Category: publishing

According to Book Industry Study Group’s newest edition of “Consumer Attitudes Toward E-Book Reading” report, the percentage of e-book consumers who exclusively or mostly purchase e-books fell from nearly 70% in August 2011 to 60% in May 2012.

“The Turkish publisher facing obscenity charges for releasing a translation of a William Burroughs novel has vowed not to be intimidated by an Istanbul court’s decision to postpone the trial, despite the ‘sword of Damocles’ which now hangs over its head.”

“Canadian literary icon Margaret Atwood is lending her name to a new online poetry prize – ‘The Attys’ – sponsored by a Toronto-based social media site for budding writers, Wattpad, which claims a community of more than nine million users that includes the Oryx and Crake author herself.”

One problem, Brian Alvey said, is that some of those companies doing publishing really well today aren’t media companies in the traditional sense, pointing to Red Bull and Coca Cola as two examples. And Twitter and Facebook trying to be media companies just adds to the confusion. Another issue is the lack of buy-in at these old-guard companies, which also makes it that much more enticing for these “tech geniuses” to build their own startups rather than fix all that is wrong with an existing platform.

“Four self-published authors will have a total of seven novels on the New York Times ebook bestseller list this weekend, and the founder of self-publishing powerhouse Smashwords is predicting the number is only going to grow.”

The Bodleian Library’s copy, still in its original binding, is being stabilized by conservators so that it can be photographed; a £20,000 appeal has begun to cover the costs of preservation, digitizing the photographs and posting them online.

“Fears that pirated editions of JK Rowling’s upcoming novel The Casual Vacancy could leak out mean that some foreign publishers will not receive a copy of the manuscript until it is published in English, forcing them to rush their translations or miss out on sales.”

“The New Yorker this week is publishing a story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, ‘Thanks for the Light,’ that it rejected three-quarters of a century ago. Turning the story down in 1936, the editors said that it was ‘altogether out of the question’ and added, ‘It seems to us so curious and so unlike the kind of thing we associate with him and really too fantastic.'”

“I’m convinced that epublishing is another tech bubble, and that it will burst within the next 18 months. The reason is this: epublishing is inextricably tied to the structures of social media marketing and the myth that social media functions as a way of selling products. It doesn’t, and we’re just starting to get the true stats on that. When social media marketing collapses it will destroy the platform that the dream of a self-epublishing industry was based upon.”

Michael Moynihan: “A month ago, when Lehrer’s self-plagiarism scandal emerged, some supporters argued that it was simply the misstep of a young journalist. But making up sources, deceiving a fellow journalist, and offering accounts of films you have never seen and emails never exchanged, is, to crib Bob Dylan, on a whole other level.”