Category: publishing

“JK Rowling shocked and thrilled her fans in equal measure today, with the revelation that her new venture Pottermore was set to feature a wealth of new and previously unpublished material about the world of Harry Potter.”

“With Google clamping down on content farms, the attention of those looking to get rich quickly from churning out content is now turning to major ebook retailers – and to selling stolen and replicated content.”

“The Canadian writer Lawrence Hill recently received the unsettling news that a Dutch political group would be assembling on Wednesday in Amsterdam to burn copies of his novel, The Book of Negroes (published in the Netherlands under the title Het Negerboek, and in the U.S. as Someone Knows My Name).”

“Bookstores, including some of the most prominent around the country, have begun selling tickets or requiring a book purchase of customers who attend author readings and signings, a practice once considered unthinkable.”

“Somewhere in the space between the book’s lush pictures and obscene words lies a kind of existential despair that is very particularly ours. … The portrait is of a very ordinary family life, but what is revealing, what may have lead to all the ecstatic blurbs, … is its Sartre-like bleakness and claustrophobia.”

“Libraries are moving into content creation, but mostly in order to help their communities share what they already create through institutional repositories and open access scholarship.”

Apart from their material, the key to success has been learning how best to market their material, including “piggy-backing” on the success of other similar e-books, as well as cross-promoting within their own two novels.

“Haiku, for all its simplicity, grew out of a complex tradition of Japanese collaborative poetry called renga,” in which a dozen or more poets “might produce as many as 100 linked stanzas, which mutate over time to take the renga through different movements.”

For instance: “In Great General Mighty Wing (1994), a sort of Kimilsungist Disney fable, the honeybee general Mighty Wing leads his hive in a successful attack on an alliance of wasps and spiders that are plotting to seize control of the hive’s Garden of 1,000 Flowers.”

Kill Shakespeare is “a series of comic books pitting Shakespeare’s greatest heroes against his greatest villains.” The set has attracted fans ranging from high school students and teachers to the director of Toronto’s Soulpepper Theatre.