Tuesday, September 18, 2007

NYT website free for all

The NY Times will stop charging for parts of its website starting at midnight tonight (Tuesday) -- good news for those who have tracked a link to the NYT Archive only to be asked for a subscription or one-off payment of $4.95. More on the great circulation vs. advertising debate here.

5 comments:

Nondescript Blogger said...

Hi Helen

I hope you are writing a sequel to Last Samurai.. You know, the ending was kind of abrupt... Ludo took over the book at some point and Sybilla's diary kind of shut itself. Its better if you write the sequel than someone else after fifty years. Or please write a fresh new book on anything you like, but please WRITE. Please dont be a one and half book wonder. Take Shaw or Wodehouse...they were prolific but they still produced quality work. But Lee Harper, she wrote that brilliant masterpiece 'To kill a Mockingbird' and that was it. You write one more book for the few thousands of us:)

Padmini from India.

Mithridates said...

Padmini: I wonder how you might respond to someone begging you not to be a one-and-a-half-book wonder. Seems like a tremendous amount of pressure, especially when you consider how many people are zero-book wonders. And what do you mean by the 1/2?

I also disagree that the ending to LS was abrupt. I've read it several times now and it gets better and better every time--the book as a whole as well as the ending. Ludo searches and searches and then stops searching and only when he stops searching does he seem to find the right man. This seems just right to me.

Helen DeWitt said...

Padmini -- I hadn't planned on writing a sequel. It's true that S is not heard much toward the end; it seemed quite plausible to me that if the story shifted to Ludo's point of view we would get S seen through a filter of uncomprehending impatience. Anyway, I have written quite a lot of books (admittedly not all finished); the problem is that it takes a lot of patience to connect a book with an agent, publisher and publication, and things go horribly wrong.

mith - Seems as though the choice is between writing and publishing (I don't know how Pamuk does it). If I tried any harder to get published I would never write anything at all, so, well, it doesn't feel like pressure, really, to have someone want to see more -- there is just a gap between what happens and what can be seen to happen.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for this piece of exciting news!

I look forward to browsing the Times for many interesting dates and events...

It used to be a favourite pastime of mine to do the same with the microfiche copies of NYTimes, London Times etc. in the National Library in Jerusalem. It's been a long time since I was able to visit there and indulge in that particular sin, but I'd have to admit anyway that full-text search beats the attraction of the quaint old microfiche readers.

Nondescript Blogger said...

Hi Mithridates...

Zero-book wonders like me are the reading public:) A little pressure never hurt anyone...the 1/2 referred to the second book of Helen written with Ilya Gridneff...which I havent read yet..

Helen: Its heartening to know that many books are in the pipeline.. hope we get to read them soon.

Padmini