Category: publishing

“Random House Inc., the publishing industry’s last major holdout against the ‘agency’ pricing model championed by Apple Inc., said Monday that it is reversing course and will begin offering its digital books in the U.S. under the new pricing system, in a bid to broaden its e-book distribution.”

“What really dismays me is this: publishers believe that libraries are not good for business, that sharing is a bug, that book culture would survive if everyone had to pay for everything they read.This is short-sighted madness.”

“As more and more of our reading moves onto hand-held screens, then publishers and booksellers will have to find increasingly imaginative ways of tempting us to buy, or rather, download them. … Also, to state the obvious: screens do not mean the end of images.”

“Even though the region had several well-established independent booksellers at the time, the Borders “experience” promised the hand-selling of independents with the wide selection of Kmart. As the landscape evolved in the digital age, that cozy, caffeine-scented solicitude gave way to the uniformity of all national chains and Borders lost its distinctiveness.”

Long before 1949, when the term “ergonomics” was coined, doctors blamed reading for health hazards including (to quote one 1795 authority) “weakening of the eyes, heat rashes, gout, arthritis, hemorrhoids, asthma, apoplexy, pulmonary disease, indigestion, blocking of the bowels, nervous disorder, migraines, epilepsy, hypochondria and melancholy.”

I. A. Richards called the book “a machine to think with”, yet it is curiously resistant to technological standardization. That point escapes many digitizing technologists, who are not perhaps the anti-book boors as sometimes portrayed.

“How does the solitary writer attract attention in the age of mass culture? One answer is to mobilise the tools of mass culture and exploit social media.”

“HarperCollins has decided to change their agreement with e-book distributor OverDrive. They forced OverDrive, which is a main e-book distributor for libraries, to agree to terms so that HarperCollins e-books will only be licensed for checkout 26 times. Librarians have blown up over this, calling for a boycott of HarperCollins.”

“Founded in 1910 in Ottawa, Ill., the Zetema book club started for the purposes of ‘study and mutual improvement,’ said member Judith Wrobel. Members have gathered in her Ottawa home midafternoon to explain more than a century of club history.”

“With Kindle Singles, Amazon has gone white knight on us. In one fell swoop, it has figured out a way to shut out virtually every entity that mediates between journalists and readers: traditional publishers, printers, warehousers, advertisers and the World Wide Web. All that’s left is the bookstore — Amazon.”