Heaven Is for Real, an account of a young boy’s vision of (Christian) heaven while undergoing emergency surgery, “has become a sleeper paperback hit of the winter, dominating best-seller lists and selling hundreds of thousands of copies.”
Category: publishing
Mapping British English Against US English (There Are Differences, You Know)
“It is a pronunciation that is changing in the UK but not in America. It is good evidence to show that British English is diverging from American English, and scotches the myth that we’re all sounding more like Americans. It seems British English speakers are changing the way they speak and Americans aren’t.”
Will English Continue To Be The World’s Language?
The dominance of English today as the language of business, science and popular entertainment appears unassailed and perhaps unassailable. For the linguist David Crystal, it is entirely plausible that “English, in some shape or form, will find itself in the service of the world community for ever”.
National Book Award Winners Announced
Jennifer Egan won for fiction for “A Visit From the Goon Squad.” In nonfiction, Isabel Wilkerson, a former reporter for The New York Times, won for “The Warmth of Other Suns”
Ruining Arbitrage: How the Web Is Hurting Secondhand Bookshops
“[S]couting [for good finds] no longer works. The internet has killed it. Sites like abebooks.com list more than 100m used books, of varying desirability and price. Every dealer now knows how much the other dealers are asking for their wares, with a resulting homogenisation of prices.”
What’s Needed Next For E-Books
“Discovery is terrible in the digital environment. The iBooks app isn’t very good, and even shopping on a Kindle isn’t a great experience. If you know what you’re looking for it’s fantastic, but the whimsy and delight you get at indie bookstores is absolutely missing.”
Report: New Business Model Needed For Scholarly Publishing
“[T]he simple product-sales models of the 20th century, devised when information was scarce and expensive, are clearly inappropriate for the 21st-century scholarly ecosystem. As the report details, new forms of openness, fees, subscriptions, products, and services are being combined to try to build sustainable business models to fund innovative digital scholarly publishing in diverse arenas.”
HarperCollins’ Bizarre Library E-Book Lending Justification
“Whether a HarperCollins book has the circulatory vigour to cope with 26 checkouts or 200, it’s bizarre to argue that this finite durability is a feature that we should carefully import into new media. It would be like assuming the contractual obligation to attack the microfilm with nail-scissors every time someone looked up an old article.”
What If You Could Jot in the Margins of an E-Book? And Read Other People’s Jottings, Too?
“Last month, Amazon announced what could be a landmark in electronic marginalia: public note sharing for the Kindle – Coleridgean fantasy software that will make your friends’ notes appear (if you want them to) directly on your own books.”
Survey: Readers Still Prefer Printed Books
“Print books still look unlikely to go out of fashion in the immediate future however, with both adults and teenagers ranking them ahead of news, comics, e-books and magazines as their preferred media.”