Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
Back in 2013, three writers sued Author Solutions, a self-publishing service, citing a list of grievances against the company. Andrew Albanese’s article at Publisher’s Weekly notes that the authors claim Author Solutions “misrepresents itself, luring authors in with claims that its books can compete with ‘traditional publishers,’ offering ‘greater speed, higher royalties, and more control…
Concerns over the age-appropriateness of books is nothing new. Efforts to ban books are perennial attempts of, assumedly, those worried about a book’s potential to negatively impact a reader too young to access its merit. At Melville House, Taylor Sperry discusses the recent attempt at banning Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and John Steinbeck’s Of…
It has been a little less than three years since the Penguin-Random House merger announcement was made, and the new company, Penguin Random House, just recently launched its new, joint website. The site is clean, highly functional, and features a home page that encourages engagement with PRH’s many excellent authors and titles. The house’s commitment to bridging…
Southwest Airlines recently started holding book readings on their flights. The airline has a history of bringing spontaneous and entertaining events aboard: there was at one point an Imagine Dragons appearance, and once even a wedding. The involved writers are compensated in free airfare, the passengers with free readings–which might seem like a win-win from a…
Book retailer Barnes & Noble recently released a new line of shopping bags in the hope of incentivizing in-store purchases. In an article at Bloomberg Business, Belinda Banks writes that the new bags “evoke an old-fashioned etching, with the words set in a serif font and forming an image evocative of the story. For The Wizard…
![Round-Down: What the [Redacted]? Clean Reader App Cleans Up Literature](https://pshares.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/ebook.jpg)
Many parents want to expose their children to great literature but find themselves facing a dilemma—often these books, for their more mature content, contain profanity. It can be a difficult thing to broker, the desire to introduce strong work at a young age with the desire to avoid swears and age-inappropriate content. And now,…
I have always loved artists’ books, though I didn’t until recently—embarrassingly—consider them part of their own genre. The Smithsonian Institution only weeks ago launched a new inter-institution project, digitally curating many gorgeous artists’ books online on a searchable platform. The Smithsonian is collaborating with the American Art Museum and National Portrait Gallery Library, the Hirshhorn Museum…
A recent article in the San Francisco Gate announced the imminent closing of yet another bookstore–Borderlands Books, which exclusively sells, according to its website, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror titles. It’s sad news, no doubt, but it’s also—pun unintended but liked—downright scary news. On its current home page, which you can visit here, Borderlands…
Restaurant chain Chipotle just announced plans to add to their recent “Cultivating Thought” series, including such writers as Jeffrey Eugenides, Amy Tan, and Neil Gaiman. The project’s promise is simple: great, short writing by these and other talented names–offered on burrito bags and soda cups. The prodigiously talented Jonathan Safran Foer came up with the…
No products in the cart.