From The Canadian Press:
A group of crusading intellectual property lawyers at Stanford Law School say they will help defend a small publishing house being sued by author J.K. Rowling over its plan to print an unauthorized companion guide to her Harry Potter series.
Full story on Google News; you can find the online version of the Harry Potter Lexicon at hp-lexicon.org or visit the publisher here.
After putting her book club on ice for a year after her showdown with memoirist James Frey, Oprah has stuck with autobiography for her new selection: Sidney Poitier’s spiritual autobiography The Measure of a Man, published by Harper SanFrancisco in 2000. The selection appears well timed for an Oscar season in which an unusually diverse group of actors are up for awards. Poitier was the first black actor to win the Academy Award for Best Actor for Lilies of the Field in 1963.
From the Publishers Weekly article; read the Yahoo! News article on the same subject here.
The OED is today enlisting the public to help them trace 40 well-known words and phrases. All of them are in the dictionary with a date of the earliest evidence of usage, but researchers want to know if the British people can do better.
The results will feature in a new series of BBC2’s Balderdash and Piffle presented by Victoria Coren. Last year viewers came up with evidence to update the history of words including ploughman’s lunch, the 99 ice-cream and the full monty.
The 40 words include some whose origin is still unknown or uncertain including shaggy dog story, loo, bonkers, Bloody Mary, take the mickey, bung and spiv.
The dictionary is also hoping for more information on mucky pup, sick puppy, glamour model, hoodie, shell-suit, stiletto, marital aid, pole dance, duh brain, and one sandwich short of a picnic. More information at bbc.co.uk/balderdash.
Link to the Guardian article
News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch has pulled the plug on the upcoming Regan Books title from O.J. Simpson, If I Did It. A tell-all of a different variety, the book, which was to be Simpson’s outline of how he might have committed the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman, was scheduled for release on November 30
Read the rest on PublishersWeekly.com.
Nov 21 edit: Guardian Unlimited also has an article on the news up now with a little more detail.
Edit #2: PW Daily has published a second story on the cancellation, entitled Booksellers Relieved O.J. Book Is Quashed.
A wave of revulsion and open criticism, reaching a climax this weekend, has swept America in the wake of revelations that Simpson intends to capitalise on the murder of his ex-wife Nicole Brown and her friend Ron Goldman with a book and TV ‘confession’ in a £1.8 million deal brokered by Murdoch-owned companies.
Link to the full Guardian Unlimited article
A movie about the fast food industry - with a bite. Yahoo News discusses some of the problems and processes involved in bringing it to the big screen.
Journalist Eric Schlosser, author of “Fast Food Nation,” said he struggled to find a publisher for his 2001 nonfiction book that became a surprise bestseller. Five years later, Schlosser said he ran into similar problems trying turning the book — an indictment of the U.S. fast food industry subtitled “The Dark Side of the All-American Meal” — into a film of the same name. It opened in U.S. cinemas on Friday.
“I spent more than a year trying to get a documentary made,” said Schlosser, who met with several networks but said he became troubled by their connections to fast food advertisers. “In the end I just felt uncomfortable,” he told Reuters. “I would rather a film never be made than a film be made that was a sellout, a film that took out the sharp edges and smoothed them over a little bit.”
Link to the full Yahoo News article
Cary Grant’s only child, Jennifer Grant, is writing a memoir, the first time she has offered an in-depth look at her famous father.
“It’s going to be a loving portrait of this man who was sort of an amazing daddy. But as you’re reading it, you’re also saying, ‘This is Cary Grant!’†said Victoria Wilson, a vice president and senior editor at Alfred A. Knopf, which plans to publish the book, “Good Stuff,†in 2008 at the earliest.
You can find the full Associated Press article on Turkish Daily News.
Taking a page from Wikipedia, publishing giant Pearson, under its Wharton School Publishing imprint, has embarked on a new book publishing project with two innovative collaborators that could involve thousands, if not tens of thousands of authors and editors.
Full press release available here
