Category: publishing

“Mother Earth, as she prefers to be called, is the steward of the Syracuse’s first Little Free Library, which opened early this month in an abandoned telephone box near a bus stop and grocery store on Gifford Street. The Little Free Library credo is ‘take a book, leave a book.’ That’s pretty much the only rule.”

“The easiest form of self-suppression is to have an idea and not write it, and we may well wish that more authors would exercise this prerogative. It gets more complicated once the book exists, however – even in unpublished manuscript form.” Consider Kafka, Gogol, Gerard Manley Hopkins …

“[For] large parts of its history Armenia has been a nation without a country. This has given the spoken and written word, the primary means through which Armenian identity has been preserved, enormous prominence in its people’s culture. Over the centuries this emphasis has fostered a particular regard for books and the means of producing them.”

“I, the hypothetical reader, am putting my trust in you to give me the straight dope, or at least to make some effort to warn me whenever you’re saying something that is patently untrue, even if it’s untrue for ‘artistic reasons.’ I mean, what exactly gives you the authority to introduce half-baked legend as fact and sidestep questions of facticity?”

“Mr. Anderson’s tenure has seen a long-running battle, between a corporatist management approach that has forced through change in a digital era and old-guard librarians who cherish their love of books and archives.” And it hasn’t been pretty.

What are those publishers saying? Janice Harayda, and Twitter, translate:
“Eminently marketable”: “This author looks fit” – Catherine Fox, author

The Independent Publishers Group: “Our electronic book agreement recently came up for renewal, and Amazon took the opportunity to propose new terms for electronic and print purchases that would have substantially changed (book publishers’) revenue from the sale of both. It’s obvious that publishers can’t continue to agree to terms that increasingly reduce already narrow margins.”

“Eco deliberately confuses fact and fiction. Having immersed his readers in conspiracy theories against the Jews, he then leaves them wondering whether some of these vile slanders might, after all, be true. The trouble with what his publisher calls ‘an inspired twisting of history and fiction’ is that Eco is playing with fire. This time it is not a game.”

Britain’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue, first published in 1811, is back – for free, online, and wildly popular.

“The purpose of a bookshop is not to make its patrons sigh with pleasure, but to make them buy books. And I have seen scant evidence that, as a marketing strategy, the beautiful bookshop works very well as a selling venue. Some may succeed in spite of their beauty – through a great location or an excellent stock – but few because of it.”