Category: publishing

Yes, the Bodleian, the Sorbonne and Trinity College Dublin made the list, as did some gems little-known to anglophones (Coimbra, Salamanca), a surprise or two (UW Seattle), and some modernist landmarks (Yale’s Beinecke, Free University of Berlin).

Farhad Manjoo: “Compared with online retailers, bookstores present a frustrating consumer experience. … As much as I despise some of its recent tactics, no company in recent years has done more than Amazon to ignite a national passion for buying, reading, and even writing new books.”

“[The] initial weeks of Christmas shopping … have yielded surprisingly strong sales for many bookstores, which report that they have been lifted by an unusually vibrant selection; customers who seem undeterred by pricier titles; and new business from people who used to shop at Borders.”

Having gathered plaudits, subscribes and National Magazine Awards over the previous seven years, VQR was sent reeling in 2010 by the suicide of a longtime deputy editor and the resignation of two staffers following accusations of bullying by the top editor. Now the University of Virginia has hired two new officers to help stabilize the journal.

“The New Yorker Wolcott Gibbs wrote for–elegant, literary, ironic, laced with a bracing skepticism–was the spiritual house organ for people looking for relief from the clang of rivaling opinions, the barkering of each week’s Next New Thing, the knowingness of haughty punditry, the maelstrom of the world’s unrelenting noise. The New Yorker of the current day flourishes financially, its circulation in the ascendant. The New Yorker of Wolcott Gibbs’s time, published in the world we now live in, would probably not last out the year.”

Making the cover for the WaPo’s Best Books of 2011 required something Amazon could never provide – a physical bookstore, with a physical bookstores’ staff.

danah boyd: “Why the hell aren’t academics working together to resist the corporatization and manipulation of the knowledge that they produce? Why aren’t they collectively teaming up to challenge the status quo?”

“Until books are downloaded into our brain, Matrix-style, the idea of reading everything is pure science fiction.”

“My son’s friendship with Dostoyevsky has been a disaster for any kind of authority I might have wielded. A father wants simply for his house to run in a peaceable and agreeable fashion. The Grand Inquisitor and the Underground Man have subverted that ambition more surely than any radical political program could.”

“Attorneys general in Connecticut and, reportedly, Texas, have also begun inquiries into the way electronic booksellers price their wares, and whether companies such as Apple and Amazon have set up pricing practices that are ultimately harmful to consumers.”