Category: publishing

“What is a masterpiece? Crime and Punishment. Hamlet. To His Coy Mistress. Ulysses. Madame Bovary. How does one know this? By having read a hell of a lot. Something only stands out from a crowd when there is a crowd to stand out from. This is one of many reasons to read as widely as you can.”

“I am intrigued by how our reading habits differ from those of readers across the Atlantic. The North American fiction hit list is familiar enough… It’s in non-fiction where the differences can be found.”

“An ebook priced like a physical book is a terrible deal for the customer. Among other drawbacks, you can’t resell – or even give away – an ebook in most cases. You don’t really own an ebook; you’re just renting it, even if the company you rent from says you can keep it, because that depends on the life span of the seller.”

“Amazon, Huh? is a new extension for Google’s Chrome browser that ‘warns’ you when you’re about to shop at Amazon. The pop-up challenges you each time you open Amazon.com: ‘When’s the last time Amazon brought one of your favorite writers in to read from her work – for free?”

“Like much of contemporary Paris, Shakespeare and Co is something of a heritage industry, cheerfully selling an idea of itself to customers eager for a glimpse into the past.”

“‘Given that I have today discovered that more illegal copies of my book have been downloaded than I have sold, I am announcing officially that I will not publish another book for a long time,’ Lucía Etxebarria announced on her Facebook page.”

Farhad Manjoo, following up on his already-notorious essay arguing that Amazon.com contributes far more to the health of the book business than do small brick-and-mortar outlets, has a suggestion or two for those retailers on how to compete with the online giant using Amazon’s tools.

“Over the past year much has been made of Larsson explicitly writing Lisbeth, with her tattoos, trauma and propensity for violent wrath, as the grown up version of Pippi Longstocking … This isn’t what [Pippi creator Astrid] Lindgren intended.” (Besides, Lisbeth doesn’t have the right socks. Or hair.)

“Given the scale of the spending reductions the council was required to make, and the information available following earlier studies, a decision that the library service should bear a share of the reduction was not, in my judgement, unlawful.”

“The strategy is to maintain value in what we produce, so whether that’s the print book or the e-book, this costs ‘x’ to make and we need to maintain that to stay alive.”