Category: publishing

“Dictionary definitions tend to be out of date or incomplete. Our goal is to find examples on the Web that use the word so clearly that you can understand its meaning from reading the sentence.”

“Glance at 2011’s chart, and you could be forgiven for wondering if 12 months have really passed. For this was a year when old books saw off new ones, and paperbacks sent hardbacks packing.”

“E-books now account for about 20% of the market — more than double a year ago. An even bigger surge is expected this week and next month, with people unwrapping their new e-readers and tablets. In the next few years, e-books are likely to match print sales and eventually overtake them. For readers, books have never been more accessible or plentiful. But no one is sure what it means for traditional publishers, authors and bookstores.”

Dr. Rowan Williams says that the Richard Dawkins school of militant atheism sees religious faith as “a rather second-rate theory to explain why the world is the way it is or a second-rate psychological crutch for people who can’t bear the weight of reality … I turn to Dostoevsky and think, well that sounds more like what I think faith is than what Richard Dawkins thinks faith is.”

“[In] the 1920s he was arguably the most visible poet in America, whose performances were witnessed, and applauded, by thousands.” His work was anthologized and taught in schools well into the 1960s; since then, his reputation has plummeted and his memory has faded. What happened?

“A few months after Zippy debuted in ‘I Gave My Heart to a Pinhead and He Made a Fool Out of Me,’ [Bill] Griffith was doing a strip about another of his primary characters, ‘Mr. Toad,’ and thought the egomanical reptile could use a sidekick who was his opposite. ‘Zippy was devoid of ego, as well as linear thought, and he seemed like an ideal fit,’ Griffith notes. ‘Within a year or so, Mr. Toad had become Zippy’s sidekick’.”

“E-books have grown to around 20 percent of the market and the percentage should keep rising in 2012 as millions of ever-cheaper devices are purchased. But the e-revolution remains in its early stages and books can still sell big through paper alone.”

“The study of word processing may sound like a peculiarly tech-minded task for an English professor, but literary scholars have become increasingly interested in studying how the tools of writing both shape literature and are reflected in it, whether it’s the quill pen of the Romantic poets or the early round typewriter, known as a writing ball, that Friedrich Nietzsche used to compose some aphoristic fragments.”

“While many major publishers have effectively gone on strike, more than 1,000 smaller publishers, who don’t have best-seller sales that need protection, happily sell e-books to libraries. That means the public library has plenty of e-books available for the asking — no waiting.”