Philip Roth vence o Man Booker International Prize 2011

Philip Roth é o vencedor da edição de 2011 do Man Booker International Prize. O prémio, no valor de £60,000, é atribuído a um escritor de 2 em 2 anos, reconhecendo a sua carreira literária ao invés de se focar apenas num único título. 

  Announcing the winner, Rick Gekoski, chair of the judges, said that for 50 years, Roth's books have "stimulated, provoked and amused an enormous, and still expanding, audience".

  "His imagination has not only recast our idea of Jewish identity, it has also reanimated fiction, and not just American fiction, generally," said Gekoski. "His career is remarkable in that he starts at such a high level, and keeps getting better. In his 50s and 60s, when most novelists are in decline, he wrote a string of novels of the highest, enduring quality. Indeed, his most recent, Nemesis (2010), is as fresh, memorable, and alive with feeling as anything he has written. His is an astonishing achievement."

Seminário "A economia das línguas portuguesa e espanhola"

  O Instituto Cervantes, o Instituto Camões e a Casa da América Latina de Lisboa, com a colaboração do ISCTE, organizam este fórum que tem por finalidade fazer um balanço e lançar o debate sobre o futuro da língua portuguesa e da língua espanhola. A relação entre elas, bem como a sua internacionalização e estratégias de cooperação, são um importante fator de afirmação do espaço ibero-americano e demais territórios de língua portuguesa no mundo. O fórum terá como principais eixos de análise a economia e a indústria das línguas, da cultura e da comunicação. Este fórum elege, como principais dimensões de análise, a economia, as indústrias da língua e as indústrias culturais.

A economia das línguas portuguesa e espanhola

Data: 19 de Maio

Local: Instituto Camões

Horário: Das 9.30h às 18.00h

Programa

37.ª edição da Festa do Livro do Funchal

Organizada pela Câmara Municipal do Funchal, e pela primeira vez com o apoio institucional do Plano Nacional de Leitura, a 37.ª Festa do Livro do Funchal inicia-se no próximo dia 20 de Maio, estando confirmada a presença de diversos escritores de renome, tais como José Luís Peixoto, Lídia Jorge, Mário Zambujal e Valter Hugo Mãe.

O programa completo do evento pode ser consultado neste link.

37.ª edição da Festa do Livro do Funchal

Data: 20 a 29 de Maio

Local: Avenida Arriaga, Funchal

Horário: 2.ª a 6.ª Feira das 13H00 às 21H00

Sábados e Domingos das 10H00 às 21H00

Entrada: Gratuita

Ciclo Prémios Nobel da Literatura Latino-Americanos

Leituras Digitais (8 a 14 de Maio)

Rubrica semanal de notícias e artigos relacionados com a edição de livros digitais.

Ebook Piracy can actually increase sales of ebooks

  Without going into the many causes of this fact (high prices for ebooks, geographical limitations on sales and so on), it is worth considering whether the rise of the pirate sites is actually all bad for the sales of ebooks…. And it seems that perhaps the picture is not as black and white as is generally thought.

  In a post on the CBC website, this is gone into at some depth, and it would appear that instead of decreasing legal sales of ebooks, the appearance of any particular ebook on a pirate website can  actually increase the legal sales of that particular ebook – in other words, the illegal copies seem to act as a sort of advertisement for the legal ones, if you see what I mean.

Digital Publishing in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Good News, The Bad News

 The Namibian government has a goal of installing computers in every school and every community library in the country by 2014. This is one of the key objectives of the country’s Vision 2030 policy, according to Veno Kauaria, Director of the Library and Archive Service in Namibia’s Ministry of Education. But like many African countries, it faces crippling infrastructure challenges: an inadequacy of electricity supply, and of internet connectivity.

Is it the end for publishing - or a new beginning?

  It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. Is it the end for publishing - or a new beginning? These days publishers are all too familiar with reading their own obituaries. I hope the next two days will put paid to that. The book industry is not on the verge of extinction - or it needn’t be. Every new form of information technology sounds the death knell of previous forms - or so runs the familiar argument. Radio signalled the end of print, TV the end of radio, cinema the end of theatre - and so on. Since all this is demonstrably untrue, it’s strange that we still give it so much credence. Each medium was indeed transformed by its presumed assassin. But through the change, they not only survived - but actually thrived in a new age.

