And the shadiness continues...

There's a deeply depressing article in New Republic about the death of the mass-market paperback edition of Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. The article is well worth reading in full, but here's the gist: Lee's estate (under the direction of her highly controversial lawyer, Tonja Carter) has required that all bookstores sell off their stock of the least-expensive version of TKAM, which will presumably be replaced by the far more expensive trade paperback editions. This is particularly bad news for schools, as Lee's novel is one of the most widely-assigned books in American middle schools.