Category: publishing

“Perhaps the most wildly divergent book app I’ve encountered so far is Chopsticks, which is another Penguin book, but one that’s vastly different than their amplified editions. It’s described as a novel, but it’s vastly different than a traditional novel. As you turn the pages, you aren’t confronted with a traditional narrative, but rather interact with different pieces of the lives of Glory, a teen piano player, and the boy who moves in next door. The story’s told through newspaper clippings, pictures, songs, and more. It’s a rather fascinating way to tell a story.”

“Surrey County Council’s decision to run 10 libraries by volunteers in a move to keep its 52 libraries open has been ruled unlawful by the High Court.”

“In Argentina, a new and bizarre piece of red tape means that imported books and magazines are being held at customs at Ezeiza airport, some 25 miles outside of Buenos Aires. Rather than receive their reading material through the letterbox as intended, readers of foreign material currently have to travel to Ezeiza” and pay a set of fees for the privilege of picking them up.

“Although publishers rarely criticize companies they do business with, some say they’re speaking out against Amazon partly because they’re offended by its tactics. They describe Amazon’s demands — made in email, with no personal-contact information provided — as overly aggressive and leaving almost no room for discussion.”

“Libraries on Nova Scotia’s South Shore are boycotting Random House, one of the world’s largest book publishers, over what they call unfair e-book pricing. The company began charging public libraries up to three times the retail price for downloadable books last month.”

“Billed as an East Village poetry walk, the project, ‘Passing Stranger,’ is a site-specific audio tour that guides listeners through the history of the neighborhood’s interconnected writers and shakers, with interviews, archival recordings and recitations of poems. Narrated by the filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, with music by John Zorn, it is a literary and geographic keepsake, a portrait of a bohemian community that still resounds.”

The final print edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica is selling like hotcakes. Faster (and heavier) than hotcakes, actually. And all the company had to do to get these numbers was kill the product.

Parents paying for their children’s self-published books aren’t worried about promising the young writers too much. “They are simply trying to encourage their children, in the same way that other parents buy gear for a promising lacrosse player or ship a Broadway aspirant off to theater camp.”

The Harry Potter e-books came online this week, and publishers need to take note – and change their ways. “If book publishers could only learn one thing from the Pottermore launch, it should be this: that one of the biggest drivers of piracy is the inability to find or consume the content that a user wants in the format or on the platform or at a time they wish to consume it.”

Meg Wolitzer: “I don’t need to remember anything about signifiers to understand that just like the jumbo, block-lettered masculine typeface, feminine cover illustrations are code. Certain images, whether they summon a kind of Walker Evans poverty nostalgia or offer a glimpse into quilted domesticity, are geared toward women as strongly as an ad for ‘calcium plus D.’ These covers might as well have a hex sign slapped on them, along with the words: ‘Stay away, men! Go read Cormac ­McCarthy instead!'”