Monday Morning Coffee – 5 October 2020
Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.
- SyFy has a great overview of evil books in cinema and literature.
- There’s a movement to stop italicizing non-English words, but it has yet to reach critical mass.
- Amazon is now recommending Epub over Mobi when submitting files to KDP. Curiously, their help pages still recommend DOC over Epub.
- Ars Technica has a good overview of the increase in library ebook borrowing this year, although they don’t really prove the premise in the article’s title.
- A university library found that hardly anyone was filling out the the survey form when they used a print periodical in the library’s collection. They concluded that no one is using the periodicals (that is probably true).
- A book hoarder discovers the hard way that you shouldn’t store books in a greenhouse.
- The first printing of the book Word Perfect was not in fact word perfect.
- The economy is in the toilet, we are in the middle of a raging epidemic, and Republicans are trying to steal the Presidential election, but the WSJ wants you to know that books can compete with Netflix.
P.S. A post I wrote was published over at The Book Designer: Open, Click, Buy – How to Sell Anything via Your Newsletter.
P.P.S. If you need a tech VA or help with your website, email me at [email protected]. Got a story that I should include in next week’s list? Shoot me an email.
Comments
Felix October 5, 2020 um 7:57 am
I’ll add that the habit of italicizing foreign words (and a lot of other crap besides) just looks weird to speakers of languages other than English. The rest of us simply don’t do that. So good riddance.
Disgusting Dude October 5, 2020 um 11:46 am
A lot of authors italize text to denote dialogue emphasis.
The same can apply to foreign words.
Much like the fights over commas, semi-colons, and split-infinitives, writers write as they want not as the literati think they should write.
Felix October 6, 2020 um 12:17 am
You… realize that emphasizing only what you want, for emphasis is very different from the language rules mandating italics for specific kinds of words that the author doesn’t otherwise want to stand out, right?
Disgusting Dude October 6, 2020 um 6:20 am
But it isn’t.
Foreign words, properly pronounced, sound different and break the cadence ahd flow.
Italics serve to point this out.
Nate Hoffelder October 6, 2020 um 10:02 am
LOL, there’s about fifteen things wrong with this comment.
For one thing, English is made up of so many borrowed words and has so many pronunciation rules (and exceptions to those rules) that to claim "foreign words sound different" is laughable at best.
Also, you really need to not use the word "foreign" in this situation because technically speaking English is a foreign language in North America (it’s actually a European tongue). Or, if you are going to argue that it’s not, then you would also have to concede that French and Spanish are also not foreign languages because they coexist in the same English-speaking countries in NA.
Really, English has so many borrow words that we should not be looking at this as English and non-English and instead think of this as words that have been accepted into standard English, and word that and have not. Should the latter group really be singled out as being different?