It is entirely possible that we don’t get the concept of fake books. Or rather, we don’t get the dividing line between a real book and a fake book. We understand plagiarism. We kind of comprehend bait and switch. It’s the part where an entire new work is written, right down to the reviews. Is it the book or the reviews that make the work fake? How does one distinguish between a pseudonym and a fake name? Why, oh why, doesn’t the press answer all the questions we could possibly ask? (Via The Literary Saloon at The Complete Review) China […]

Around here, there are a lot of discussions about how the inherent inefficiencies built into music distribution benefit record labels. The same could be said for book publishing. The model was developed a long time ago, when printing presses were slow, computers occupied entire floors of large buildings, and Amazon was either a river or single-breasted woman. One favorite inefficiency, for both publishers and authors (though for entirely different reasons…no, that’s not true. Same reason, different perspective.), is the policy of returns. We liked this comment: After all, the costs involved in maintaining returns create, in effect, the bubble that

What with one thing and the other, we don’t get as much reading done as we should*. For the past year or so, we have tried to figure out how a person without a day job works so many…days. It’s like every time we turn around, we’re heading for this office or that office. This is wrong on so many levels (not the least of which is the fact that all this to-ing and fro-ing wreaks havoc on our afternoon naps). For a while, we tried listening to books-on-tape at the gym — actual cassettes. Which, it turns out, they