Lots of booky goodness going on today (that’ll happen when it gets to be 10pm and you realize you haven’t left your apartment all day – part of an effort to save money this week). So I’m just going to do a little round-up of sorts:

1) ROPES arrived from the printer yesterday. I keep referring to the books as “babies,” and I don’t know if that offends people who actually, you know, have children, but I think it is a pretty standard book/magazine industry term, especially for those new(ish) to publishing who get really excited about boxes from the printer. Anyway, now that they’ve arrived…

2) ROPES pre-sales are happening now. I fiddled with PayPal buttons for longer than I care to admit, but they are now installed on both the ROPES WordPress blog and the ROPES Facebook page, which makes it extremely easy to just pop over and purchase a copy or two. The very first pre-sale went to my mom. It’s for a good cause! Go on, go on, go on…

3) There was a Gizmodo article floating around for a while, and it touched on a topic I’ve tried to cover here before: namely, that e-books are in an incunabula stage and are likely to develop away from the codex and not rely on things like pages and covers. It was a nice article and I’m glad I finally got around to reading it because it made me excited about my thesis again (right now, that is nothing short of a miracle), but then I made the mistake of reading the comments section and my brain exploded and I had to start all over again. Moral of the story: don’t read the comments sections of the interwebs. Just don’t do it. (Notice this blog doesn’t allow comments? There’s a reason for that. Mean people suck.)

4) On a brighter note, I finally finished reading the whole programme for the Cúirt International Festival of Literature. The programme launched last month (see below), but I’ve only been dipping in and out of the programme as needed. I finally just made myself sit down and read the whole thing from cover to cover, and there were many delightful little surprises inside. Por ejemplo, there was a quote from the Kirkus Reviews/Austin American-Statesman review of The Blinded Man, the first book from Swedish crime writer Arne Dahl’s Intercrime series to be translated into English. Also, one of our Publishers on Publishing speakers hinted at an Irish mythology comic project a few weeks ago, and it turns out the artist will be attending Cúirt as part of the young people’s programme.

Photo from the Galway City Tribune.

5) Finally, speaking of Cúirt (rhymes with ‘porch’), they have a free app for iPhones that allows you to flick through the programme and create a personalized planner of festival events. I already have mine decided, although I’m sure it will change during the week as the festival unfolds. I do know for a fact that I will be attending the ROPES launch on the Friday at 5pm. It is pretty damn cool that our little student literary journal’s launch party is included in an app. A FREE app, I might add. Go on, go on, go on…