Category: publishing

“This is a pretty big deal. It’s a little like if Hulu Plus just included every new show from the four networks, HBO, Showtime, Disney, AMC and ESPN. Or to use a different metaphor: this is a cable subscription for the most popular magazines in the world.”

Even though the e-book sites had some glitches on day one, J.K. Rowling’s newest venture sold more than $1 million worth of e-books and audiobooks in its first three days. “The blockbuster sales are a victory for Harry Potter’s creator, author J.K. Rowling, who battled e-book giant Amazon.com for the right to sell the books through her own website, Pottermore.”

Actually, people of the 1950s (yes, those 1950s) were much less likely to be reading than we are. Why do we like to think there was a reading golden age – and that that golden age isn’t now?

How much do independent bookstores (at least the ones in Boston) beat the chains and Amazon? Let us count the ways.

“Amazon.co.uk, Britain’s biggest online retailer, generated sales of more than £3.3bn in the country last year but paid no corporation tax on any of the profits from that income – and is under investigation by the UK tax authorities.”

The job of the critic is to discover and praise good books, whether they are written by men or women. The job of the writer is to write them. And neither job is made any easier by complaining about the “place of women in the literary world.”

“The place of women in the literary world is still as urgent an issue as it has ever been. I worry that other women of my generation, having taken their admission to this world as a natural right, have grown as complacent as I have been. But admission is not the same thing as acceptance. And what the reception of literature by women over the last few decades–longer, of course, but let’s keep to a manageable scope–shows us is that acceptance is a long way off.”

“Nearly two years after the managing editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review killed himself following complaints he made about his boss, Ted Genoways, Mr. Genoways has announced that he is stepping down as editor of the award-winning literary journal.”

“US non-profit literacy agency Worldreader has beta-launched an app for non-smartphones in order to distribute free e-books into sub-Saharan Africa and other parts of the developing world.”

Chris McGrath, an online entrepreneur from Milton Keynes, tried to sue Vaughan Jones, 28, from Nuneaton, over a series of reviews and postings he made on the Amazon website about his self-published and little-known book “The Attempted Murder of God”.