Loudpoet has an interview with former Soft Skull Press publisher Richard Nash about his new social publishing venture Cursor. ““Social” is taking the book and making it much easier to have a conversation with the book and its writer, and have conversations around the book and its writer.” Is this a way forward for beleaguered publishers? (via The Lone Gunman)
Is Social Publishing the Future?
Four Hours of Chekhov
Recommended listening: Radio Open Source has been broadcasting Anton Chekhov‘s short stories, with voices including Chekhov translator and biographer Rosamund Bartlett, author Andre Dubus of House of Sand and Fog, and numerous other writers, actors, and scholars. “Chekhov makes you want to be a better person. He makes you want to live a better life.” (Unpersuaded? Consider our essays on why reading Chekhov, unlike booze or smokes, will make you a better person in 2014.)
False Negative
A striking photo of the Brontё sisters is not, in fact, a photo of the Brontё sisters. The women in the photo look a lot like them, but their hometown didn’t have much in the way of photography in the 1840s, and there isn’t any record of the Brontёs getting their photo taken. So how did the picture become known for being something it isn’t? At the LRB’s blog, Alice Spawls explains why. Pair with our own Edan Lepucki on Jane Eyre’s Mr. Rochester.
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Book Cover Contests
Venus Febriculosa, currently judging entries for its Name of the Rose book-cover design contest, has opened up another contest, this one to design a “cover” for Eugenio Montale’s poem, “The Eel.”
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The Best Prison Literature
With Guardian reporting that the “Tome Raider,” a Cambridge graduate turned antique book thief, was sentenced for thefts worth £40,000, AbeBooks has put together this list of the best prison literature.
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Greatest Geek Books
These are the nine greatest geek books of all time, according to Wired readers.
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Death by Bookcase
At the Telegraph, Sir Tom Stoppard briefly explains his desire to be killed by a falling bookcase.
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Nash appeared on a panel titled “The Future of the Book” at the Decatur Book Festival over Labor Day weekend, 2009. The other two panelists were former Atlanta Journal-Constitution book section editor Teresa Weaver and University of Georgia Press sales and marketing director John McLeod. He was the only one to discuss new options for internet book marketing, and received the most questions from the audience. Will enough people pay to make social writing clubs viable? What will he charge and how many subscribers will it take to make it worthwhile? Will his business model then be adopted by other now-free sites (folks like Max)? Could Nash be the internet equivalent of the guy who invented barbed wire (and tamed the wild west)? At the time he was still wooing investors (he told the audience). (Photos of panel here: http://tiny.cc/H3c4S or search http://www.flickr.com/groups/dbf09/).