Category: publishing

Forbes–one of financial journalism’s most venerable institutions–now employs a company called Narrative Science to automatically generate online articles about what to expect from upcoming corporate earnings statements. Just feed it some statistics and, within seconds, the clever software produces highly readable stories. Or, as Forbes puts it, “Narrative Science, through its proprietary artificial intelligence platform, transforms data into stories and insights.”

Author Geoff Dyer: “It’s one of those expressions and concepts whose rhetorical potency and convenience derive, imprecisely, from the fact that no one stops to think whether it means anything at all – any more than a squash player pauses to consider why there’s a wall at the back of the court. … [And] like a squash court wall again, [it] exists in order to have stuff hurled against it.”

Item 1: “The author is the expert. Why assume that the one person who has spent the past 12-18 months on the subject, the story and the world of their work, knows least about how they should be represented to the trade and to the reader?”

“With the disappearance of paper encyclopedias, a part of the Western intellectual tradition is disappearing as well. I am not speaking of the idea of impartial, objective, and meticulously accurate reference. There is no reason this cannot be duplicated in digital media.”

“Three separate lawsuits have been filed with the Beijing No. 2 Intermediate Court on behalf of 12 writers who allege 59 of their titles were sold unlicensed through Apple’s iTunes online store.”

“Our members are already struggling to get enough hours together to make a living …. and now on top of it they’re facing a further threat of layoffs. We cannot bring back to our membership an agreement to be ratified that would allow over 50 per cent of them to be laid off, in case in 2013 if the city wants to close libraries.”

Rising rents, says owner Nicholas Hoare, are forcing him to close his namesake bookstores in Ottawa and Montreal. “That was the straw that broke the camel’s back,” said Hoare. “Not Amazon, nothing else.”

“Readers have been snapping up the books, eager to get a glimpse behind the fog of war and ready to embrace stories that accentuate heroism instead of the often dreary developments reported in daily news accounts. Seeing some of these books rise to the top of best-seller lists, publishers are rushing to sign up similar titles, to be released in the next year.”

“Like its editor, The New York Review is elegant, well mannered, immensely learned, a little formal at times, obsessive about clarity and factual correctness and passionately interested in human rights and the way governments violate them.” But Robert Silvers is 82. Who can possibly succeed him?

Novelist Frank Cottrell Boyce: “Pleasure is a form of attention. If you can take pleasure in something – an idea, an activity – then your brain will happily entertain it for years without aim or objective. It’s therefore a particularly open form of thinking that allows you to surprise yourself and the rest of humanity.”