Category: publishing

“[C]ookbooks have been late bloomers in the e-book revolution … Yet cookbooks have recently begun to show signs of strength in the digital book market.” The genre’s new poster child: Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, out in digital form next week.

“A late gamble on Bob Dylan has sent the singer-songwriter soaring up the odds to become the fourth favourite to win the Nobel prize for literature on Thursday.”

“More than 800 bookshops have shut in the past five years, including almost 400 independent outlets, according to new figures from the Booksellers Association of UK and Ireland.”

“Webster considered the King James ungrammatical, obsolete, and filthy. He also thought Americans didn’t need any king’s bible; they needed their own translation … Webster’s Holy Bible … with Amendments of the Language appeared in 1833. In it, Job no longer eschews evil; he shuns it” – and there is no slaying, spewing, or suckling, either. (And then there are all the prepositions.)

“[The] twelve men of the amazing 2012 Men of the Stacks calendar … are all professional librarians, and they are all, from the looks of it, extremely well-read.” (Ahem.)

“The service arrives as authors are increasingly looking for ways to circumvent the traditional publishing model, take advantage of the infinite shelf space of the e-book world and release their own work. That’s especially the case for reviving out-of-print books whose rights have reverted back to the author.”

Despite the site’s 1 million users, the site set up to launch J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series as e-books isn’t quite ready for prime time.

“By buying into ‘chick-lit’ we are buying into the notion – perpetuated by publishers – that, as women, we require a different genre of fiction. That is harmful, not just because it’s patronising, but because it undermines the work of the author too.”

“If this is the valley of destruction, then many publishers can begin to glimpse distant sunlit uplands. People haven’t stopped reading fiction or non-fiction, or paying for what they read. On the contrary, via both Kindle and printed page, they’re reading as much as ever.”

Jeffrey Eugenides: “We know from our Derrida that narrative is exhausted and character a fraud. We know that we might be ‘mocked’ for persisting in writing realist fiction. But we keep on doing it! Because we think there is something about reality, and especially about human consciousness, that can be accurately described and that the novel is the best way to do it.”