Category: publishing

“The library’s efforts are the sort of salesmanship that traditionally accompanies any new ambitious undertaking. But they are also an acknowledgment that the plan, which includes the sale of two prominent Manhattan branches, is a dramatic reshaping that has, at the very least, upset library traditionalists.”

“Like Betty and Veronica, the two are feuding over Archie’s future, but there is nothing comic — or friendly — about their rivalry. Each accuses the other of endangering the family legacy, Mr. Goldwater by wanting to expand Archie into a megabrand with help from outside investors and the Hollywood uber-agent Ari Emanuel, Ms. Silberkleit by vowing to keep the company’s traditions intact and preserve family ownership, ostensibly leading to stagnation.”

“It is we amateur runners who are likeliest to turn to audiobooks as a training accompaniment, I suspect. Far from wanting to ‘listen to our breathing’ to achieve an optimum split time, we’d rather drown it out with something more interesting that will distract our minds from the miles of unrun road ahead. As I found with The Fear Index, a cliffhanging chapter ending will force the most reluctant runner into his or her trainers again, not for the fun of training but simply to find out what happens next.”

“During the Great Depression, publishers faced off against another seemingly invincible retail juggernaut: Macy’s Department Stores.”

“As those of us who put things more bluntly put it, it was as if the government not only sanctified the Amazon monopoly, but they made sure it’s going to get even more dominant. It does indeed seem collusion took place — between the government and Amazon.”

“The DoJ lawsuit plays, it seems to me, right into the hands of Amazon. Yes, we’ll have cheaper books, but at what cost? Is it worth paying a little bit less for a title if it threatens the future existence of the publishers who are bringing us the books? Or will we be happy getting everything we read from a vastly reduced pool of presses?”

“Transforming these ancient texts and images into digital form helps transcend the limitations of time and space, which have in the past restricted access to knowledge. Scholars will be able to interrogate these documents in fresh approaches as a result of their online availability.”

“If there’s a case against the government’s [price-fixing lawsuit,] it’s that the forces of disruption buffeting traditional publishing are much too large to be blocked by any cartel. The good news is that literary culture should survive either way.”

“Like the fax machine, Word was designed to put things on paper. … [But] Microsoft Word is an atrocious tool for Web writing. Its document-formatting mission means that every piece of text it creates is thickly wrapped in metadata, layer on layer of invisible, unnecessary instructions about how the words should look on paper.”