Category: publishing

“Though the settlement will not change much about the way that Google and publishers already partner, it is the newest signpost for defining copyright in the Internet age.”

“He has an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and a PEN/Hemingway Award for his book Mary and O’Neil, a meditative novel about love and loss told in a series of short stories. He has never read any of the Twilight books – ‘I’m kind of not the demographic,’ he says. And The Passage is not only, or even primarily, about vampires.”

“According to a company spokesperson, Barnes & Noble is in fact ‘not selling Amazon titles’ in its stores. But all over the country, it seems it is” – until news of that fact hit the Internet, causing B&N headquarters to scramble for an explanation and order stores to remove the titles in question.

“Alas, language changes whether we want it to or not. They have to: things change, we change, and language changes so we can talk about it all.”

A rapper called Biz, “who sings for a band called Loco Locass, has been nominated in the French-language children’s text category for a novel called La chute de Sparte, … has withdrawn his book from consideration for a Governor General’s Literary Award because he is ‘not a subject of Her Majesty’.”

“Taken together, the three committees have nominated a total of 12 different books – three short of the maximum possible disagreement.”

Until recently, the Americans never used “brilliant” to mean “really good”, but they’ve adopted it with gusto, employing it in ways we never would.

“Book-publishing giant Penguin Group has filed a dozen lawsuits in the past week against authors who have failed to meet their deadlines, despite being paid big advances. The alleged deadbeat dozen include Prozac Nation author Elizabeth Wurtzel, New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead, Wonkette founder Ana Marie Cox, and Holocaust survivor/tall-tale teller Herman Rosenblat.”

“The Casual Vacancy is facing protests in India over its portrayal of a Sikh girl as ‘mustachioed yet large-mammaried’. Sikh leaders said they were investigating complaints about the ‘provocative’ language and would demand a nationwide ban on the book if Rowling was deemed to have insulted the faith.”

“Pagination is one of the worst design and usability sins on the Web, the kind of obvious no-no that should have gone out with blinky text, dancing cat animations, and autoplaying music.”