Summer Stories

Executive editor Bill Keller wants to ban books and read Twitter instead. Or at least that is the satirical claim he made in a piece in The New York Times this week–“Let’s Ban Books, or at Least Stop Writing Them.”

Welcome to July, the month when media organizations (including GalleyCat) fill slow news days with fluff pieces. We would like to nominate Keller’s piece as the top summer fluff piece of 2011.

What was your favorite publishing puff piece of the summer? Read more

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

In the happiest video of the summer (embedded above), Old Spice spokesmodel Isaiah Mustafa defended libraries in a surreal speech.

Mustafa stole the hearts of millions of Americans with his ads that mix stream-of-consciousness narration with surreal special effects. In the video, he answered librarian Andy Woodworth‘s question–how do you feel about libraries?”

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long, strange summer for the publishing industry.

At the end of June, author Molly Ringle (pictured, via) won the 2010 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, writing the world’s worst opening sentence to an imaginary novel. The contest was named after Victorian novelist Edward George Earl Bulwer-Lytton, who wrote the line: “It was a dark and stormy night.”

Welcome to our Top Stories of Summer 2010 series. For all our readers returning from summer homes and Caribbean yacht trips, we’ve created a short list of the 15 stories you may have missed during this long, strange summer for the publishing industry.

Here is the award winning sentence: “For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”