Category: publishing

“There’s no denying that Dickens’s embroidered, involved sentences make increasing demands on the modern reader. The enormous success of J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books and Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy shows that we still have an appetite for long, complicated stories. But Rowling’s and Larsson’s prose is built for speed. Unlike Dickens, there’s nothing there in the way of language to stop the rapid turning of pages.”

“A new book by Munira Mirza, the culture adviser to the mayor of London, Boris Johnson, has been withdrawn because of a legal problem over a Tate image on its cover.”

“Poor neighbourhoods in England are still beset by Victorian-era levels of illiteracy, the schools minister has claimed.”

“The money-losing U.S. chain stunned and cheered the publishing industry by announcing its Amazon ban earlier this week, citing the online company’s policy of reserving exclusive rights to sell e-books produced by its new publishing arm. By week’s end, both Indigo and Books-A-Million, the second largest chain with more than 200 stores, had joined the ban.”

“For years, there has been speculation that Amazon will open its own outlets, presumably to sell Amazon-label products. The idea seems farfetched, but before 2001 so was the idea of Apple operating its own stores.”

“Writers are essential. Readers are essential. Publishers are not.” And if you are no longer essential to the process, your job just got a lot harder.

The Nobel laureate “published her last book, Here, in 2008, but she had been working on a collection of poems that an associate said will be published in a book this year.”

“The most important thing to know about the Daily Mail‘s website (more properly called the Mail Online) is that it’s not really an online newspaper. That’s exactly why it’s so successful. Unlike traditional online newspapers, the Mail Online bears little resemblance to the British tabloid that spawned it.”

“You can’t really pay much attention to anything else while you’re reading, so in order to play with any of these new features, you have to stop reading. If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, then the attentional tug of all these peripheral doodads is vaguely annoying, and if you’re not engaged by the story, they aren’t enough on their own to win you over.”

“The more often we hear a song on the radio, the keener we are to buy the CD. It’s the same with literature. The more people ‘pirate’ a book, the better. If they like the beginning, they’ll buy the whole book the next day, because there’s nothing more tiring than reading long screeds of text on a computer screen.”