Category: publishing

“Man Booker’s excellent circus would not be the same without the spectacle of breathtaking snubs and horrifying errors of judgment, but this year’s most flagrantly sidelined titles amount, you might think, to a more enticing selection than the actual shortlist.”

“Amazon.com Inc is in talks with book publishers about launching a media library service similar to Netflix Inc for tablets and other digital books.”

“Nobody could deny that Jeffrey Archer ticks the zippy box, along with hundreds of other authors who might, in previous years, have been given to understand that a total lack of seriousness, along with the inability to write a decent sentence, still constituted powerful obstacles to Booker success. No longer.”

“Despite having published more than 30 books, reinventing himself every time and coaxing new forms of experimentation and innovation from the rigid structures of Arabic poetry, [Mahmoud Darwish] is still generally considered a nationalist. This is a source of pride for some, a serious hang-up for others.”

“If you’ve ever tried reading comics on the iPad, you know that it’s an almost-perfect delivery method.” Now that publishers have started offering same-day digital delivery, sales numbers support their new push. Only one thing is still missing.

“American poetry criticism faces a major problem, one that has nothing to do with poetry, or readers, or anything remotely literary. The problem is that a critic who wants to quote a poem in a book has to face a permissions regime that ranges from unpredictable to plain crazy, as I discovered while working on a guidebook to modern poetry for general readers. The permissions took months to compile, and the initial estimate was nearly $20,000.”

“A small American press has been swamped with complaints after publishing a version of Hamlet by the science fiction author Orson Scott Card in which King Hamlet is a gay paedophile.”

“The critics of the anglification argue that the use of English as preferred language of research worldwide works against all those who do not have English as their mother tongue, while at the same time giving an unfair advantage to the native speakers of the language of Shakespeare.”

“The research suggests having a scene in our head can impact our subsequent behavior, and that scene needn’t be conveyed in the form of eye-popping computer graphics. Descriptive prose will do quite nicely.”

“Burying your head in a novel isn’t just a way to escape the world: psychologists are increasingly finding that reading can affect our personalities. A trip into the world of Stephenie Meyer, for example, actually makes us feel like vampires.”