Category: publishing

Irshad Manji: “A few days ago, Amazon.com announced that for the first time ever, it’s selling more e-books than paper ones. … ‘Sad,’ a colleague of mine grumbled at hearing the news. ‘Welcome to the suicide of a literate society.’ Wrong. It’s the reverse.”

“Perhaps he’s only a writer’s writer. And a certain kind of (self-regarding?) writer at that. Martin Amis: ‘I bow to no one in my love for this great and greatly inspiring genius.’ Rushdie again: ‘The most important writer ever to cross the boundary between one language and another.’ Others bowing in worship include John Updike, Don DeLillo, Jeffrey Eugenides and Zadie Smith. But these maybe aren’t people you look to for book recommendations.”

“The British author Alan Shadrake has lost an appeal against his contempt of court conviction and will begin a jail sentence in Singapore next week. … [He] refused to apologise for his book, Once a Jolly Hangman: Singapore Justice in the Dock, which is critical of the country’s use of the death penalty for crimes such as drug trafficking.”

“With ebooks now growing in popularity, publishers are beginning to think about enhancing ebooks and even recreating books as apps for tablet computers.”

“What would James Joyce think of Twitter? More important, what would his handle be? It’s impossible not to imagine the inherent fun the great English-language experimentalist would find in translating his voluminous ideas onto the 140-character template, or at least the irresistible challenge.”

“Yes, I am aware of the technical distinction between less and fewer and uninterested and disinterested and infer and imply and all the rest of them but none of these are of importance to me.”

“There is a Wild West quality to the book business these days, and it is on full display at BookExpo America, an annual trade show that draws tens of thousands of authors, publishers and booksellers.”

“In a trove of interviews that are to Supreme Court obsessives what the State Department cables released by WikiLeaks were to students of American foreign policy, eight Supreme Court justices described how they write their opinions, what they look for in briefs and the art of legal writing generally.”

Laura Miller: “Yet if you [find Roth’s novels insufferable], and you happen to be a woman, chances are excellent that – no matter what you say – Roth proponents will assume your aversion is based in politics. This is as frustrating as telling the chef you don’t care for lamb chops and getting a self-righteous lecture on his supplier’s humane farming practices.”

Indeed, the Nook and Barnes & Noble’s vast digital library played a key role in attracting an offer from Liberty Media last week. The bid values Barnes & Noble at about $1 billion.