Category: publishing

“At a time when e-books are making reading practical but not very pretty–with their inflexible line-endings, clunky page-turns and limited typography–we need small presses to publish the best writing in books that are also beautiful objects.”

Maybe, sometimes. Ron Charles: “There’s no need to be cruel, but sometimes the exasperation of slogging through a dull, stupid or monumentally over-hyped book gets the best of even the nicest person.”

“Over the last three decades, at least 100 books have been banned by the Chinese government. They are books that never see the light of day; books that alter lives of writers and publishing houses; books that were published and then retracted and destroyed.”

“The real problem is that it is virtually impossible for the general reader to deduce from a text itself what genre it belongs to. We rely upon editors, publishers, and all others who are responsible for vetting a text before the public to tell us how to understand it. When an article appears in a newspaper or newsmagazine, we have a reasonable expectation that it is factually accurate. In a literary magazine like The Believer or another artistic venue, the standards are far less clear. Books are the most dangerous territory of all, since publishers notoriously do not fact-check, and categorization is often left to the whims of editors.”

“Eighty five percent of published papers remain locked behind subscription pay walls, accessible only to those affiliated with universities and other large research institutions. But new journals that make everything they publish freely available are growing rapidly. And government efforts to make the results of all publicly funded scientific and medical research accessible to everyone are expanding, despite industry-backed legislative efforts to end them.”

Data mining is “where you count a bunch of features in a text or a molecular element, or who is buying a product. Marketers use it to target audiences and analyze web content, but we can use the same techniques to analyze the First Folio.”

Daniel Everett’s book “is an attempt to deliver, if not a fatal blow, then at least a solid right cross to Universal Grammar. He believes that the structure of language doesn’t spring from the mind but is instead largely formed by culture, and he points to the Amazonian tribe he studied for 30 years as evidence.”

“I would like to publish more women, but the fact is that I will be publishing more books by men than by women. Of the books I have been offered, these are just the better books. So that’s a shocker. And no, I am not going to turn down a great book by a man just because he’s a man. Nor am I going to publish a book by a woman just because she’s a woman. It is – it has to be – the work that counts.”

“This year’s LBF has a special focus on China, saying it aims ‘to showcase the very best of Chinese literature today’. But exiled writer Bei Ling, head of the Independent Chinese Pen club, told the BBC he is ‘shocked’ by the line-up.”

Dennis Loy Johnson of Melville House: “I recently read a survey that said 39% or 40% of people who bought books on Amazon looked at them in a bookstore first. They could know everything about the book online short of having seen it, but still the physical object had enough meaning to them to want to see it first.”