failed, and the final contract would have required contributors to pay $2,995 for each open-access article. In a statement to the Chronicle of Higher Education, the outgoing EIC remarked, “the math just didn’t add up.”

Amazon has bought book-based social-networking site Goodreads for an undisclosed amount. The retail giant is expected to use Goodreads, which currently has more than 16 million members, as a platform for selling books, though details of the strategy are still up in the air.

How do you know when a book review makes a splash? One way is when the publicist contacts to reviewer to inform them that "there's a special place in hell for you." That's what happened to Kate Losse after Dissent published her smart and sharply critical review of Sheryl Sandberg's techno-utopian, dubiously feminist tract Lean In.

Lisa Darms ranks as our favorite among Flavorwire’s list of the ten “Coolest Librarians Alive.”

James Franco is really not a fan of the Atlantic's blog.

At the Believer, Alice Gregory talks with Renata Adler about cruelty and criticism, seeing her early novels back into print, and her recent work on a third, as-of-yet unpublished novel.