• The University of Maryland University College (i.e., its off-campus programs, administering to about 90,000 students worldwide) is going textbook-free next year.

Thomas C. Bailey, UMUC’s acting associate dean of Academic Affairs, coordinated the undergraduate switchover. He said that the decision was driven by the ever-rising cost of textbooks: “It has almost gotten to the point where textbooks are as expensive as the cost of a class.”

• The Day of the Jackal author Frederick Forsyth has revealed he worked for MI6 for more than 20 years.

• Does Amazon make a bad partner? Note they’ve appointed a new Director of Social Responsibility. We Amazon-watchers are keeping an eye on things.

I’d like to ask a publisher, or any of Amazon’s other so-called partners: How should these businesses protect themselves for the day when “The Everything Store” deems that it’s no longer in its best interest to make the partners as profitable?

• Remember Kate Gale, the “last minute, but very promising, new candidate [who] has entered this season’s race for Most Clueless White Person in Publishing?” Now Sherman Alexie and others have resigned from the advisory board of her press.

• Speaking of Sherman Alexie, he has spoken out on The Best American Poetry 2015. As editor of the anthology he selected a poem written by Michael Derrick Hudson, who had submitted under the pseudonym “Yi-Fen Chou” in a self-admitted attempt to subvert “what he believes to be a politically correct poetry business.”

I did exactly what that pseudonym-user feared other editors had done to him in the past: I paid more initial attention to his poem because of my perception and misperception of the poet’s identity. Bluntly stated, I was more amenable to the poem because I thought the author was Chinese American.

• There’s a petition going around to remove books from Amazon by a “pick-up artist” who thinks rape ought to be legal. Yeah, we had to read that sentence twice, too.

• President Obama will award the 2014 National Humanities Medal to Indian author Jhumpa Lahiri. Stephen King will receive the National Medal of Arts. And Joy Hargo has won the $100,000 Wallace Stevens Poetry Award.

• Academics are being hoodwinked into writing books nobody can buy.

If someone tried to buy said book—I mean, like a real human being—they would have to pay the equivalent of a return ticket to a sunny destination or a month’s child benefit.

• Perseus Books Group is possibly up for sale. There’s never been a better time to pick up a $400 million-a-year revenue independent publishing company.

• “The Saddest Bookworm,” your video of the week:

• There was some tension between keynote speakers Roxane Gay and Erica Jong at the Decatur (Georgia) Book Festival. They had different views about whether mainstream feminism has excluded women of color.

• A parent in Tennessee, confusing gynecology with pornography, wants her son’s school to ban a biography of stem cell contributor Henrietta Lacks. An assistant principal commented on the author’s Facebook page:

“Know that the book and teachers have the complete support from the administration of the school. It’s an amazing book that fits with our Stem curriculum better than almost any book could. The next book that the sophomores are reading? Fahrenheit 451 … Oh, sweet, sweet, irony.”

• Meanwhile New Zealand has banned a book for the first time in 22 years, on the eve of Banned Books Week, no less. Oh, sweet, sweet irony. To the credit of New Zealanders, there’s pushback (we love the photograph that accompanies the article).

• Finally, an AI robot that learns new words in real-time tells human creators it will keep them in a people zoo. Where they belong.

• And lest we forget:

Ever dreamed of being an obscure, unpaid journalist? Consider scouting for Town Crier. Write to editors at easystreetmag dot com.

• A brouhaha is brou-ha-ha-ing at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP), following a HuffPo blog post by conference subcommittee member Kate Gale (whose Twitter profile states “I am a goddess”). AWP Executive Director David Fenza defended the goddess.

How gay is AWP? I would say that I’m about 30% gay, that percentage accounting for all the time with girls before I started dating guys and which I’d be happy to return to if the need arises. We could simply ask applicants, how gay are you? If the person is confused, AWP could lay out some questions to help tease out the truth. If you’re female and not sure if you’re gay, think about this. Did you attend Smith or Reed? How many pairs of Doc Martens do you have? Have you seen the movie Bound more than once? If male, do you attend musicals regularly? Do you have a large Barbara (sic) Streisand collection? Do you shop at Crate and Barrel?

Apparently we at Easy Street are all gay. We even know how to spell Barbara (sic) Streisand’s name. We think Literary Hub said it best: A last minute, but very promising, new candidate has entered this season’s race for Most Clueless White Person in Publishing.

