Link Roundup: “Death to the Virginia Quarterly Review”

1. Sony has one-upped Amazon by making half a million out-of-copyright books available for their Reader, in a partnership with Google. The internet giant has raised the hackles of authors in their quest to make all human knowledge searchable online, though the recently-applied $125M greenback poultice has quieted authors. Now that Google is encoding books in the EPUB format, it’s easy to make them accessible to e-book readers. Let’s see if Amazon follows suit; their business model would seem to make that unlikely. If you’re wondering about the merits of each device, see News.com’s head-to-head comparison, or Wired’s.

2. Shorter Clay Shirky: “Trust me: media outlets should just close up shop and then magic fairies will report the news.” I’m partial to Adrian Monck’s response to Shirky.

3. Artist Robert Irwin was named the 2009 Thomas Jefferson Foundation Medalist in Architecture by the University of Virginia, of which VQR is a part. The prestigious award has been given out annually since 1966. Irwin was the subject of a long feature by Lawrence Weschler in our Spring 2008 issue.

4. Gawker’s Hamilton Nolan has tagged a National Magazine Awards story with “Death to the Virginia Quarterly Review.” We’ve decided to take it as a compliment.