Book News, In Brief

College students in Utah are protesting the use of Alison Blechdel's Fun Home in their school's curriculum on the grounds that it's pornographic. Remember the good ol' days when college kids used to protest in favor of free speech?

Amazon has expanded their new print on demand policy -- slightly. Yesterday, it was 'You either p.o.d. with Amazon, or Amazon's not selling your book.' Today, it's, 'If you want to use an outside print on demand service, you must provide the Amazon warehouse with at least five copies of your book. No exceptions.' The monolith explains: “It isn’t logical or efficient to print a POD book in a third place, and then physically ship the book to our fulfillment centers. It makes more sense to produce the books on site, saving transportation costs and transportation fuel, and significantly speeding the shipment to our customers."

The comics publisher Dark Horse blames scanlations and in-store shrink wrapping for the cancellation of their critically acclaimed manga series Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service, Mail, and Hiroshi Hirata's samurai epic, Satsuma Gishiden. Although scanlations and shrink wrap may seem unrelated, the two actually effect one another quite a bit. Here's how the unlikely union works: The kids go into a bookstore to check out the new manga, but they are unable to browse it due to it being wrapped in plastic. This forces the savvy kidlings to go online to preview the books that they were interested in. But upon finding the whole series online for free, they no longer see any reason why they ought to bother going back to the bookstore to pay for it. In closing: Thanks, overly protective parents groups. You f**ked up another good thing.