Category: publishing

“Simply put, this generation of scholars is helpless without technology. Many textbook publishers, meanwhile, are acting like 1990s music executives, slapping on high price tags and copyright handcuffs that conspire to make their products less valuable than their dead tree counterparts.”

“Today’s literary scholarship too often serves as a vehicle for politics, and even professors who care little for public opinion are eager to indoctrinate students in their views. We seem to have given up on the notion that literature itself can be useful. But in doing so, we are forgetting a crucial function of the books we study.”

“Haruki Murakami’s venerated novel of love and mental illness, Norwegian Wood, has been pulled off a reading list for New Jersey teenagers after a rash of complaints from parents.”

“Time travel and warp drives may, alas, be out of the picture in a new partnership between NASA and Tor/Forge Books, which will see the science fiction publisher’s authors teaming up with the space agency to release a range of ‘scientifically accurate and entertaining’ novels”.

“Much of the music — about nine hours’ worth for the typical novel — is instrumental or ambient noise. But during livelier passages, a reader may hear the patter of footsteps, a booming gong, a crackling fire or the tick of a grandfather clock.”

“Jo Nesbø, the Norwegian author whose books about the driven, enigmatic detective Harry Hole have made him a bestseller in Britain, said yesterday it was inevitable that crime writing would change in the wake of the Anders Behring Breivik shootings last month.”

Graphic novelist James Sturm, who takes several years to write and draw a book, decided to try producing single-panel gag cartoons – and then to try selling some to the Holy Grail of cartooning. The effort turned out to require serious discipline and a virtual training regimen.

“The 12th edition of the Chambers Dictionary, published on Thursday, features a new miscellany of linguaphile-pleasing lists. Particularly entertaining is a compendium of insults – never has cursing been so creative.”

“John Locke, the first self-published author to sell one million e-books on Amazon.com, has made a deal with Simon & Schuster for the sales and distribution of his print books.”

“Children are now far more likely to read emails and websites than comics, according to a survey of more than 18,000 eight to 17-year-olds. The research also found that while one in 10 children claimed to have read 10 books in the last month, 13% had not read any at all. And boys were nearly twice as likely to say they never read than girls. Some 29% of all children read every day.”