Category: publishing

Though he died in 1982, he “is still a member of a literary movement called OuLiPo: the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle (workshop for potential literature) does not see death as an obstacle to membership. His love of writing work in eccentric, apparently impossible forms continues to inspire. But can a work written by such crazy systems ever be a masterpiece?”

“A Chinese publisher is set to bring out the first ever authorised edition of Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude in Chinese, after winning an auction for the rights with a fee reported to be in excess of $1m.” Pirated editions have been so common in China that an angry GGM vowed 20 years ago never to license the book there.

in 2010 sales of e-books and audio book downloads in the ‘general titles’ category, which includes novels and consumer titles, shot up from £4m to £16m. Academic and professional books still dominated overall digital sales, which reached £180m last year.”

“What would Flannery O’Connor have sounded like if she’d had a Twitter feed? Or Charles Dickens? Or Shakespeare? The writers themselves may no longer be with us, but clever fans are impersonating them on Twitter.”

The cuts “underscore a deeper confusion about what libraries are: what they do, who they serve, and – in an age where the notion of books itself seems mortally flawed – why we still need them. What’s the point of buildings filled with print? Isn’t all our wisdom electronic now? Shouldn’t libraries die at their appointed time, like workhouses and temperance halls?”

“This brave new world of publishing has been heralded by the release of a new e-book reader by Amazon, in which adverts are automatically embedded in the text of novels. Harry Hurt’s innovation was to incorporate the adverts within the original text, but even this is not an entirely new departure.”

“Andrew Kessler said he did not intend the month-long pop-up bookstore to be a profitable business so much as a cross between a marketing stunt and conversation piece at a time when many conventional bookstores and publishers are struggling.”

“In this era when most writers are expected to do everything but run the printing presses, self-promotion is so accepted that we hardly give it a second thought. And yet, whenever I have a new book about to come out, I have to shake the unpleasant sensation that there is something unseemly about my own clamor for attention. Peddling my work like a Viagra salesman still feels at odds with the high calling of literature.”

The idea, inspired by similar initiatives in France and Spain, would offer the pension to those who are aged over 65 and have published at least five books or invested more than 20 years in “literary creation”.

“Anecdotally I am sensing a market shift that threatens the continuing wide spread distribution of hardcover and paperback books that currently dominate our bookshelves. Will printed books become gifts and souvenirs?”