Category: publishing

“Shauna Raycraft set out seven years ago to rescue over 300,000 books from being burned by her neighbour … [but] she was only able to sort through one-third of the books. Now the end has come. If Raycraft doesn’t get help sorting through the 200,000 remaining titles by the end of the month, she is calling in the fire department and burning the rest.”

“[H]istory shows us that many authors have been willing to go to the extreme in order to get noticed. Here’s a look at some of the more fabled attempts made over the years …”

“As the Broadway hit ‘Gatz,’ an inventive eight-hour show during which the entire novel is read aloud on stage, moves to London this month; as buzz builds for a new movie version starring Leonardo DiCaprio set for release this year; and as economists such as Paul Krugman appropriate the novel’s title to hammer home their beliefs about income inequality, one thing, at least, is very clear: This is the Year of Gatsby.”

“Three-quarters said that children’s attention spans were shorter than ever before, while 94 per cent claimed that pupils preferred to be using the internet rather than reading.”

The African-American author has “refused to authorize a Hebrew translation of her prize-winning work, citing what she called Israel’s ‘apartheid state’.”

“To a large extent, it really is the best of times for publishing. We have a lot of potential to connect more people with more ideas more efficiently and quickly than ever before. We have more people reading and writing than ever before, though (like publishing) literacy skies are also in a permanent downward trajectory according to generations of chickens little.”

The Humble School in Uganda “is on the front lines of an effort to reinvent developing world literacy programs with technology. The premise is that the new economics of digital publishing might make more and better books available in classrooms … A vision of “one Kindle per child” for developing countries faces considerable challenges, including the cost of e-readers and making sure that kids actually learn better on the devices than with old-fashioned books.”

The James Joyce estate, headed by the author’s grandson Stephen, has gone so far as to get a program celebrating James Joyce banned from Irish radio and to forbid Kate Bush to use even a few lines of Ulysses in a song; Stephen even tried to prevent the National Library of Ireland from exhibiting some of its own Joyce manuscripts. James Joyce biographer Gordon Bowker explains the difficulties.

“Their debate that day inflected Scottish literary discussion for a generation. Indeed, in ways which are as interesting as they are depressing, the debate about Scottish literature has barely moved a jot since: individual vs collective, nationalism vs internationalism, triumphantly local vs constrictingly parochial, shock-horror over drugs, double shock-horror over sex and drugs.”

“In 1946 only 5 percent of Holland’s book production was made up of translations; by 2005 it had reached 35 percent and in the area of prose fiction the share had grown to 71 percent. Of those translations, 75 percent now come from English. What figures I have managed to find for Germany and Italy do not differ a great deal.”