• In a well deserved blow to the “Sad Puppy” movement in the sci-fi world, voters chose “No Award” in five categories at the 2015 Hugo Awards ceremony.

• A Japanese bookstore chain is buying 90% of a Haruki Murakami print run to keep the books out of the hands of Amazon. There are so many things wrong with this, we don’t know where to begin. Let’s just say chain managers should make purchase decisions because they make good business sense, not out of poopiness with the competition. Besides, if Amazon needs more copies than they’re getting in the first print run, the publisher will print more. Publishers have an annoying habit of doing just that.

• And if that’s not enough, in the “Here We Go Again” department, here we go again: Authors United is pressing its case to the Justice Department to investigate whether Amazon is a monopoly. Here’s why the claim is doomed.

• Having Said All That. Remember the recent uproar over Amazon being a bad place to work? Of course you do; it was just a couple of weeks ago; pay attention! Now a former employee is speaking out about a gender bias at the company.

Jeff: You asked for direct feedback. Women power your retail engine. They buy diapers. They buy books. They buy socks for their husbands on Prime. On behalf of all the people who want to speak up but can’t: Please, make Amazon a more hospitable place for women and parents.

• The lawsuit against Author Solutions has petered out.

• Kindle counterfeiting: a growing threat to authors.

• We get one more Günter Grass novel, but we have to wait until the fall of 2016 to read it in English.

• British Intelligence spied on Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing for twenty years. And the FBI spied on James Baldwin. If you feel left out, tell us about it, and we’ll spy on you.

His skin was black, his sexuality fluid, and his politics tended toward the left, a combination that was enough to turn him into a target for the FBI.

• The latest from the Authors Guild Fair Contract Initiative: Delete the Non-Compete. We don’t always agree with the AG, but this time we do.

• Finally, Scarlett Johannson’s attempt to ban the translation and film adaptation of a French novel that capitalizes on her name has only resulted in bringing attention to the novel. Oh, and she got €2500 (about $2800) out of the lawsuit. We advise her not to spend it all in one place.

• William Jay Smith, former U.S. Poet Laureate (1968-70), died Tuesday.

• Not that the romance genre (or any genre) needs defending, nevertheless Kristan Higgins does a good job of it. In a way, she speaks for all writers, no matter what they write.

The categorical dismissal of the most-read genre in the world reveals ignorance, not intellectual superiority. This is a billion-dollar industry, and it’s not built on vapidity and cliché.

• E-reader cases that look like beautiful old books. Not a bad gift idea.

• Another lost Scott Fitzgerald manuscript has emerged, this time a fragment of a novel: “Ballet School—Chicago” was found in a box in the Princeton University library. At the rate lost manuscripts are being discovered, pretty soon they won’t make headlines anymore.

• Charles Bukowski’s rules for writing.

“Writing is like most writers think fucking is: just when they start thinking they are doing it pretty good they stop doing it altogether.”

• Is working for Amazon really that bad? Jeff Bezos says no way. Yet Nancy Pelosi has gotten involved. And while we’re here, Amazon is not a monopoly, cutie pies.

• Read—don’t just talk—to your kids. “A new study finds children hear more unique words when adults read to them than in ordinary conversation.”

• Who would complain about books instead of toys in McDonalds happy meals? Turns out, the complainers have a point.

• John Grisham and other celebrities are recommending the Confederate emblem be removed from the Mississippi state flag.

• In the “Who’d have thought?” department, the most powerful engine for evolution in language is the innovation of teenage girls.

Why do women lead the way with language? Linguists aren’t really sure. Women may have greater social awareness, bigger social networks or even a neurobiological leg up.

• In the “Yikes!” department, this is not something we would expect from Holland. Window prostitutes, yes. Reefer cafes, yes. This, no.

• Authonomy is closing. Yawn, whatebber.

• Finally, a gallery of bookstore cats. “Gatsby the Catsby” wins Coolest Name.

• The Authors Guild, in its most recent installment of their Fair Contract Initiative, is targeting presses that grab copyrights. Who knew this was a problem? In university press contracts, apparently, copyright grabbing is boilerplate.

Most scholarly publishers routinely present their authors with the single most draconian, unfair clause we routinely encounter, taking all the exclusive rights to an author’s work as if the press itself authored the work.

• A forthcoming J.R.R. Tolkien short story, written while he was in college, is available for preorder. We wonder why it took so long. We marvel at its brazen Kindle price.

• The Guinness World Record overdue book fine. Take a gander at the amount before you look.

