Category: publishing

“See, you can’t really say that you’re going to ‘change everything’ when it comes to textbooks and announce that your partners are the 3 companies who already control 90% of the textbook market. You can’t say that you’re going to disrupt the textbook industry by going digital when Pearson — one of those big 3 and, indeed, the largest educational company in the world — made over $3 billion from digital content last year alone.”

Margaret Atwood: “People – not only women – have sent me photographs of their bodies with phrases from The Handmaid’s Tale tattooed on them, ‘Nolite te bastardes carborundorum’ and ‘Are there any questions?’ being the most frequent.”

“The iPad’s primary differentiator from a dedicated e-reader is going to be its ability to display full-color, interactive, multimedia content. With textbooks, that means not just audio and video, but also three-dimensional diagrams that can be touched, rotated, explored.”

The annual fete “began with ‘a few readings’ on the edge of a small arts event … This year, with Oprah Winfrey, Deepak Chopra, Jamaica Kincaid, Lionel Shriver and Richard Dawkins among its lineup, organizers expect as many as 100,000 attendees to turn up in this arid Indian city.”

“Dickens refers to ‘the friendships we form with books’, while Charles Lamb regarded books as ‘the best company’.” The problem, of course, is that however much we care about books, books don’t care about us.

“Apple’s product is big on promise and will, in the end, kill the sale of paper textbooks. Of that I’m certain. How long it takes is the million dollar question today, but knowing the speed at which Apple forces the paradigm to shift, I doubt the textbook publishers will survive much longer just selling dead tree product.”

“A plan by the education secretary, Michael Gove, to send a copy of the King James Bible to every school in the country – each including a personal inscription from him – has run into trouble after government sources reported he has been told to find private funding for the project.”

“An Afghan calligrapher has worked for five years to create the world’s biggest Koran, a bid to show the world that Afghanistan’s rich cultural heritage and traditions have been damaged but not destroyed by 30 years of war.”

“New writers could expect an average advance of £10,000 around 20 years ago: “Now they’re lucky to get between £1,000 and £3,000.” Research by the society shows that 75% of writers earn less than £20,000 a year and 46% less than £5,000.”

“In 2011, the Times reviewed 254 works of fiction. 104, or 40.9 percent, were by women, and 150, or 59.1 percent, were by men. Of the works of fiction that got two full reviews, 21 were by women, 22 were by men.”