If imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, what is plagiarism? The least sincere form? A genuine crime? Or merely the work of someone with less-than-complete mastery of quotation marks who is in too great a hurry to come up with words and ideas of his own? Plagiary, It’s Crawling All Over Me
Sometimes it’s hard to tell: is Susan Gable sadistic or masochistic? Or maybe she has too much time on her hands. Today’s tip certainly suggests the latter. It is rare that an advertising campaign affects us in a way that inspires utter loathing. Truly. We save such emotion for truly awful thin–wait, that’s what happened here. Let us summarize to save you the agony. Oral-B, a toothbrush company, decided to promote a new, uh, sensitive brush product by tying it to romance novels. First (and this should say it all), you choose one of three readers to, we suppose, read
The husband has embraced audiobooks with an unexpected fervor — it turns out that T.C. Boyle short stories are just the right length for his cardio workout. Also just weird enough for his cardio workout, but that might be more than you need to know. He’s also been quite enthusiastic about the notion of podcasting novels. Or rather, reaping the benefits of someone else’s decision to podcast their work. In an effort to rouse the official BS enthusiasm, he’s taken to sending us frequent updates. In today’s installment, Cory Doctorow finishes Jame’s Patrick Kelly’s Burn. We, of course, are easily
As it turns out, the Da Vinci trial is keeping the industry glued to, hmm, what does one observe when a trial is held in the UK? News is scant, but we have high hopes that someone will do something. In the meantime, we’re heading back for more coffee.
Forget all that nonsense about the world ending, we were indulging in a melodramatic moment. All is right again, and we have been given a heads’ up of the best kind — coming to a bookstore near you this summer (meaning camp out now!) will be a definitive biography of one Nelle Harper Lee (we told you were were obsessed this week!). The nice people at Kirkus have a write-up of the book and a short interview with the author. No, not that author, Charles Shields, the author of the biography, Mockingbird. Really, where is your mind?. We feel like
That thud you just heard was our head hitting a wooden desk. Hard. And, yes, it hurt. We’ve long suspected that the world as we know is coming to an end. We simply didn’t realize it would happen this week. And here we went and wasted the weekend on accomplishments. Nothing less than the future of Western literature is at stake in the High Court tomorrow [today, actually]. Or so the publisher of The Da Vinci Code, the money-spinning blockbuster by Dan Brown, is expected to argue in a ground-breaking trial. Yes, kids, coming to a scandal near you: the
We realize that most of our readers aren’t lucky enough to hear the behind-the-scenes conversations (nor the re-enactments) at BS HQ, so it’s possible that you missed some ranting and raving in the last week or so. It all started, more or less, with this: Take Gallup’s poll. Beyond flat to declining blog traffic, it found just 9% of Internet users read blogs frequently, 11% do so occasionally, 13% rarely bother, and 66% never do. And “reading blogs” ranked last in a list of 13 common Internet activities, below things like emailing, checking news and weather, and shopping. It continued,
We had one of those “All Harper Lee, All The Time”* weekends. First up, of course, was a screening of Capote, where we learned that Lee was a driving force behind In Cold Blood. Though the husband notes sometimes movies Make Facts Up. We don’t care, we believe. Now we learn that the book that put us on the straight and narrow (what does that mean?) will finally be available to those who Don’t Read. You know who you are. “We are proud to be the original publisher of this American treasure and are thrilled to add ‘To Kill a
As we read articles about how the various Google initiatives are destroying life as we know it, we have to wonder where the viable alternatives are: There is much hue and cry about how Google is a commercial entity and surely has a profit motive. Only the most naive of us would believe otherwise. But we should recall that this project does not come free to Google, either. While authors’ groups and publishers decry the commercial intent of a corporation, largely absent from the discussion is the announcement of a hint of an announcement of an industry initiative to engage
It’s Friday, February is slow (makes July and August seem like positively thrilling months), and we’ve hit rock bottom. First, pope news. Now feuding authors. Of course, no way could we resist pointing you to an article that starts like this: Literary award ceremonies, generally speaking, are not particularly boisterous affairs. This year’s British Book Awards may, however, be an exception. The London hotel hosting the event, Grosvenor House, has asked for an “exclusion zone” between two of the shortlisted authors, Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson, on account of their now legendary personal feud having erupted into fisticuffs at a
