Happy Valentine’s day, people! My most valentiney thing today is green tea with rose petals, but  who knows, maybe the pub quiz this evening will be themed 🙂 Oh, and I’m working on Space Romance, so that’s pretty relevant.

Publishing: Astatalk have dropped their fiction board (where someone had uploaded Tease, at one point!). Rumour has it the FBI had a ‘friendly’ word with them.

Interest-Piquing: The weird world of book packaging. Turns out one company, Alloy, is responsible for most the more famous packaged books (e.g. Sweet Valley High). Everyone in that article is very insistent they’re happy with the company and the decisions being made (and the amount they’re paid), aren’t they?

InsPiring: Search is on for the ninth planet. Sorry, Pluto, you still don’t cut it.

Procrastination: The five worst valentine geek gifts

Don’t forget, comment on this post by the end of the month to be in with a chance to win 21 Hammer Horror films.

Publishing: From March31st Apple are insisting all apps that offer content must make it available to purchase through the app (where they get a 30% cut). Amazon’s Kindle app, for example, allows you to read kindle books but doesn’t allow you to download them through the app. You can see where this is going, can’t you? Yet another square off.

Which is interesting, since if you skim through the spin in this press release (really, only three major self-published authors?) you’ll notice this:

Bright is one of a select group of authors whose books will be premiering in a new e-book format featured on Amazon that will be announced on Tuesday.

The e-books will be announced to promote Adobe’s new e-book format at Seybold Seminars in Boston.

Adobe’s epub is the big rival to the Kindle format, so, well. This looks interesting.

Interest-Piquing: Vida have been doing a little research into reviews and reviewers. Turns out that at most major sources of professional reviews, it’s considerably easier to be review and be reviewed if you’re male. Three times easier.

Editor-in-Chief of the European Journal of International Law is taken to caught over a negative review. They were fairly certain they could get it thrown out of court (for libel tourism, since there was no real reason to take them to caught in France), but wanted to stand up for their right to publish a negative review and prove it wasn’t criminal defamation. The verdict is due March 3rd.

InsPiring: Nellie Bly travelled around the world in less than 80 days and got herself committed to an asylum so she could tell the world how bad the conditions were. Nellie Bly was the pseudonym of Elizabeth Jane Cochran. She travelled the world as an investigative journalist throughout the late 1800s, and after her death was described as “The Best Reporter in America”. I’ll lay good odds you’ve never heard of her, but, fortunately, there’s a website complete with downloads of her best known articles.

Procrastination: Rose: the 3D Zombie Puppet Musical is looking for backers. They’ve got 16 days left and a lot still to raise.  To encourage more people to give, Adam Blomquist is doing a giveaway on his blog. If they don’t raise enough to make the movie, they won’t take money from anyone.