Category: publishing

“The British Library has come under fire from booksellers for including a link to online giant Amazon.co.uk on entries in its public online catalogue.”

“Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.”

“While the political climate has eased, publishers still face practical problems. The Arab publishing world, made up of 22 diverse countries with a population of 300 million people, faces low revenues and inefficient distribution networks.” E-books may change all of that.

“What has changed, and will continue to change, is the library’s appearance. The way the library looks today is drastically different from the way it did 50 years ago. Many of the visual cues of library-ness are vanishing.” See some of those visual cues in the slideshow.

Toronto writer Larry Gaudet pairs Goya’s “Disasters of War,” print reactions to the Napoleonic wars, with his own prose about today’s violence. You can get his new book for anything from $45,000 to, he hopes, a free download.

When the shortlist for the UK’s Man Booker prize was announced, some literary critics and authors thought the list was “too readable.” The disgruntled forces’ new Literature Prize might be provocative – but bring it on, says a member of the Booker committee.

“The book features hundreds of images, by Spiegelman and others; there are charts, page breakdowns, fascinating discussions of structure — but even more, the sense that the work itself was anything but inevitable, that it was an epic struggle to produce.”

In the U.K., critics fret over the readability of the Booker Prize shortlist. In the U.S., critics fret that the National Book Award shortlist is not popular enough. So what should the NBA actually stand for, and why?

“At present, it’s only a cottage industry, but its makers are confident that with sufficient backing it could supply the mass market, at equivalent cost, with paper whose ecological footprint is half that of wood-pulp products, and leaves our friends the trees untouched.”

“To the further dismay of campaigners, within hours of the ruling council contractors began boarding over the windows of the six doomed libraries, all of which have been closed with immediate effect, a council spokeswoman said.”