Category: publishing

“Last year, Robert Darnton, a cultural historian and director of Harvard University’s library system, began to raise the prospect of creating a public digital library. This library would include the digitized collections of the country’s great research institutions, but it would also bring in other media – video, music, film – as well as the collection of Web pages maintained by the Internet Archive.”

Using a famously nasty evisceration of Keats’s Endymion as a starting point, Robert Pinsky reminds us of the three prime directives – and observes how rarely all three are followed.

“Closing libraries is the behaviour of a debased culture. Libraries are not just a source of books. Many of us feel that they symbolise something more, that Britain is a civilised place. And when part of our civilisation is being destroyed, we have to stand up against the barbarians.”

“Because it was one of the top booksellers in the country, publishing houses had entire departments dedicated to working with Borders and its sales teams. It also means that suddenly, publishers have lost a major thoroughfare for book sales, one of their biggest. … So what Borders closing means, at the basic level, is that fewer paper books will be produced.”

“A judge warned lawyers for authors and publishers and Google Tuesday that he will decide whether snippets of books can be sold online without the permission of copyright holders if the sides do not settle their 6-year-old case soon with an agreement to create a massive online library.”

Students can rent the books for as little as 30 days or as many as 360 days, and can add an extra day or buy the book if they want, Amazon said.

“They have been, and I’ve explained this to the heads of the company in London and New York, unusually shrill and punitive towards authors.”

“Borders Group Inc., the bankrupt bookstore chain, faces a sale to liquidators after Najafi Cos. declined to bid. … Najafi had made an offer that would have kept some of the retailer’s remaining 400 stores open.”

“Some of the qualms about digital research reflect a feeling that anything obtained too easily loses its value. What we work for, we better appreciate. If an amateur can be beamed to the top of Mount Everest, will the view be as magnificent as for someone who has accomplished the climb? Maybe not, because magnificence is subjective. But it’s the same view.”

“This year’s 101 students were chosen from more than 475 applicants, the highest number in years, showing that they were not deterred by the $6,990 fee for tuition and room and board on the Columbia campus — or by the limitations of entry-level positions that pay around $30,000 a year.”