Category: publishing

‘Every vampire story has its day or, I guess, its night. But there’s a longer history here, too. In the 18th century, when Barnabas Collins and Lestat became vampires, the shape and length of life were different. So was death. When Abraham Lincoln was born, the average age of the United States population was 16, and life expectancy was under 40. Two centuries later, the average American can expect to live to nearly 80. Living longer hasn’t made dying any easier; arguably, it’s made it harder.”

“At the moment, no e-reader on the market matches the Kindle, but its store is uninspiring, and its algorithm-led attempts to chum up to users are terrible. Anyone who can produce a good e-reader and back it up with an engaging community for book lovers could take on both Amazon and the pirates, if publishers are bold about ditching DRM technology.”

Publishers rejoice across the land (and possibly across the world) as Oprah Winfrey brings back her book club, revamped for the digital age and ready to confer crazy great sales on every book she touches.

“It seems to me abhorrent that library disputes have become mixed up with midnight police raids. We have moved suddenly into the realm of secrecy and force, an alarming step. The dismantling of a library system that was one of the glories of Victorian enlightenment and the envy of the world is happening across the country.”

“Define the 1 percent however you want–the upper echelons of commerce, government, culture, academia, even the British royal family–and you’d be hard-pressed to argue that they are paragons of correct usage and good style. For quite some time now the language connoisseurs have been schoolteachers, writers of letters to the editor, and ink-stained wretches on Grub Street (and their digital descendants).”

“In ‘Quantitative Patterns of Stylistic Influence in the Evolution of Literature,’ an article published in … The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, even today’s literary writers have little use for the classics. They are, the study asserts, much more influenced by their peers … And these researchers, being mathematicians, have the numbers to prove it.”

“The ability to process vast troves of data on customer behavior–data sets that would have been too expensive or taken far too long to process in the past–offers the potential to create predictive models for any business, and certainly for book publishing.”

“It is, I admit, hard to imagine major universities without presses. But one has to at least consider: Have those various intellectual communities become too splintered, specialized and small? Have the monographs that university presses produce become so costly that individual scholars can’t purchase them?”

“Over 270 writers, translators and editors” – including Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua – “signed a letter to Culture and Sports Minister Limor Livnat, urging her to continue pressing for protection of Israeli authors’ royalties.” Livnat is sending to the Knesset “a bill that would bar retailers from discounting new books for the first 18 months after publication.”