You might ask yourself: Why do books have prices printed on them? Marketplace
Why are books actually marked with a price on them? Music isn’t. Movies aren’t. Most retail items that I could think of that you would find at resellers aren’t in fact.
Textbooks in the digital age. More on Cengage's digital textbook offering. (Boston Globe)
Textbook publishers had been trying to shift from paper to digital for years. Then along came the COVID-19 pandemic, giving many reluctant educators and students the nudge they needed to make the leap to online course materials. In Cengage’s case, digital sales now represent 68 percent of total revenue, up from 58 percent three years ago. About half of its sales are to college students, and digital represents 82 percent of the higher-ed revenue now for Cengage.African comics and their growing market (The Economist)
Kugali is part of a small but vibrant industry. As in many areas of African popular culture, Nigerian brands are prominent; others include Comic Republic and Vortex Corp. But animators are thriving elsewhere, too. Afrocomix, an app for reading comics, was made by Leti Arts, a video-game developer based in Ghana and Kenya. In 2019 “Mama K’s Team 4”, written by Malenga Mulendema, a Zambian artist, and co-produced by a South African studio, became Netflix’s first African-made animated series. Etan Comics is the publisher of the first Ethiopian superhero comic books, “Jember” and “Hawi’’.
J.K. Rowling gets a profile in Vulture (NY Mag) and it isn't that flattering (Vulture)
One of the fans most devoted to Rowling’s exhaustive world building was a former Michigan school librarian named Steven Vander Ark. His website, The Harry Potter Lexicon, had won Rowling’s praise; it catalogued the minutiae of her books in such detail that she said she occasionally consulted it to fact-check her work as she wrote. In the months after the series concluded, Vander Ark contracted with a local publisher to turn his site into a print volume, and Rowling’s appreciation soured. Suing Vander Ark’s publishers for copyright infringement, she said, “I believe that this book constitutes the wholesale theft of 17 years of my hard work.”
Representing Vander Ark’s publisher, the executive director of Stanford Law School’s Fair Use Project pointed out that publishing companion guides to existing works was a practice that had been accepted “for hundreds of years.” But Neil Blair, one of Rowling’s agents, said that people who wished to produce such companions typically approached Rowling’s representatives first. Before publishing anything, they would seek her approval and make changes where requested; they would, in other words, “fall in line.” The judge ruled in Rowling’s favor, awarding $6,750 in damages. Vander Ark had broken down in tears as he testified, but after the trial, he avowed that he would always be a Harry Potter fan.
Many publishing folk take exception to any potential ex-trump officials getting book deals (Guardian)
Put together by the author Barry Lyga, the letter, which is continuing to add names, has been signed by bestselling writers including Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere, Holly Black and Star Wars author Chuck Wendig. Titled “no book deals for traitors”, it opens by stating that the US “is where it is in part because publishing has chased the money and notoriety of some pretty sketchy people, and has granted those same people both the imprimatur of respectability and a lot of money through sweetheart book deals”.
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