Category: publishing

“Reading online is, we know, a keyword-driven process, and the reader (this reader) has to exert near-constant mental counter-pressure — drive with his foot on the brakes, as it were — if he is to read words on screen in the way that he once, when younger and more assiduous, read words in books.”

“Faber takes TS Eliot into the 21st century today, with the launch, in association with Touch Press, of an iPad app of The Waste Land that includes a video performance of the poem, notes, commentary and readings from Viggo Mortensen, Ted Hughes, and Eliot himself.”

“Akashic [Books] has already printed nearly 300,000 copies and sold more than 50,000, many in preorders, since the book does not officially go on sale until next week.” Akashic’s titles usually sell a few thousand copies.

“The majority of the titles that were infringed upon were scholarly monographs. It’s very hard to find a correlation between the appearance of these books on these sites, and lost sales. In some cases you can’t help but think that … obscurity might be our biggest problem, rather than piracy.”

“Scholars at the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute have finally completed the Assyrian Dictionary, listing 28,000 words of a language that hasn’t been used for more than 2,000 years. Published in 21 volumes, the dictionary project was started in 1921. In all, 88 scholars worked 90 years to compile it. At $1,400 a set, it will be sold mostly to universities.”

“Conan Doyle sent it to a publisher but it was lost in the post and he then had to reconstruct it from memory. It was never finished. The first Sherlock Holmes novel, A Study in Scarlet, was printed three years later.”

“Over the weekend, The Wall Street Journal ran a piece claiming that fiction at least nominally aimed at readers under 18 – young adult or ‘YA’ fiction, that is – is entirely too dark. … Unsurprisingly, the commentary has come under intense criticism – it’s not in any way a new complaint.”

We’re falling away. Who? “People who drone on about the sanctity of the printed page, the ‘Republic of Letters,’ the artifact of the book, yadda yadda yadda. Why the course correction? I love books, I buy books, and I just can’t make the case for paying double for a product that is, after all, ephemeral.”

“There are no two ways about it: E-books are here to stay. … But for all of the benefit they clearly bring, e-books are still falling short of a promise to make us forget their paper analogs. For now, you still lose something by moving on.”