James

While at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, I'd like to pay tribute to one of the city's many great intellectual sons: James Clerk Maxwell (1831-79), the titanic Victorian scientist whose work was described by Albert Einstein as the "most profound and the most fruitful that physics has experienced since the time of Newton." His genius touched pure mathematics, electromagnetics, optics (color theory), kinetic theory and thermodynamics, astronomy (the rings of Saturn), and many other disciplines. And he was also a poet.

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Fifty Shades of Grey takes the indie route to 100 million bestsellerdom

According to an announcement at the London Book Fair, worldwide sales of EL James’ Fifty Shades of Grey erotic fiction trilogy have now passed the 100 million mark. This comes courtesy of the trilogy’s publisher, Vintage Books, a Penguin Random House imprint who – let’s remember – were not the first book’s original publisher. That [...]

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I'm off to Edinburgh's Book Festival, as I write. It's 30 years old and the biggest of around 40 such bookfests around Scotland, stretching through the year and from Shetland to Wigtown, Scotland's national book town. They have been a big success in bringing authors and readers together, and showing the appetite for public debate on the issues tackled in books and beyond. Making that link is one of the key ways of selling books these days.

The literary community seems divided on Amazon’s Kindle Worlds, a new platform that will allow fans to publish their fan fiction through the book giant.

Fan fiction has always been controversial, largely because fans are writing stories about characters that many see as the intellectual property of their creators: the original authors. In some cases, as with J.K. Rowling's "Harry Potter" books, the characters are in fact copyrighted.

In a funny way, fan fiction is the purest form of literary art there is, the one most untainted by commerce. It’s hard to make money from it because someone else owns the intellectual property (unless you change the details just enough, in which case you can make quite a lot of money on it. Just ask E.L. James.)

Amazon’s ready to change that. A new program called Kindle Worlds will let would-be writers publish, and profit from, fan-fictional e-books with the blessing of the original characters’ creators…

What news organizations are learning from their e-book efforts (Poynter Online) What’s left if B&N sells the Nook division to Microsoft? (The Passive Voice) A ‘novel’ idea for spreading literature in Africa: The cellphone (Christian Science Monitor) The e-book piracy debate, revisited (NYTimes.com) The fascinating stories behind classic book titles (Flavorwire) Kindle Daily Deals: Subterranean by James [...]

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