Category: publishing

“In an interview at the Royal Geographic Society this week, during which VS Naipaul provoked fury by suggesting that women writers are ‘sentimental’ and ‘unequal to me’, he also claimed that ‘I read a piece of writing and within a paragraph or two I know whether it is by a woman or not.’ Do you?”

New Web-only publications such as Lonny, Rue, and High Glossare “oddly identical to a traditional print publication in format, with a table of contents, recurring features and a software platform that recreates the experience of flipping a magazine’s pages.”

Romance novelists and readers have come together to defend their chosen genre against the accusation that “women can become as dangerously unbalanced by these books’ entrancing but distorted messages as men can be by the distorted messages of pornography”.

“One in three kids in the city say they own no books, one in four leaves primary school unable to read or write properly, and one in five leaves secondary school without being able to read and write with confidence.”

Glenn Beck has found a new outlet for his “million book ideas”. The right-wing radio host is launching a publishing imprint in conjunction with Simon & Schuster.

“The Blind Assassin by … Margaret Atwood has been tapped as the inaugural entry for a new, Twitter-based book club. Spearheaded by The Atlantic magazine and Northeastern University journalism professor Jeff Howe, 1book140 aims to spark ‘global, participatory’ conversation about the selected titles.”

“On June 16, the anniversary of the single day in 1904 on which the entire story of Ulysses unfolds, there will be a concerted attempt to recast the novel on Twitter. Ninety-six fans are busy reinterpreting and translating 96 chunks of the novel into 140 character tweets, which will be posted every 15 minutes.”

“It seems like the definition of an untapped market: Spanish speakers make up about 12 percent of the U.S. population, but only 4 percent of books sold in the country are in Spanish. It’s a surprising shortage that has prompted vendors and customers alike to take new steps to prove that there is a viable market for Spanish-language books.”

According to Bowker, the numbers of books published by “traditional” U.S. publishers in 2010 saw a 5 percent increase over 2009, totaling 316,480 books. But these figures are dwarfed by the “nontraditional” category of publishing, which issued a whopping 2.78 million books, a 169 percent increase over the year before.

“[W]hile most [observers] celebrate their effect in drawing attention to all manner of literary endeavours – and raising sales – other observers are beginning to worry about the cumulative effect of competitive spectacles that inevitably identify far more losers than winners.”