Book Stuff: Publishing All the Rest From This Week

This week in book news, all the news that's fit about print that I was too lazy to write about.

50 Shades of Grey author will not tell who's in the movie.  How about Amanda Bynes?  What happened to her?  What's she been up to?  googlegooglegoogle... Holy crap?! What the hell happened to her?

Neil Patrick Harris to write memoir.  Yep.  Lots of Doogie and Barney and dancing/singing stuff.

Lois Lowry ends Giver book series.  Hint:  I think he dies.

Huh... Was there other news out there flooding the publishing world that I didn't cover here?

New Book Claims Some Punk Shot Van Gogh

The new book Van Gogh: The Life by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith postulates that instead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the chest, Vinny VG may have been shot by some punk kid.  The authors acknowledge that while Van Gogh may have been institutionalized off and on throughout his life and had a death wish, on the day he died he did not behave as if he was going to kill himself, taking his paints and easel into the field and then staggering over a mile back into town.  He may have lied to protect the juvenile from prosecution.  NBCNewYork

Ooo, ooo, now there's a slasher movie idea that just needs to be made.  Can somebody say I Know What Famous Painter You Killed Last Summer?  How about Ear for an Ear?  This winter, Vin Deisel is Vincent in Fast and Van Goghne.

Library Book and Tech News: Cyber-Book-a-Tron

I am a librarian from the future.  I am sent from the future to save you, the librarian who will save us from the coming information apocalypse.  Come with me if you want to read.

Netflix announced that it will not pursue the separation of its DVD and streaming services.  Customers of Netflix have already quit or made their decisions.  NYTimes

Charlaine Harris, who already announced her True Blood-based Sookie Sackhouse vampire novel series is almost over, will be writing a graphic novel.  The new series will be based on supernatural stuff and probably be better than the AMC TV series that it was based on.  USAToday

After DC made an exclusive deal with Amazon for their graphic novels, the bookchain Barnes and Noble removed around 100 graphic novels from their shelves.  The break up is set to be a sad one, with B&N sitting alone crying and burning old pictures of Superman.  WSJ

The FCC has passed a resolution that all cellphones must have GPS capabilites by 2018.  Get ready to be tracked by a government agency grasping for relevancy.  techcrunch via geekologie

Italian Wikipedia is no more due to an Italian law that states that if a person has a problem with information shown on any web content, a statement of contradiction must be added to the page in a unaltered form whether it is true or not.  As Wikipedia is constantly updated, this negates their business model.  There goes my Italian Stallion page.  wikimedia via boingboing

Miramax CEO Mike Lang stated that diversity of services offering online content is more important than battling online piracy.  Monopolies cornering the market through exclusive deals can hurt content more than people randomly sharing the content online.  torrentfreak via boingboing

Catching Up, Last Week's Book News: I Was Busy

So sue me, I missed out on a lot of news this week.  So here's the weekend wrapup, all the stuff I forgot to get to involving books and book related news!  Enjoy!

President Obama went on a vacation and bought some books.  Some made up bullshit controversy came up when he seemed to read a lot of male authors.  Holy shit, that bastard.  Let's forget that he seems to be promoting some literacy and not out on the ranch pretending to be the Marlboro Man and focus on a trival details like "taste," "preference" and "give the guy a break he's the president not the messiah." reuters

NASA has plans to publish a science fiction series.  Yup.  Guess that whole "space flight" thing was something they did as a day job while they came up with a kickass space marine idea. mnn

SF Gateway, one of the largest libraries of science fiction, is offering out of print scifi books as ebooks coming soon.  Guess what website NASA is waiting on? planetpdf

U.S. Venture donates school supplies and over 1,800 books to school children.  I don't have a joke here.  Sometimes big business marketing is not so bad.  prnewswire

New juvenile book "Maggie Goes on a Diet" shamed for being dangerous and against body type issues.  "Debbie Goes on a Run and Eats Healthy" deamed un-American.  "Frank Goes Outside" Book Burning to be held on Tuesday. desderetnews

New Jersey school district pulled a book about lesbians for "inappropriate language."  Cast of Jersey Shore responds, "That's a fuckin' disgrace.  I like lesbians and hope their language get a fair shake, ya know?" foxnews

"To Train Up a Child," a "Christian" book about raising your child through the "spare the rod, spoil the child method" and already associated with at least one child death, is being censored throughout the world.  I will not stand for book censorship, so let's just kill all the motherfuckers who beat or tell others to beat their children.  stuff.co.nz

The school board in Missouri that banned Slaughterhouse Five is pretending to take a look at the merits of the books because the nation is pissed off at them.  It is also no coincidence that Kevin Bacon was seen in the area encouraging children to dance.  chron.com