Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to read this book in two months or it will self destruct:

Argentinean independent publishers Eterna Cadencia are publishing an anthology of new Latin authors using special ink that disappears once it comes in contact with sun and air, completely disappearing within 2 months time after opening the book. This makes for an interesting approach to motivate book buyers to read books more promptly, giving first-time authors the attention they need to survive:

Which also means people who enjoyed these struggling new authors cannot pass the book on to friends or come back and read them again. Not to mention the negative pressure of being forced to read it in a certain time.

I predict this gimmick will fade away inside two months.

via Read This Book In Two Months Or The Words Will Disappear From The Page – PSFK.

I’m all for new cover art on classics, but this feels a touch too shameless.

Sexing Up the Classics for Teens – Entertainment – The Atlantic Wire.

Hugh Rundle has produced another thought provoking article, suggesting the current copyright system is doomed.

Librarians should not play along with this. Eli Neiberger told us earlier this year that our mission should be to ‘fight for the user’. Fighting for the user doesn’t mean signing petitions pleading with publishers to sell us their ebooks. It means looking for alternatives and spending your money with companies that do serve your communities needs properly. Show your community how to publish their own ebooks and bypass the publishers. Show your community how to curate their own newsfeeds using Twitter or Flipboard and cancel your subscriptions to crappy news aggregation databases. Refuse to subscribe to any service that requires your members to create a new account with the provider or an associated DRM software product. Question whether ALIA should really enshrine support for Copyright in its policy documents. Demand to know why IFLA opposes one of the few systems that could support the creation of cultural works without locking them down.

Winter is coming for the copyright slumlords. Make sure you rug up, and remember whose side you are on.

As Hugh knows, I’m closely involved with our library subscribing to a service that requires our members to create an account with a DRM product. That’s how we’re getting at least some popular ebooks into the library. I’ve read other arguments that we should boycott such providers so the publishers are forced to do it our way. I wouldn’t be surprised if the publishers preferred this – then they could just stop selling ebooks to libraries. The fact is, if we want some new release popular ebooks in the library (we can’t get them all), we’re currently forced to make some big compromises.

I’m going to try to guess what is in Hugh’s head and predict his response: that’s fine, let people buy ebooks at the cheap prices that will result when the copyright revolution hits. Libraries will need to reposition themselves as something other than popular fiction lending institutions if they are to survive.

the rural romance genre is growing at a phenomenal rate, with publishers estimating sales have tripled in the past four years. A uniquely Australian take on romance fiction, ”chook lit”, as it’s affectionately known, routinely outsells local popular fiction and crime.

Chook lit. Is that always going to be the thing now? We have to come up with some silly little catchy phrase to tag each sub-genre with?

(via Romance and rodeos rule as rural readers turn to ‘Chook lit’.)