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Digital books, books on mobiles, and on Kindle seem to be the next big thing in publishing. Margaret Atwood, the diva of digital, has The Heart Goes Last, a new book, coming out this week, which came about from an e-book series. Many big players, like new publisher Juggernaut, say they will form a quarter of their catalogue soon. Soon new books may be exclusively launched on the digital platform, before the printed version is issued.

Scholarly Practice

Here is a refreshing, and contrarian, thought from a publisher—to give open and free access to whatever they publish. ‘Open access’ is the mission of Mandy Hill of Cambridge Univer­sity Press. There is a raging debate about how to make peer-reviewed research articles available to all. “There can be a time lag. Copyright to a recent research work could be with a publisher for say 6 months or a year in which time they can recover the cost.... But after that it should be made available to everyone, especially to students in poorer countries through the internet,” Hill says.

Snog Agog

Social media is agiggle about singer Morissey’s new book List of the Lost, which many say has this worst sex scene: “Eliza and Ezra rolled together into the one giggling snowball of full-­figured copulation, screaming and sho­uting as they playfully bit and pulled at each other in a dangerous and clamorous rollercoaster coil of sexually violent rotation with Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone”.