Monthly Archives: January 2007

Song of Ice & Fire to be adapted for TV

Posted on January 20, 2007 by Mark

From Variety:

HBO has acquired the rights to turn George R.R. Martin’s bestselling fantasy series “A Song of Fire & Ice” into a dramatic series to be written and exec produced by David Benioff and D.B. Weiss.

“Fire” is the first TV project for Benioff (“Troy”) and Weiss (“Halo”) and will shoot in Europe or New Zealand. Benioff and Weiss will write every episode of each season together save one, which the author (a former TV writer) will script.

View the full story here.

Posted in Movie Adaptations, Science fiction/fantasy |

US satirist Buchwald dies aged 81

Posted on January 18, 2007 by Keren

Art Buchwald, a Pulitzer Prize-winning US writer and author of 33 books, has died at the age of 81, his son says.

Known for his wry humour, he published his final book, Too Soon to Say Goodbye, in November of last year.

The book includes his plan for getting a big newspaper obituary: Don’t die on the same day as a Nobel Prize winner.

He suffered from kidney failure a year ago and went into hospice, where he was not expected to live long.

But he defied doctors’ predictions, surviving for nearly a year despite refusing dialysis treatment.

Link to the BBC News article

Posted in Authors, Obituaries |

British science fiction award shortlist released

Posted on January 16, 2007 by Keren

The shortlist for the annual British science fiction award had been released.  Awards will be given in three categories: novel, short fiction and artwork.  The awards will be presented at Eastercon on April 7.

There’s also a recommended reading list of non-fiction works.
Link to the shortlist (via BoingBoing)

Posted in Awards, Contests, E-books, Reading, Science fiction/fantasy |

Nominations open for PW's bookseller & sales rep of the year

Posted on January 14, 2007 by Keren

PW is seeking nominations for our 14th annual awards for Bookseller of the Year and Rep of the Year. This year’s award winners will be profiled in the April 30 pre-BookExpo America issue of Publishers Weekly and will be honored in New York City during the BEA convention.

Nomination submissions should go to Donna Paz Kaufman at dpazkaufman@comcast.netor fax (904) 261-6742. Include your name, phone number and industry affiliation. Candidates cannot nominate themselves. Your nomination will be included with the packet of materials used by the jury to select this year’s winners.

Link to the Publishers Weekly article

Posted in Articles, Awards, Booksellers |

Anime TV goes digital

Posted on January 14, 2007 by Keren

To satisfy the U.S. demand for popular Japanese anime, manga publisher Viz Media has licensed the digital download rights for the hit Japanese TV anime series Death Note, which is based on the bestselling manga series published by Viz in the U.S. It appears to be the first time a U.S. manga publisher has been able to secure the digital rights to a Japanese TV anime series while it is still popular and running in Japan.

Thanks to the Internet, U.S. fans want the most popular Japanese manga and anime right away. Marks said offering downloads is an effort to “satisfy fan demand” and beat digital pirates at their own game. “It’s up on YouTube anyway,” said Marks. “We’d like to have an official version available. It’s an experiment to figure out a way to get material to fans as fast as we can.”

According to the article, the episodes will probably sell for about $1.99 each.
Link to the Publishers Weekly article

Posted in Articles, Film, Science fiction/fantasy, Technology |

HP 7 may be absent from small shops

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Mark

Telegraph.co.uk reports:

A quarter of independent booksellers say that they will not stock the final Harry Potter book when it is published because they claim they cannot make a profit on it.

The survey, for The Bookseller magazine, found that the country’s dwindling number of small bookshops said they could not match the discounted prices on the Harry Potter titles offered by online outlets such as Amazon or big chains and supermarkets.

Some even claim they will have to buy the book from supermarkets because they will be cheaper than their usual suppliers.
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Charles Hampton of Boarderman’s bookshop in Bishop’s Stortford said: “We made a loss on the last one and I am not prepared to make a loss on this one.”

He claimed that some outlets were able to sell Harry Potter books for £3 less than he was able to buy them for.

Full story can be found here.

Posted in Booksellers |

An American Idol of books?

Posted on January 12, 2007 by Mark

From Reuters, via Yahoo News:

A major U.S. book publisher is hoping its new Web-based writing contest can tap into the popularity of interactive competitions like hit television show “American Idol.”

As part of the “First Chapters” contest, aspiring first-time authors and members of www.gather.com can post manuscripts on that social-networking Web site, organizers from publisher Touchstone Fireside and gather.com said on Thursday.

Full story here.

Posted in Contests, Publishers, Websites |

Carol Pinchefsky: Why more people don't read science fiction

Posted on January 10, 2007 by Keren

Carol Pinchefsky wrote an article for Orson Scott-Card’s Intergalactic Medicine Show magazine in which she talks about a subject very near to my heart – why science fiction and fantasy seem to have such a limited appeal to readers.

The reasons are varied but inarguable — science fiction holds only a 6% market share, according to research done by the Romance Writers of America in 2005. (1)

Why does speculative fiction not appeal to mainstream readers? The answer, “It just doesn’t interest me” does not interest me. So after years of observation, I’ve drawn a few (non-scientific) conclusions. The answers are more complex than a choice to avoid the science fiction section of the bookstore.

Link

Posted in Articles, Reading, Science fiction/fantasy |

How to speak a book

Posted on January 10, 2007 by Keren

Richard Powers writes about dictation through the ages:

Why all this need for speech? Long after we’ve fully retooled for printed silence, we still feel residual meaning in the wake of how things sound. Speech and writing share some major neural circuitry, much of it auditory. All readers, even the fast ones, subvocalize. That’s why so many writers — like Flaubert, shouting his sentences in his gueuloir — test the rightness of their words out loud.

What could be less conducive to thought’s cadences than stopping every time your short-term memory fills to pass those large-scale musical phrases through your fingers, one tedious letter at a time? You’d be hard-pressed to invent a greater barrier to cognitive flow. The 130-year-old qwerty keyboard may even have been designed to slow fingers and prevent key jamming. We compose on keys the way dogs walk on two legs. However good we get, the act will always be a little freakish.

Link to the NYT article

Posted in Articles, Technology |

Costa award winners announced

Posted on January 10, 2007 by Keren

William Boyd was named novelist of the year Tuesday in Britain’s lucrative and long-standing Costa Book Awards.
The prizes — known until last year as the Whitbread Book Awards — were established in 1971 and are Britain’s longest-running literary competition. They are open to residents of Britain and the Republic of Ireland.

The prizes are awarded in five categories — novel, first novel, poetry, biography and children’s book.  Each category winner receives $9,700. One of the five will receive the $49,000 book of the year award on Feb. 7.

The awards were renamed last year after sponsorship switched from retail and leisure group Whitbread Group PLC to the Costa coffee shop chain.

Link to the rest of the Yahoo! News article; link to the Guardian news article

Posted in Articles, Authors, Awards, Contests |