• If you can decipher +NDXOXCHWDRGHDXORVI+ you can help the British Library and the British Museum.

• George R.R. Martin promises the end of A Song of Ice and Fire will be bittersweet.

“I’ve said before that the tone of the ending that I’m going for is bittersweet. I mean, it’s no secret that Tolkien has been a huge influence on me, and I love the way he ended Lord of the Rings. It ends with victory, but it’s a bittersweet victory.”

• Here we go again. A book has been removed by a Florida school from its summer reading list because it contains bad words. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time isn’t Christian enough for the Christians.

• Finally, a 1991 letter from author Elena Ferrante to her publisher, explaining why she isn’t going to help promote her debut novel. Priceless.

I’ve already done enough for this long story: I wrote it … I believe that books, once they are written, have no need of their authors.

• Hachette revenues were down 7.8% in the first half of 2015, compared to the first half of 2014, but mostly because 2014 benefitted from some mega-sellers. Hachette imprints include Grand Central Publishing, Little, Brown & Co., and Orbit, among others.

• College textbook prices have risen 1,041 percent since 1977. We were in college in 1977 and can vouch for this. In fact, we thought textbooks were way too expensive back then.

“College textbook prices are increasing way more than parents’ ability to pay for them,” economics professor Mark Perry said. At the extreme end, one specialized chemistry textbook on his campus costs $400 at the campus bookstore.

• In related news, Barnes & Noble has completed its college textbook spinoff.

• Charlie Hebdo has been doing well financially since the 7 January attack.

This is a ticklish development. A Catholic country that for decades after the war had one of the West’s largest Communist Parties, France tends to find money dirty. It is associated with guilt.

• It’s the era of emergence of lost manuscripts. This time a short story, “Temperature,” by Scott Fitzgerald, missing since he wrote it in 1939, and published for the first time in the current issue of The Strand.

• This weekend a group of writers will hammer out a novel in 75 minutes. We’re intrigued, but let’s face it, the end result will almost certainly languish near the bottom of our reading list.

The idea is simple: the fifty or so attendees of the panel will spend about 45 minutes collaboratively hammering out a plot, characters and structure. Then, for the next half an hour, each of them will be given one chapter to write, and the results will be collected together, lightly edited, and published as a free ebook.

• Print books are flourishing at airport book stores.

• Reading is good for your health. Well, we knew that, didn’t we? But now we have some quantitative data.

Folks who read at least 30 minutes a week are 20 percent more likely to report greater life satisfaction and 11 percent more likely to feel creative. They’re also 28 percent less likely to suffer from depression and 18 percent more likely to report high self-esteem.

• College libraries are ridding themselves of print books. Other kinds of libraries will follow as soon as they can afford to do so. We have lived too long.

• Apparently agents are responding more enthusiastically to male writers. Catherine Nichols sent out her manuscript under the pseudonym “George Leyer” and was shocked by the response.

George sent out 50 queries, and had his manuscript requested 17 times. He is eight and a half times better than me at writing the same book.

• Finally, a publisher is raising money to burn all its books. Srsly. If this stunt works it might start a trend.

• Simon & Schuster has cancelled plans for a paperback edition of Bill Cosby’s sympathetic biography, and has yanked some key celebrity blurbs.

• Amazon has overtaken Walmart to become the largest retailer in the U.S. Or has it?

• The Authors Guild is arguing that publishing contracts should have time limits. This is another in a series of position papers drafted by the AG since Roxana Robinson replaced Scott Turow. The reign of silence is over.

Diamonds may be forever, but book contracts should not be. There’s no good reason why a book should be held hostage by a publisher for the lifetime of the copyright, the life of the author plus seventy years—essentially forever.

• Are typewriters making a comeback???

• The “Worst Day Ever” poem that went viral last week was written last year by a 17-year-old.

• A forgotten Dr. Seuss book, stored in a box for decades, has found the light of day.

• The Man Booker longlist has been announced, and some are concerned about American dominance.

• [PANK] is going bye-bye at the end of the year.

• A mailman in Utah requested books on behalf of a 12-year-old on his route, a boy who had difficulty gaining access to books, and the request went splendidly viral.

Letter carrier Ron Lynch was delivering mail to Matthew’s apartment complex in Sandy last week when he found him reading trashed advertising fliers and newsletters. “He told me his wish is to have books to read.”

• Finally, France beat Britain to win the first European Quidditch Games. Apparently Britain was short a snitch or two.

