Sunday, August 24, 2008

MediaWeek (Vol 1, No 34):

TimeOut wants BBC out of Publishing (TOLine):
Tony Elliott, the owner of Time Out, the entertainment listings magazine, called for a break-up and sale of the BBC’s commercial division yesterday as he accused the corporation of overreaching itself with the £75 million acquisition of the Lonely Planet travel guides. The magazine proprietor said that Time Out, publisher of its own travel guides, could not compete with the BBC’s promotional muscle - and that the BBC should not publish books and magazines.
The TimesOnline profiles City Lights in San Francisco:
It was established in 1953 by poet and ‘beatnik’ Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin to provide a progressive, all-paperback alternative to books available at the time. It’s where the Beat Generation laid their hats and where publishing and selling Allen Ginsberg’s Howl got Ferlinghetti and bookseller, Shigeyoshi Murao, arrested in 1957 on obscenity charges. Their victory in court guaranteed the sale of other previously banned books – including D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer. (Three years later British readers achieved similar rights after the failed prosecution of Penguin for publishing Lady Chatterley’s Lover.)
Enid Blyton rocks and is the subject of a preview in TOL:
With its sense of adventure and advice on derring-do for juniors, The Dangerous Book for Boys was the sort of “how to” manual that could have been dreamt up by Enid Blyton, the creator of the Famous Five, the Secret Seven and a host of other dearly loved children’s characters. Now the inevitable has happened. Booksellers are eagerly awaiting the launch on September 4 of the Famous Five’s Adventure Survival Guide, a similar tome but with the bonus of a brand-new mystery starring the ginger-beer-loving youngsters.
For my librarian friends a comparison of JCR and Scopus Impact Factors: LINK
Impact factors for journals listed under the subject categories "ecology" and "environmental sciences" in the Journal Citation Reports database were calculated using citation data from the Scopus database. The journals were then ranked by their Scopus impact factor and compared to the ranked lists of the same journals derived from Journal Citations Reports. Although several titles varied significantly in impact factor and rank, the Journal Citation Reports and Scopus lists had a high degree of statistical similarity.
Common Sense contractual terms from Random House via BoingBoing:
Random House is asking some of its authors of young adult books to sign contracts with "morality clauses" that allow the publisher to take back your advance and cancel your book if you're caught doing anything that "damages your reputation as a person suitable to work with or be associated with children, and consequently the market for or value of the work is seriously diminished."
BusinessWeek ad topic pages NYT. NYTimes has been doing this for years. (NYT via Blogrunner). ExLibris was sold by one fund to another. PR Slow week....

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