"Could the new wave of Zen editors and e-ink tablets, tempering tech solutionism with analog nostalgia, reverse this trajectory — and give writers a dedicated device of our own?" Julian Lucas gives some of them a try. - The New Yorker
Mary's final letter was to her cousin Henry III of France. "An international team of researchers have found that Mary used a delicate folding process to seal the letter, ensuring that any tampering would be immediately obvious to its recipient." - The Guardian (UK)
Sometimes it's better to read than to experience. "I think I like winter weather best when it’s on the page and not the thing standing between me and the closest bar or the corner bodega when I’m out of popcorn." - LitHub
"Nonfiction writers make mistakes, too, of course. But not on the first page. As soon as I discovered my falsehood, I vowed to turn my back on nonfiction forever and write nothing but poetry, a genre in which you’re encouraged to lie." - LitHub
One poet sped home from a teaching gig in Lebanon; another was diagnosed with breast cancer as the pandemic burst forth. "In many ways, their poems also convey just how different their lives were, even though they were living just 5 miles from each other." - NPR
The culture that connected people of my generation was popular television and music. I noticed when I traveled that bookstores were as crammed with seasonal novelties as shoe stores; and used bookstores — this has been one of the saddest developments of my lifetime — had mostly disappeared. - Liberties Journal
Not only is the Canadian copyright crisis now called “the Canadian flu” in international book publishing circles but—for those who love silver linings—it’s believed to be working as a vaccination-by-example to help ward off similarly disastrous legislation in markets far from Canadian shores. - Publishing Perspectives
The trade group says that a Maryland law (along with a similar one pending in New York) requiring publishers who sell e-books to individual customers in the state to also sell to libraries "on 'reasonable' terms" is against federal copyright law and unconstitutional. - Publishers Weekly
If words are arbitrary and purely a matter of convention, then how did they come to be established in the first place? In practical terms: how did our ancestors create the original words? - Psyche
The sleeper among audiobooks — ahead of Michelle Obama and Kazuo Ishiguro, behind only J.K. Rowling — is mystery writer Brenda Chapman's Cold Mourning. Among ebooks borrowed, at #4, ahead of this year's Booker winner and just behind Ishiguro, is Ellery Adams's The Secret, Book & Scone Society. - The Guardian
In translating, you pose yourself a question—or it is posed to you by the text; you have no satisfactory answer, though you put something down on paper, and then years later the answer may turn up. Certainly you never forget the question. - LitHub
"For decades, translators in the U.S. have been ... working in the back rooms of literature even as they play a central role in enriching Anglophone letters. ... None of the past five years' winners of the International Booker Prize credits the translator on the front cover." - Vulture
This year she's been focused on turning seven of Condé Nast's biggest publications into global brands, each under one leader. She is also ensuring that there are unlikely to be any more Anna Wintours — imperial editors-in-chief each with their own fiefs. - The New York Times
