Everyone reads the acknowledgements. In fact, for many of us, the first thing we do when we pull a book off the store shelf is to flip to the back. The writers among us might be searching for the agent or the editor we can query, or we might be seeking our own name in the list. But we certainly read the acknowledgements for the drama and the human story revealed therein.
The Millions : The Story Behind the Story: An Appreciation of Authors’ Acknowledgments.
The acknowledgments page will conclude with the sort of crowd-pandering favored by stumping politicians—with expressions of awe and humility for the author’s supportive parents, brilliant children, and devoted spouse. Apparently having dedicated the book to these same people was insufficient as a gesture.
Raymond Carver signing books, New York City, 1988
Does an author have the right to prevent people from copying their book(s) for free? Should authors have this right? Does it matter?
Does Copyright Matter? by Tim Parks | NYRblog | The New York Review of Books.
The Internet Archive has partnered with BitTorrent to publish over 1,000,000 of its books, music and movies as legal torrents.
From the Internet Archive’s blog:
BitTorrent is the now fastest way to download items from the Archive, because the BitTorrent client downloads simultaneously from two different Archive servers located in two different datacenters, and from other Archive users who have downloaded these Torrents already. The distributed nature of BitTorrent swarms and their ability to retrieve Torrents from local peers may be of particular value to patrons with slower access to the Archive, for example those outside the United States or inside institutions with slow connections.
Internet Archive adds 1,000,000 legal files to the world’s store of BitTorrents – Boing Boing.
Roxane Gay on writers of color:
We are many. We are everywhere. The world of letters is far more diverse than the publishing climate would lead us to believe. You only need to open your eyes and open your mind.