• E.L. Doctorow, author of The Book of Daniel, Ragtime, and Billy Bathgate, died in New York Tuesday at age 84. The New Yorker has provided links to all of his appearances in the magazine.

• They’re at it again. The parents. The ones who think their children only ought to read books that promote Christian values. Those parents.

• Meanwhile the number of people who believe there are books that should be banned is on the rise. The demographic breakdowns are interesting.

In just four years, the percentage of Americans who believe there are any books that should be banned has increased by more than half: 28% believe this to be the case today, vs. 18% in 2011. One-fourth (24%) are unsure, which leaves nearly half of Americans convinced that no books should be banned completely (48%).

• We don’t generally mix the words “Amazon” and “profit” together in the same sentence, but following their second quarter results, times may be a-changin’.

• Remember the letter “Authors United” sent to the Department of Justice, accusing Amazon of being a monopoly? Jousting knight J.A. Konrath has fisked it in a letter of his own.

I don’t know if you’re required to take their bogus complaint seriously, or if you can simply dismiss their bad logic, ridiculous examples, and outright lies. If you’ve already seen through their nonsense, you can stop reading this letter right now, and toss it into the garbage on top of theirs.

• It’s disappointing when you attend a debate and one side fails to show up. On the other hand, the ridicule showered upon the absent side helps to make up for the disappointment. We attended this non-debate, and were amused.

• Go Set a Watchman (Did you think it would be quiet by now? DID YOU.) sold over $1.1M books in its first week.

• The argument has been settled. Hogwarts is tuition free.

• Salman Rushdie says he could not depend on fellow writers for support to write The Satanic Verses today.

“I’ve since had the feeling that, if the attacks against The Satanic Verses had taken place today, these people would not have defended me, and would have used the same arguments against me, accusing me of insulting an ethnic and cultural minority.”

• Okay, if Yeats isn’t buried there, who is? (Jimmy Hoffa!)

• Finally, 125 men who vaguely resemble Ernest Hemingway. Who wouldn’t want to miss that? The contest isn’t until tomorrow (Saturday), so all you heavy-set men with white beards still have time.

• It’s here. Go Set a Watchman was released Tuesday, 14 July. And now they think there might be yet another lost Harper Lee novel. Meanwhile Watchman is storming the charts.

• “Authors United,” in the form of author Douglas Preston, is tilting at Amazon again.

• An editor at PRH Canada has set the bar for expected revenue.

“I’m not interested in a book that is going to generate less than $100,000 in revenue unless the editor or publisher has a compelling vision for the book and/or the author.” This has set the cat among the pigeons north of the border.

• Bookstore sales were up in May. Is the industry stabilizing? Meanwhile Books-a-Million is being bought out by its majority shareholder.

• 250 Italian authors asked that their books also be removed from Venice schools, in solidarity with colleagues whose books about same-sex families have been removed. This tickles our fancies.

A gratuitous picture of Venice.

Composer and musician Maria Schneider testified, “The DCMA makes it my responsibility to police the entire Internet on a daily basis. As fast as I take my music down, it reappears again on the same site—an endless whac-a-mole game.”

• Teachers at a Biloxi school have transformed a hallway of old lockers into an “Avenue of Literature.”

• Turns out there’s a correlation between the presence of certified school librarians and student proficiency in reading and writing. Go figure.

Librarians teach information literacy—how to separate the useful from the less useful, the credible from the inaccurate, and how to navigate the internet safely.

• Getting cheated by the people you hired to protect you from being cheated.

• You’re aware of the new Amazon review policy, right? Wherein if you “know” the author, your review of the author’s book will be deleted? J.A. Konrath has some thinks about this, and our thinks align with his.

Does removing and preventing reviews make Amazon more customer centric, or less customer centric? Does limiting votes help or harm the customer experience? Does suppressing opinions encourage others to give their opinions, or make them shy away from sharing opinions because they might be blocked or removed?

• Remember when Ted Cruz was accused of trying to game the NYT bestseller list? He finally made it onto the list, and quite possibly the accusation was unfounded. We don’t love Ted Cruz, but we do love truth and fairness, which, incidentally, is why we don’t love Ted Cruz.

• Finally, which is stranger, truth or fiction? The Onion on Harper Lee’s hypothetical third novel.

• Oh! And this:

• Read the first chapter of Go Set a Watchman. Or listen to Reese Witherspoon read it (scroll down to the link). Mike Shatzkin thinks the publishers are blowing opportunities.

