Long Island

Some Long Island students might find it difficult to fill out their summer reading list this year. Why? Because some of the books don’t exist. A summer reading list for the Hempstead, N.Y. public school system had more than 30 typos, according to Newsday. Some of the books on the list include “The Great Gypsy” [...]

The post New York school’s summer reading list features hilarious but unforgivable typos appeared first on TeleRead: News and views on e-books, libraries, publishing and related topics.

Many writers have specialties: mystery, romance, true crime, even vampires. But Lisa Pulitzer has developed a curious subgenre that she has nearly all to herself: the escape story.

Ms. Pulitzer specializes in writing books with women who have abandoned groups that include, from left, a polygamous sect, a vehemently anti-homosexual Baptist church and the Church of Scientology.

Ms. Pulitzer helps young women who have fled religious sects or cultlike organizations give their accounts in compelling, often best-selling prose. “I’m now the official cult gal,” she said.

After 35 years of writing novels—not just novels, mind you: bestsellers—Susan Isaacs has a very clear understanding of how the book publishing industry works. Her take on the business from the perspective of a prolific author (13 novels and one book of nonfiction) offers unique insight into how and why things are changing.

Isaacs loves to tell the story of how her first book came to be published in the late 1970s. A former editor of Seventeen magazine and a freelance political speechwriter, she was home with young children and living in Long Island. "I wrote a mystery. It was the usual [situation of] reading too many mysteries and then saying, 'I think I can do this.'" A school acquaintance of her husband's was managing editor of Simon & Schuster and offered to read the book. He liked it, and told Isaacs, "You don't expect friends to write a good book!"

Copytele, a company that licenses out its patents to other companies, has filed a lawsuit that in part seeks for the company E Ink, which makes the technology behind e-readers like the Kindle and Nook’s screens, to stop production of those displays. Copytele claims E Ink illegally obtained the patents required to make them. Because E Ink is the only company that makes those screens, this could mean that Kindles and Nooks go off the market, at least for some period of time.

Nonfiction works of cloak-and-daggery will be the focus of a new joint venture between the non-profit Long Island Spy Museum, multimedia book publisher Shadow Lawn Press and Eye Spy Intelligence Magazine, the world’s only independent publication dedicated to espionage and intelligence.  The venture launches Long Island Spy Museum Publishing, a nonfiction imprint dedicated to the espionage genre.

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