Issue Number 30 - August 2000

We're starting a new advice service on good quality books - all cheap and easily available [with big discounts at Amazon]. Virginia Woolf's ORLANDO is one of her lesser-known novels. It's a delightful fantasy which features a hero who changes sex part-way through the book - and lives from the sixteenth to the twentieth century.

E.M.Forster's A ROOM WITH A VIEW is set in Florence, and offers a witty observation of English manners and morals in the Edwardian era. If you saw the chocolate box Merchant-Ivory film, you might be interested to know that the original novel has a much harder centre.
Details at Amazon

Or how about a novel written in the form of poems - sonnets, no less? Vikram Seth's THE GOLDEN GATE was inspired by Pushkin's 'Eugene Onegin' but is set in contemporary California. I have never come across anyone who has not been charmed by this witty and touching account of modern life.
Details at Amazon

eBooks latest - Stephen King again!
Stephen King created publishing history when he put his last novella 'The Bullet' onto the Web. The electronic book was downloaded 400,000 times in the first couple of days - and he split the profit with his publishers.

This time he's gone one further - cutting out the publisher altogether. He's trusting people to pay $1.0 per download to read 'The Plant' in serial form. If enough people pay up, he'll continue posting the episodes. If they don't, he's going to stop.

I've read the first episode. It's about a nutty guy who submits a book on Black Magic to a downmarket paperback publishing company. When the typescript arrives, it is accompanied by photos of human sacrifice ...

http://www.stephenking.com

Books and the Enemies
In 1929, D.H. Lawrence's satirical poems 'Pansies' were seized by the Post Office. After questions in the House of Commons, they were delivered, accompanied by a note 'recommending' which fourteen poems should be deleted if the publisher decided to issue the work. The publisher took the hint.

(Source: BookEnds)

MP3 and the Napster Case
Music fans yesterday overwhelmed Web sites offering services similar to Napster after Judge Marilyn Patel issued a preliminary injunction against the popular music-exchange site. She ruled that it was clearly engaged in the intentional violation of copyright law.

Freenet saw its daily traffic quadruple before noon, while Gnutella's Web site was so swamped it temporarily went offline. Unless Napster receives a last-minute reprieve from a federal appeals court, it will shut down and remain offline pending a full trial later this year.

Although executives for the recording industry and some musicians hailed the judge's ruling as a landmark decision for Internet copyright law, industry observers noted that Napster's more than 20 million users will have little trouble finding a replacement site.

In fact, sites such as Gnutella and Freenet could be an even bigger headache for record companies, since those sites do not operate with a central database as Napster does, but exist only to offer free downloads of peer-to-peer software.

With this software, users can trade music, text, or even movie files between their computers without going through a Web site.

(New York Times, 28 July 2000)

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