Book Marks: No Jail For 'Script Thief, Plus Annoying Things About Books

Either someone was listening to the Literary Hub or perhaps the crime wasn't severe enough: Infamous manuscript thief Filippo Bernardini won't be jailed for his little scam where he tricked people into sending him unpublished 'scripts so that he could read them before anyone else. According to the Guardian:

The former publishing employee, who worked for Simon & Schuster in the UK – the company has not been implicated in any of Bernardini’s crimes – had said in court documents that he had a “burning desire” to feel like he was a publishing professional. He added that he had no desire to leak the manuscripts he acquired.

Instead, Bernardini has been sentenced to three years of supervised release, after which he will be deported.

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The Internet Archive has been operating on an open library concept where people can sign up and borrow digital copies of books. I was pointed to this place when I asked about books I can read for reviews or at least cross-check details such as ISBNs. Publishers aren't happy about this, citing copyright infringement, and recently a US court ruled in their favour:

“The publishers have established a prima facie case of copyright infringement,” writes Judge John G. Koeltl of the United States district court in the Southern District of New York in his 47-page decision, which includes a firm rebuke to the controversial concept of “controlled digital lending.”

IA isn't shutting down yet and of course I'll be tracking this.

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Roald Dahl, Ian Fleming, and now Agatha Christie? Yes, sensitivity readers are taking their scalpels to the works of the doyenne of crime fiction "in new editions of Poirot and Miss Marple mysteries published by HarperCollins."

I'm not a fan of this move and I might talk about this in more detail later. This risks putting new generations of readers in the dark of what these works read like originally and the kind of environment that shaped the minds of the authors involved. Whitewashing the past, that's what this is.

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Claire Handscombe at Book Riot talks about things readers find annoying about books. And she has quite a bit to say, having been...

...a writer, a bookish podcaster, a blogger, a Book Riot contributor, a bookstagrammer, a bookseller, and a marketing exec in publishing. So this is my world, and I love it.

But I love it the way we love our families. We know they’re not perfect. Sometimes we fondly or exasperatedly laugh at how not perfect they are. There are things that drive me round the bend about this whole word and its absurdities.

In other news:

• Here's a story of a widower's quest to keep his late wife's book alive, captured in his son's documentary, The Book Keepers. This looks like something many of us should watch: a dad's labour of love, told through his son's – at least, I hope so regarding the latter.
• This year's shortlist for the Stella prize, which celebrates “original, excellent, and engaging” writing by Australian women and non-binary writers, is dominated by books from small and independent publishers.
• For writers and authors at various stages and of all stripes, Electric Literature introduces seven newsletters that "offer the best insights and advice from abstract aspects of publishing to the smallest details, including market analysis, writing query emails and proposals, navigating contracts, marketing your work—and don’t forget much-needed emotional support and a laugh or two."
• Not one mention of chatGPT or AI in an op-ed titled, "Take That, ChatGPT!". Genius? I'm not sure. But how it just goes on.