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According to a lawsuit, Harper Lee’s agent Samuel Pinkus duped the To Kill a Mockingbird author to assign him the copyright to her only book. An investigation into Lee’s fight to regain the book’s copyright, which continues to earn millions of dollars in royalties: “His first move was to obtain the copyright to To Kill […]

Why is scientific research still stuck in a model that requires that work be published in a small number of journals owned by a small number of companies? “Companies like Elsevier developed in the 1960s and 1970s. They bought academic journals from the non-profits and academic societies that ran them, successfully betting that they could […]

Longreads’ Mark Armstrong on Steven Soderbergh’s “State of the Cinema” and four other recommended stories about the movie, music and publishing industries.

What we can learn about the future of books from its past: “Publishing is a word that, like the book, is almost but not quite a proxy for the ‘business of literature.’ Current accounts of publishing have the industry about as imperiled as the book, and the presumption is that if we lose publishing, we […]

The writer reflects on his professional and financial mistakes, and how he’s changed his focus: “I was still just a guy with one book under his belt. And a book that, despite all the attention it was getting, sold maybe 10,000 copies. It wasn’t some sort of international publishing phenomenon. It was, at best, sort […]

The writer reflects on her old part-time job—ghostwriting the Sweet Valley High book series: “Sweet Valley High set its fables of ‘same and different’ in a 1980s world of new wealth and upward mobility, latching on to an innovative publishing reality: create a mass-market paperback series for young female readers, keep the price point low […]

John Fairchild turned his family’s dry fashion trade journal, Women’s Wear Daily into one of today’s most influential fashion publications. The 85-year-old looks back on his controversial career: “Unlike in Paris, where couture designers were revered, Seventh Avenue was then dominated by garmentos while the designers toiled in the back rooms as relative unknowns. Fairchild […]

[Not single-page] The case against Rudy Kurniawan, who arrived on the wine scene less than a decade ago and now stands accused of selling millions of dollars in fake wines: “Among a privileged set, though, Kurniawan’s quirks and résumé gaps were of much less interest than his generosity. After one tasting, Wasserman hailed him for […]

Stanford University, and its president John L. Hennessy, have a tight relationship with Silicon Valley, which has helped the university’s endowment grow to nearly $17 billion. A look at how those relationships are shaping what’s next: “John Hennessy’s experience in Silicon Valley proves that digital disruption is normal, and even desirable. It is commonly believed […]

Former Time Warner Book Group CEO Larry Kirshbaum jumps from the traditional publishing world to “the dark side,” heading up Amazon Publishing. Meanwhile, the Big Six watch closely: “Amazon could be an unstoppable competitor to big publishing houses. If history is any guide, Jeff Bezos, who declined to comment for this story, doesn’t care whether […]