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Morning Coffee – 30 December 2019

Here are a few stories to read this Monday morning.

  • It’s apparently still news that indie bookstores are thriving in the age of Amazon
  • The RWA decided to set itself on fire the day before Christmas.  If you really want to understand what happened, this Twitter thread sums it up better than any of the reporting. 
  • Did you know Japanese bookstores shelve books by publisher, not author? (Patterson would be shelved the same under either system)
  • China is blocking the release of American books as Trump’s trade war causes more economic damage.
  • People are now imputing political attributes into the choice of serif vs san serif fonts. 
  • This piece on the history of ebooks over the past decade missed a couple key points, including how several segments of the non-fiction market are getting eaten by things like instructional videos.  (It also ignored library ebooks, and services like Kindle Unlimited.)

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Comments


Bill Peschel December 30, 2019 um 8:51 am

Mad Genius Club did two posts on the Courtney Milan / RWA situation that are much more balanced than that Dumpster fire on Twitter.

Nate Hoffelder December 30, 2019 um 9:03 am

balanced? heh, no (And I think they are up to 4 posts now.)

Sorry, but there is only one side to this issue. I can say this with confidence because this incident has dredged up a lot of dirt, including multiple improprieties in the process, other ethics complaints that were ignored by RWA staff, significant flaws in the committee’s findings, etc.

There was no validity to that expulsion at all.


Bill Peschel December 30, 2019 um 8:52 am

Actually, I reacted to the first tweet that called another writer racist without actually, you know, reading the books. There are some more weird details in the thread. Just ignore her knee-jerk crap-stirring.


tony December 30, 2019 um 9:35 am

"People are now imputing political attributes into the choice of serif vs san serif fonts. "
And it costs $44 to see what those imputations actually are…


Brandon Hall January 1, 2020 um 1:37 pm

I’m now imputing political attributes into the choice of open access vs paywalls.


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