Category: publishing

“A team analyzed words appearing in nearly 5.2 million books digitized by Google. The research estimated that about 8,500 new words entered the English language each year from 1950 to 2000.”

“Writers born elsewhere tend to be captivated first by the grandeur and reckless honesty of the great Russian authors; some might always view the country though the prism of Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Chekhov and Vasily Grossman.”

The enormous database “consists of the 500 billion words contained in [5.2 million] books published between 1500 and 2008 in English, French, Spanish, German, Chinese and Russian.… [A]nyone with a computer to plug in a string of up to five words and see a graph that charts the phrase’s use over time.”

“Most e-readers, like Amazon’s Kindle, have an antenna that lets users instantly download new books. But the technology also makes it possible for the device to transmit information back to the manufacturer.”

“For about four years, a devoted group of women have been trekking to local laundromats lugging not detergent bottles and boxes of softener, but baskets of books. … [They] handpick children’s book titles from all interests and reading levels, leave them at the laundromats and later return to clean the books and replenish the selections.”

Laura Miller: “Chances are, [Martin] Amis’ strenuously inventive prose would strike them as too much work. … Such a reader, who is interested solely in the consumption of plot, favors the hackneyed phrase over the original” because she recognizes it immediately and so can consume more plot more quickly.

The Nobel laureate’s novel The Changeling is one of ten finalists for the award for the best novel by an Asian writer in English. Also on the list is journalist Manu Joseph’s debut novel, Serious Men, which won The Hindu newspaper’s best fiction award last month.

“In the era of online buying and the e-book, both currently dominated by Amazon, the big chains are in trouble — and new technologies may provide independent bookstores with a lifeline.”

“Writing is one of the top 10 professions in which people are most likely to suffer from depression, with men particularly at risk from the illness, according to US website health.com. The site puts artists and writers among the most vulnerable of professionals, alongside other ‘at risk’ jobs including care workers, teachers, social workers, maintenance staff and salespeople.”

“It’s the biggest cliché in mystery writing. But where did the cliché originate? Were any fictional butlers ever actually revealed as murderers? Judging from the phrase’s cultural resonance, you’d think the early mystery scene was seething with hatchet-wielding manservants. An investigation of the evidence, however, reveals another story entirely. The butler was framed.”