Interview: Rabih Alameddine, Author Of ‘An Unnecessary Woman’ – Alameddine’s novel features a heroine who works in a bookstore in Beirut and translates her favorite stories into Arabic, never to be sold or published. Despite the title and Aaliyah’s circumstances, she is happy and fulfilled. I adore Alameddine’s response to a question about “writing lovable characters:”
“In my opinion once you do a character fully, and if the writer — and this is me in this case — actually loves the character, it comes through. The character becomes lovable. Because the truth is it is rare to find a human being fully before us that you can’t fall in love with. You might want to kill them at times, you might want to smack them and throw them off the roof, but it’s also a love affair. And that’s what, in my opinion, a good novel does.” NPR
Adobe to Require New Epub DRM in July, Expects to Abandon Existing Users – Me: Readers just want to be able to read all the ebooks I’ve lawfully purchased and used. Adobe: Screw you and all your dollars spent, too. Me: Go Team Kindle!
“The tl;dr version is that Adobe is going to start pushing for ebook vendors to provide support for the new DRM in March, and when July rolls Adobe is going to force the ebook vendors to stop supporting the older DRM. (Hadrien Gardeur, Paul Durrant, and Martyn Daniels concur on this interpretation.)
This means that any app or device which still uses the older Adobe DRM will be cut off. Luckily for many users, that penalty probably will not affect readers who use Kobo or Google reading apps or devices; to the best of my knowledge neither uses the Adobe DRM internally. And of course Kindle and Apple customers won’t even notice, thanks to those companies’ wise decision to use their own DRM.” The Digital Reader
Major Tech Companies Disclose Secret Court Orders for First Time – Reports for Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and LinkedIn are all available via link in this story, which details the new terms for tech companies to, in the words of a Google blog post, let the public “better understand how surveillance laws work and decide whether or not they serve the public interest.” Sure a lot of these disclosures are in tech’s own best interests, but sometimes those interests intersect with our own:
“Google, Yahoo, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft and LinkedIn have all provided statistics on government requests for user data issued through National Security Letters (NSLs) and Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) court orders. Internet communications companies were previously forbidden to release such data, until the U.S. government reached an agreement with several of the aforementioned companies, which was announced last week.” Mashable
Book thieves are shrinking the Brooklyn Public Library’s collection – Perhaps librarians can weigh in on how widespread a problem this is. Note that these books are not being outright stolen, but checked out and never returned. High on the list of potential targets are professional and test preparation guides and graphic novels. More digital books? Not sure what the solution is here.
“Reuven Blau reports for the New York Daily News that, while 2013 numbers are not yet available, 70,144 books were stolen from the Brooklyn Public Library in 2012 — and that this is indicative of a trend that started with staff cuts a few years ago. Library workers point out that after the staff was reduced, thefts spiked from 61,543, a 14% increase. The Brooklyn Heights branch has gone from 30 employees to 20, and one anonymous staffer points out, “We don’t have the staff to watch as much.”” MobyLives
Can couples really get stuck together during sex? – How about this for a romantic challenge? A little nookie, followed by a trip to the emergency room:
“‘Its not the most romantic ending a couple can imagine,’ says Dr Aristomenis Exadaktylos, author of a study of 11 years of admissions to his hospital in Bern, Switzerland.
He and his co-authors found plenty of patients who had experienced problems after sex – migraines, heart problems, even amnesia. But asked on the BBCs Health Check radio programme if he had come across a case of the womans vagina clamping on to the mans penis, he said ‘No’ – and added that the idea was probably an urban myth.
Two listeners, however, wrote in to dispute this.” BBC News