Category: publishing

“From whoopensocker to upscuddle, strubbly to swivet, 50 years after it was first conceived the Dictionary of American Regional English is finally about to reach the end of the alphabet. The fifth volume of the dictionary, covering ‘slab’ to ‘zydeco’, is out in March.”

“Barnes & Noble has made a decision not to stock Amazon published titles in our store showrooms. Our decision is based on Amazon’s continued push for exclusivity with publishers, agents and the authors they represent.”

“NBC Publishing’s current plan is to release its first e-book in February and 30 over the course of the year. This will include both multimedia and E Ink books — and in some cases, print copies, too, probably in partnership with another publisher.”

“Seventy-two percent of adult cell phone users send and receive regular text messages, according to the Pew Research Center’s Internet and American Life Project. The numbers rise to 87 percent for teens, who average 50 text messages a day. We’re not speaking into a microphone, but we’re certainly recording our thoughts in ways that make them both public and possibly eternal. So how careful should we be about our grammar?”

“In the summer months, our children, not just in the city of Chicago but across the country, lose about six months of their educational standards from one grade to the next,” Rahm Emanuel said at a City Hall news conference. “And one of the things I asked him to take on was to find that mission in the summer, how the Chicago Public Library can step into that void.”

Laura Miller writes that there’s a deep-seated prejudice in the collective American mind – especially with respect to educating children – against enjoying fiction purely for pleasure: one should always be able to find in a story some lesson or moral; the goal should always be some sort of self-improvement.

“Texting is like the old ticker tape: highly dramatic and intense if it’s reporting the Wall Street Crash or the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, not through any inherent virtue of the machine. Is the breaking news which runs at the foot of the screen on the BBC news channel condensed and consequently poetic? I fail to see how anyone could rationally claim that it is. Again texting is linear only. Poetry is lines in depth designed to be seen in relation or in deliberate disrelation to lines above and below.”

“‘A good hatchet job draws as much excited attention as a good book any day.’ That’s the late, great critic Wilfrid Sheed … On Feb. 7, The Omnivore, a British Web site that aggregates cultural criticism, will announce the winner of its first annual Hatchet Job of the Year Award for book reviews.”

“The internet is full of ironies. I, for one, could never have guessed that writing about the end of books would generate more income for me than actually publishing the damn things. I’ve been on an End of Books reading tour since August and it turns out that what the internet gurus say about consumers being more willing to pay for events, speeches and gigs, rather than buying cultural objects, is now becoming true.”

“Maybe nobody will care about printed books 50 years from now, but I do. When I read a book, I’m handling a specific object in a specific time and place. The fact that when I take the book off the shelf it still says the same thing – that’s reassuring.”