Category: publishing

“With three out of five short-listed novels also named as Giller finalists, and two also appearing on the short list for the Rogers Writers’ Trust Prize, the choices demonstrate a rare harmony of opinion among literary juries this fall.”

“The e-book hasn’t killed the book; instead, it’s killing the ‘page.’ Today’s e-readers scroll text continuously, eliminating the single preformed page, along with any text defined by being on its bottom.”

“I wanted to write about love and marriage, houses and children, school runs and shopping and ageing parents. In all these everyday concerns I find the stuff of drama: this is the actual life so many of us are living,” says writer William Nicholson. “The first publisher to read it said to me, ‘It’s wonderful. I’d publish it if you were a woman.'”

Sure, you might have 2000 books on your Kindle, but who would ever know? After all, the point of bookshelves is to make your erudition clear.

Novelist Richard Ford doesn’t understand why so many writers are all about “show me the money.” His first advance “was real money, okay. But it wasn’t ‘serious money.’ That, you got from a job. And writing wasn’t really a job. It was more of a lark.”

The new Kindle Fire has been touted as a way for people to read books and more books. Whatever happened to “the future” – hypertext, interactivity, vooks and all of that? Maybe the future lies in the past.

“Tipped as a potential Nobel prize winner for many years, Transtroemer is the eighth European to win the Nobel Prize for Literature in the last 10 years. He is the first Swede to receive the prize since authors Eyvind Johnson and Harry Martinson shared it in 1974.”

“Where publishing is concerned, the Internet is both midwife and executioner. It has never been easier to reach large numbers of readers, but these readers have never felt more entitled to be informed and entertained for free.”

“A new generation of Canadian writers took centre stage on Tuesday with the announcement of six finalists for the 2011 Scotiabank Giller Prize, led by two largely unknown young writers from the West Coast who have become world-leading nominees due to the impact of their current novels.”

“We’re so accustomed to thinking of copyright as the foundation of a writer’s livelihood that it’s difficult to imagine how authors could survive without it.” But back before copyright was invented, authors “made nothing from the sale of their books; their profits derived from the wealthy patron to whom the work was dedicated.” Are we headed to that model, modified for the digital age, again?