Liu Xiaobo Appeals Conviction, Kirkus Reviews Is Back, and More

by Staff
1.6.10

Every day Poets & Writers Magazine scans the headlines—from publishing reports to academic announcements to literary dispatches—for all the news that creative writers need to know. Here are today's stories:

The poetry of W. B. Yeats and texts by the Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud are now available to read free online, as their copyright expired New Year's Eve (Telegraph).

Kirkus Reviews is back in business just a month after Nielsen Business Media shut down the 76-year-old trade publication (DailyFinance).

Liu Xiaobo, the Beijing writer who was given an eleven-year prison sentence on December 25, has appealed his conviction (New York Times). 

Hackers from the U.S. and Israel claim to have broken copyright protections built in to Amazon's Kindle, allowing ebooks stored on the application to work with other devices (Register).

Grey House Publishing announced yesterday that it will begin publishing the print editions of the exhaustively comprehensive bibliographic product line, Books In Print, under an exclusive license from R. R. Bowker.

Reknowned New York literary agent Andrew Wylie will represent the estate of the late John Updike (Observer).  

Spring Design, the developers of Alex Reader, have reached an agreement with Google to provide access to more than a milion public domain digital books (Publishers Weekly).

Three major library associations have asked the Justice Department to oversee Google's plans to create a massive digital library to prevent an excessively high price for institutional subscriptions (Reuters).

A struggling independent bookstore in England received a little help from the big discount superstore across the street (Guardian).