There’s good news and bad news about Mirasol

  How do you light a reflective screen?  I’d go with a clip on light, myself, but the only real way to integrate a light source would be to embed a front light. That’s what Qualcomm did with their new Mirasol demo. And this is indeed their new demo; it’s the first time it’s been shown off.

The bad news is that the finished products won’t hit the market until fall.

Al Gore joins ex-Apple engineers to reinvent the e-book

  Push Pop Press, a company set up by former Apple employees Kimon Tsinteris and Mike Matas, has published Our Choice, an app version of Gore’s 2009 book about global warming.

The app, according to Push Pop Press, “will change the way we read books”. It combines high quality photography with interactive graphics and animations. There is narration from Gore himself and more than an hour of video.

Publishing’s Paper Problem and How to Future-Proof the Industry

  Though the idea of publishing as a data-driven industry may still be anathema to its old guard, the Book Industry Study Group’s 8th annual Making Information Pay conference hammered home once again that gathering and managing the right data is critical to “future-proofing” the industry. The key is using data to improve content and product development, book discovery and rights management, as well as customer loyalty and profitable growth, said Book Industry Study Group chair Scott Lubeck in his introduction to the ten presentations packed into last Thursday morning’s meeting at the McGraw-Hill auditorium in New York.

8 Lessons from the UK’s World E-Reading Congress

  Dedicated e-readers could die out within five years, killed off by the rise of smartphones at the lower end of the market, and by tablets at the top. That’s the view of Benedict Evans, digital media guru at London-based consultancy Enders Analysis and Chair of the final day of the World e-Reading Congress which concluded in the city Wednesday (read our coverage of the first day’s session).  “At the moment, readers have a window driven by price because tablets are so expensive. But I think many more people will read on phones in the future. The Kindle is dreadful -– it’s like reading a fax, and you have so little on the screen…”

Tweets, Blogs and Books: How Online Writers and Publishers Still Rely on Each Other for a Payday

  Blogger. Vlogger. Tweeter. Author. Journalist. These words aren’t synonymous, and yet they all have one thing in common: behind these terms are people who are jockeying in the media world for your attention. They could be selling something (whether novel or life insurance), cooking something, “curating” something, or actually reporting something. No matter what their goals are, their media platforms differ as much as their topics.

Mourning the Printed Book — The Aesthetic and Sensory Deprivation of E-books

  It’s rightly claimed that no technology ever dies completely — there are still buggy whips being made, you can still listen to AM radio, and you can still dance the jitterbug to a live band. But there is a threshold below which the impact of a technology becomes negligible. When this happens, artists, creative people, and innovators move on.

 The printed book will persist. It will just become something different — carefully crafted infrequently and for collectors.

New York Times E-Book Best Sellers

  These lists are an expanded version of those appearing in the May 22, 2011 print edition of the Book Review, reflecting sales for the week ending May 7, 2011.

E-Book Fiction

1.                      DEAD RECKONING, by Charlaine Harris

2.                      10TH ANNIVERSARY, by James Patterson and Maxine Paetro

3.                      WATER FOR ELEPHANTS, by Sara Gruen

4.                      SOMETHING BORROWED, by Emily Giffin

5.                      NO TIME LEFT, by David Baldacci

Complete List »

E-Book Nonfiction

1.                      BOSSYPANTS, by Tina Fey

2.                      HEAVEN IS FOR REAL, by Todd Burpo with Lynn Vincent

3.                      DOES THE NOISE IN MY HEAD BOTHER YOU?, by Steven Tyler

4.                      STORIES I ONLY TELL MY FRIENDS, by Rob Lowe

5.                      UNBROKEN, by Laura Hillenbrand

Complete List »

Vídeos

Interview with Lulu CEO Bob Young

Feira na Avenida da Liberdade

Realiza-se hoje e amanhã a primeira Feira de Antiguidades, Alfarrabistas e Artesanato na Avenida da Liberdade, evento que se irá repetir no segundo fim-de-semana de cada mês. Entre os mais de 150 participantes confirmados estarão presentes diversos livreiros e alfarrabistas.

Feira de Antiguidades, Alfarrabistas e Artesanato na Avenida da Liberdade

Data: 14 e 15 de Maio

Local: Avenida da Liberdade, Lisboa

Horário: 10.00h-20.00h

Entrada: Gratuita