Even though HathiTrust is currently being sued by The Authors Guild and a few others, it’s recently partnered with Google and Duke University Press to digitize “a trove of older titles.”
Duke University Press Goes Digital
She Tried. That’s What Matters, Right?
Folks who’ve read Mark O’Connell’s Epic Fail (excerpt) may have a perverse curiosity concerning Amanda McKittrick Ros. Widely considered to be one of the worst authors ever to write, McKittrick Ros’s infamous 1887 novel Iddesleigh is available for free download.
Do I Dare to Eat a Banana?
“She didn’t even want to be anything. She just wanted to be able to sit in a room and not feel tortured by it, which is sort of the human condition in general. Eileen isn’t dreaming of leaving home and making it in the big city on Broadway. She just wants to go and eat a banana, you know?” Ottessa Moshfegh on her new novel, Eileen, for The Rumpus.
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Pre-Anderson
Who else read the biographies of historical figures as a kid and felt bad about not having learned Greek and Latin by age ten? Would you like to feel worse?
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Franzen on HBO’s The Corrections
Another #LitBeat: BEA
In the latest installment of #LitBeat our correspondent reports from a Tumblr-hosted event at Housing Works, featuring readings from Baratunde Thurston, Alexander Chee, and our own Edan Lepucki.
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Beautifying Books
As e-books gain market share, publishers are gussying up book designs. Free Press vice president and publisher Martha K. Levin says, “the message [is] that even if you’re buying 90 percent of your books on your e-reader, this is the one that you want to have on your bookshelf.” The article highlights 1Q84 as an example of a successfully well-designed physical object, but if you haven't seen a copy, check out Chip Kidd's discussion of his work on the book.
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Algorithmic Forecasting
The Financial Times takes a detailed look at the Financial Computing Centre, home of future quants, where Michael Galas is working to build "a hedge fund without employees" and a crop of PhD candidates are using social media to predict the markets. Could these algorithms one day spill beyond finance, and influence education or social sciences?
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Duke press will handle all the work of securing permissions from copyright holders before the books are added to Google’s search database. I see no problem with this arrangement, Duke U Press and Google are both commercial companies, and acting according to current law.