Over her breakfast coffee, she watched the last of Georgia’s hills recede and the red earth appear, and with it tin-roofed houses set in the middle of swept yards, and in the yards the inevitable verbena grew, surrounded by whitewashed tires.

• Meanwhile, more intrigue surrounds Harper Lee’s upcoming release. The interwebs will be flooded with news about it now through its 14 July publication date. We won’t buck the trend.

• Did Ted Cruz try to game the NYT bestseller list? HarperCollins says no.

• A new Ayn Rand novel, or rather an old one that never got published, has been published. For die-hard fans only, we think.

• The comma gets its day in the sun. A woman got out of a parking ticket because a village ordinance contained a proofreading error. Grammar nerds (like us) are having a field day.

• Amazon’s deleting reviews if it thinks the reviewer and author know each other. Next time we pass each other on the street, look the other way. Here’s a level-headed take on all of it.

• The Authors Guild advocates for a 50% ebook royalty rate. No argument here.

We maintain that a 50-50 split in e-book profits is fair because the traditional author-publisher relationship is essentially a joint venture. The author writes the book, and by any fair measure the author’s efforts represent most of the labor invested and most of the resulting value.

• How publishers decide what to publish: the P&L.

• A Q&A by J.A. Konrath on the new Kindle Unlimited compensation structure, as only J.A. Konrath can Q&A it.

• 11 things you didn’t know about Ernest Hemingway. Some of these are verifiable, for example the stuff quoted from A Moveable Feast. But, he was a KGB agent? We’re not so sure about that.

• Are free school visits “one of the worst things an author can do?”

• Finally, in the “Oh yeah? Says who?” department, how to save $50,000 on your MFA.

Interested in being a correspondent for Town Crier? Write to editors at easystreetmag dot com. Here are some of the journals we follow:

Book2Book, Book Riot, BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, Digital Book World, The Digital Reader, Electric Lit, GalleyCat, Good e-Reader, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Jane Friedman, Library Journal, Literary Hub, LitReactor, The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, The Paris Review, The Passive Voice, Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, Publishing Perspectives, Salon, Shelf Awareness, TeleRead, The Washington Post, Victoria Strauss

• Apple has lost its appeal to overturn an antitrust judgment.

• As Hugh Howie puts it, it was the Great KU Flip-Out of 2015.

It’ll be fun to tell our kids where we were when KU 1.0 turned into KU 2.0. We’ll tell them how in the aftermath we roasted rats and pigeons over upturned and burning cars. How we tended to the wounded, finishing off those we knew would not make it. How we drank our own urine in order to survive.

• Ron Boire, presently CEO of Sears Canada, will take the reins of Barnes & Noble bookstores in September.

• When E.L. James conducted a Twitter Q&A with the hashtag #AskELJames, she opened Pandora’s Box. She’ll get over it; she’s reportedly worth £37 million.

• James Patterson is increasing his school library donations to $1.75 million.

• Remember the hoopla surrounding the cover of A Gronking to Remember? Me neither, but basically the author used a photo without permission. Tsk, tsk, tsk. The story gets intriguinger.

• Tess Gerritsen has given up her lawsuit against Warner Brothers to retain rights under a contract it absorbed from New Line Cinema. This is a troublesome development.

• According to Gloria Steinem, “Librarians saved my life.”

Only in libraries might one learn that the much lauded Second Amendment, our so called right to arms, has its origins in racism, and is what lawyers call “the fruit of the poison tree.”

• The class action certification against Author Solutions has been denied. How this fraudulent company keeps landing on its feet is beyond us.

• Maps of literary places. Why do we include this? Maps, that’s why!

• Incarcerated? If this program catches on, you may be able to read books to your children during visitation hours.

• The world’s 57 largest book publishers.

• Finally, if you don’t yet get the power of slam poetry, give it one more try:

Interested in being a correspondent for Town Crier? Write to editors at easystreetmag dot com. Here are some of the journals we follow:

Book2Book, Book Riot, BuzzFeed, The Daily Beast, Digital Book World, The Digital Reader, Electric Lit, GalleyCat, Good e-Reader, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, Jane Friedman, Library Journal, Literary Hub, LitReactor, The New Yorker, The New York Times, NPR, The Paris Review, The Passive Voice, Poets & Writers, Publishers Weekly, Publishing Perspectives, Salon, Shelf Awareness, TeleRead, The Washington Post, Victoria Strauss