Category: publishing

“Nearly two months after the U.S. Department of Justice filed an antitrust lawsuit against Apple and five major publishers, the tensions over commerce were audible on the show floor.”

“Children as young as five will be expected to learn and recite poetry by heart in a major overhaul of the national curriculum for schools in England. The education secretary, Michael Gove, will promise a new focus on the traditional virtues of spelling and grammar when he sets out his plans for the teaching of English in primary schools later this week. At the same time, Gove will put forward proposals to make learning a foreign language compulsory for pupils from the age of seven.”

“Getting published, it turns out, is a lousy way to stay published. Back in the day my stuff at the original BYTE.com was lost, years later the same thing happened to my stuff at InfoWorld.com. With all due respect to this venue I will be pleasantly surprised if the URL at which you are reading this is alive in 2020.”

“At that time, Gatsby seemed like the relic of an age most wanted to forget. In the succeeding years, Fitzgerald’s slim tale of the jazz age became the most celebrated and beloved novel in the American canon. It’s more than an American classic; it’s become a defining document of the national psyche, a creation myth, the Rosetta Stone of the American dream. And yet all the attempts to adapt it to stage and screen have only served to illustrate its fragility and its flaws.”

“All literature preserves something which otherwise would die away with the flesh and bones of the writer. Reading is reclaiming the right to this human immortality, because the memory of writing is all-encompassing and limitless.”

“Beyond the page, ebooks may someday transform how we read. We are used to being alone with our thoughts inside a book, but what if we could invite friends or favourite authors to join in?”

“In 2009, the nation watched in awe as the state board worked on approving a new science curriculum under the leadership of a chair who believed that “evolution is hooey.” In 2010, the subject was social studies and the teachers tasked with drawing up course guidelines were supposed to work in consultation with “experts” added on by the board, one of whom believed that the income tax was contrary to the word of God in the scriptures.”

Academic libraries are under stress, as the publishing world changes. Digitization, data collection, changing reader habits – America’s librarians have a lot to worry about…

Lev Grossman: “I know it’s a weakness. A vice even. You’re making a choice: essentially what you’re saying (or what I’m saying) is … I’m willing to chuck most or probably all of my dignity, and some measure of my personal safety, and your personal safety, because it’s more important to me to keep reading this book I’m reading than it is to look where I’m going.”

On one hand, “sheep pen,” “ghetto,” “biologically based self-confinement.” And on the other, the Woolfian ideal of “a room of one’s own,” ultimately culminating in the Orange Prize. Which view is truer, which owns the greater persuasive force?