Category: publishing

“Authors are paid 6.05p every time their physical books are borrowed from the UK’s public libraries, up to a maximum of £6,600, under the government-funded Public Lending Right scheme. But ebooks and audiobooks, a growing sector for library users, are not currently included in the scheme.”

“Publishers want to know what to publish. Readers want to know what to read. The traditional models are being smashed.”

The concern, launched in 2001 as Miramax Books (and the publisher of Tina Brown’s ill-fated Talk magazine), “has remained open throughout the brothers’ tumultuous last decade, persists. Now with a full-time staff of two, the latest iteration of Weinstein Books is about to release its first spate of titles.”

Eight critics and editors do the job that the Pulitzer Prize committee wouldn’t – deciding which book should win this year’s fiction award.

“It’s an ever-shrinking group, the authors who are given the real estate between multiple sets of hardcovers to chronicle the life and times of their subjects. ‘I don’t know of anyone who has gotten a contract for a multivolume biography in the last five years,’ said [historian] David Nasaw … ‘God bless Bob Caro, but it’s over.'”

“One, we have choices now that we didn’t have before, now that industry gatekeepers no longer control the sole means of distributing books in the digital-forward era. Two, publishing is a business, not an ideology,” and as such, innovation shouldn’t be frozen in place to keep brick-and-mortar booksellers afloat. And three, Amazon is not the great Satan.”

“The digital transformation is happening quicker than it happened for music. Are there some people who would prefer it not to be happening? Of course there are. But it’s creating lots of innovation.”

“If your kid plays hockey or baseball, you may already be familiar with algorithm journalism. Last fall Pointstreak Sports Technologies, a Canadian company that helps sports leagues compile game statistics, struck a deal with Narrative Science, a Chicago-based tech startup, to enable stories to be automatically written on every single game in its database. Parents or players can post those stories.”

“While the growth in genealogy and an apparently insatiable appetite for works on the grim events of the 20th century, from the Second World War to the Stalinist purges, has made history into one of publishing’s star sectors, the profession’s guardians are concerned that the pressure to achieve a public profile is damaging for academia.”

“Third only to the USA and Britain, it’s set to become the biggest in the world as India’s middle class continues to expand rapidly over the next 10 years. Keen to get a piece of the action, international publishers are flocking to set up offices in India, while many canny Indian publishers have already been reaping big rewards from backing emerging homegrown talent.”