On the Books: Book about Reagan's rise stirs controversy

Chris Ashby, a lawyer representing Reagan’s Revolution author Craig Shirley, has cited 19 instances of duplicated wording and insufficient or incomplete attribution from Shirley’s text in Rick Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, the new 856-page third volume in Perlstein’s history of politics in the 1960s and 1970s, The New York Times reports. According to the Times, Shirley’s lawyer has asked for a public apology and $25 million in damages, and has requested that revisions be made to digital editions and that all physical copies of the book be destroyed. Shirley said he has since found almost 50 instances of his work being used without credit.

Perlstein, however, told The New York Times that he cited Shirley’s book 125 times on his website, where he posted his source notes. “These are paraphrases,” Perlstein said. “I’m reverent toward my sources. History is a team sport, and references are how you support your teammates.”

Perlstein and his publisher published endnotes online instead of at the back of the book, because an in-print endnote section would have ballooned the book’s page count to more than 1,000, and because online endnotes can be more extensive than print ones. “My notion is that people will read this book with their iPhones open,” Perlstein said. Other publishers and academics remain apprehensive about publishing sources online, saying that the documentation can be lost, or that the URL may no longer work in the future. [The New York Times]

Patti Smith reviews Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. “This is a book for both the new and experienced reader. It has a strange casualness, as if it unfolded as Murakami wrote it; at times, it seems like a prequel to a whole other narrative. The feel is uneven, the dialogue somewhat stilted, either by design or flawed in translation. Yet there are moments of epiphany gracefully expressed, especially in regard to how people affect one another.” [The New York Times]

Libraries are struggling with ebook lending, according to a report from the International Federation of Library Associations. Many publishers have inconsistent licensing practices, so libraries have trouble keeping many of them consistently available. Furthermore, they face competition from growing commercial ebook subscription services like Kindle Unlimited, Oyster, and Scribd. [Publishers Weekly]

The market for anti-Hillary Clinton books is booming, which might be a good sign for Clinton. [The Christian Science Monitor]