“It is fitting that the official opening of the first Greek publishing house in Istanbul for 50 years, takes place in a former Greek school that has not delivered primary education since 1984 because there were no longer enough pupils in the neighbourhood. The Istos publishing house, founded by a group of seven Greeks and Turks, will publish bilingual books about Istanbul’s Greek Orthodox community, their cultural heritage and impact on the city.”
Category: publishing
Up Next: Ads On Your E-Book?
“With the amount of data Amazon has available, there’s a massive opportunity to use that as a pretty powerful targeting technique online and into mobile.”
Judge Allows Authors’ Class-Action Suit Against Google Books To Proceed
“In a major development in the long-running case over Google’s unauthorized book-scanning,” US Federal Judge Denny Chin has ruled “that groups representing authors and photographers could go forward with a class action.”
Amazon.com Buys A Publishing House
“Amazon has acquired Avalon Books, a small publisher that focuses on hardcover mystery, ‘wholesome’ romance and Westerns, and will make its titles available digitally for the first time. … Avalon Books have been geared and marketed primarily toward the library market; now Amazon will seek to market them to a wider audience.”
Amazon Finally Installs Air Conditioning In Its Warehouses
Nine months after embarrassing press reports that summer temperatures in some of its facilities were so high that emergency medical technicians had to be kept at the ready, the e-commerce giant is spending $52 million to install air conditioning in its US warehouses.
A Library Of Everything (Is It Really Possible?)
“If it were just a matter of moving bits and bytes around, a universal online library might already exist. Google, after all, has been working on the challenge for 10 years. But the search giant’s book program has foundered; it is mired in a legal swamp. Now another momentous project to build a universal library is taking shape.”
London Library Emptied In Middle Of Night Could Be Saved
“The leader of Brent council in north London said they had agreed to sit down with local people who have been campaigning to save Kensal Rise library for more than a year and work with them over their proposal to run it at no ongoing cost to the local authority.”
Kafka’s Final Absurdity: How His Papers Ended Up Being Hoarded By An Israeli Cat Lady
“For the past 40 years, the women of the Hoffe family have held an assortment of Kafka’s primary drafts, letters, drawings and, possibly, unpublished manuscripts.” (Esther Hoffe was the mistress of Kafka’s agent, Max Brod.) “[The] women have guarded [the papers] closely, and to this day no one is sure exactly what they contain.”
E-Books Gain Market Share (But Cannibalize More Expensive Hardback Sales)
“E-books accounted for 7% of consumer spending on books in 2011 and 14% of units purchased, according to the most recent data from Bowker Market Research. In 2010, e-books had a 2% share of dollars and a 4% share of units.”
What’s It Like To Be The Literary Executor Of Your Hero?
“[Edward] Mendelson’s special connection with Auden was studiously based on the work, and what it revealed of Auden’s world view, his ideas on poetry, art, religion and morality. To hear Mendelson expound on Auden is to hear a man who, over four decades of scholarship, has caught the cast of another’s mind perfectly, deeply, and eloquently. Even though he never knew it then, in that 20-year-old dumbstruck student, WH Auden had found a clearer afterlife than the rest of us will ever manage to find.”