Category: publishing

Lucy Maud Montgomery, Madeleine L’Engle, S.E. Hinton, J.K. Rowling … the list goes on. Two-thirds of the finalists for NPR Books’ 100 Best Ever Teen Novels were written by women.

“The erotic novel has sold in excess of 5.3m copies in print and ebook – more than The Highway Code or Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code.”

“The Vatican has been accused of rejecting Bulgaria’s new choice of ambassador to the Holy See because he wrote a novel containing a gay sex scene.”

The Authors Guild is demanding “as much as $2 billion in damages for digitally scanning 2.7 million university library books without permission.”

“Today writers want to impress other writers. One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce’s Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit.” (Whereas, says Coelho, “I’m modern because I make the difficult seem easy, and so I can communicate with the whole world.”)

The extraordinary illuminated manuscript offers more than just gorgeous artwork and Gospel text and commentary: looked at carefully, it can tell us some things about the lives of its creators.

“Amazon, which owns the Kindle, a popular e-reader, has revealed that in the UK it is selling 114 e-books to every 100 printed hardbacks and paperbacks.”

Cheap e-books are devaluing literature, says crime writer Mark Billingham. If they cost “less than half the price of a cup of tea,” readers don’t value authors or books.

“It works like this: users pay £9.99 a month for unlimited access to Bardowl’s library of audiobooks, which they stream via their iPhone or iPad. And, yes, you can listen offline.”

Ron Charles: “We live in a consumer culture. Many feature writers are pressured to produce copy that their readers can ‘use’ — that is, use to buy things. Combine that with a thirst for clicks and views, and you’ve got the potential for abuse. (A freelancer for a women’s magazine told me recently that she’s been instructed to rave about the books she’s assigned, no matter what she really thinks. That’s not book criticism; it’s publicity. And it’s hardly ‘nice’ to the people who really matter: our readers.)”