“I think it’s bad for readers, bad for publishing, and bad for culture. Above all, despite appearances, the best-seller list isn’t populist; it’s elitist. … The best-seller list functions, in essence, as a restraint of trade, a visible hand that crushes the life out of the literary marketplace.”
Category: publishing
Dan Brown Books Are Most-Donated To Charity
“Next most donated after Brown were crime writer Ian Rankin, prolific author of the Detective Inspector Rebus series, and Top Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson, who last year became the first non-fiction author to enter the top 10, and has moved up from number eight to number three.”
Will e-Tablets Save Comics Or Kill Them?
“The comics industry is slowly, agonizingly, belatedly backing into digital distribution, but with a deeply unusual goal in mind: to push digital customers toward brick-and-mortar stores for long enough to make sure the business can survive its forthcoming, unavoidable mutation.”
Prestigious John Llewellyn Rhys Book Award Cancels Over Money
“Earlier this year the the book charity lost half of its funding from the Department of Education. £5,000, the award has been presented to many authors, who have gone on to become well-established, including Sir Andrew Motion, Melvyn Bragg and William Boyd.”
What Do Bestseller Lists Say About Us?
“The best seller is caught in a peculiar paradox: Its popularity can be understood as both proof and negation of its value. If the only attribute inherent to the best seller is sales, then any book that is popular runs the risk of being lumped in with the rest and tossed aside like a candy wrapper once finished.”
The Poetry Magazine Everyone Wants To Be In
It’s one of the most difficult to get into — it publishes under 1 percent of what’s submitted.
Why Some Readers Lose Interest In Fiction
“Non-writers who have bailed on novels and short stories often say they’ve exhausted their patience for flagrantly ‘untrue’ narratives. One blogger explained it thus: ‘I put it down to having experienced enough real life narrative and drama such that made-up stories no longer appeal’.”
Understanding Literature Through “Distant” Reading
“As its name suggests, the Lit Lab tackles literary problems by scientific means: hypothesis-testing, computational modeling, quantitative analysis. Similar efforts are currently proliferating under the broad rubric of ‘digital humanities,’ but Franco Moretti’s approach is among the more radical. He advocates what he terms ‘distant reading’: understanding literature not by studying particular texts, but by aggregating and analyzing massive amounts of data.”
Is There A Relationship Between Energy (Fuel) And Literature?
“Instead of divvying up literary works into hundred-year intervals (or elastic variants like the long eighteenth or twentieth century), or categories harnessing the history of ideas (Romanticism, Enlightenment), what happens if we sort texts according to the energy sources that made them possible?”
“Sleepwalking” Into Book Piracy
Have publishers set themselves up to be pirated as digital books become popular?