Category: publishing

“For the most part, now such illusions have been dismissed, and even while desperately treading water (and watching some of their weaker brethren go under), the presses, and many others both in and outside of the university sphere, are now seriously and smartly seeking … short-term and long-term replacements not just for a broken business model but for a shattered publishing ecosystem.”

“Textbook publishers could see the U.S. market flooded with less fancy editions they have produced for students in poorer countries. The foreign editions might be flimsier, but their content is the same as in the editions the textbook companies sell to U.S. students — and they are “often half or a quarter of the price of the domestic editions.”

“Imagine a book–in this case the 1934 novel The Street of Crocodiles, a surrealistic set of linked stories by the Polish Holocaust victim Bruno Schulz–whose pages have been cut out to form a latticework of words. The result is a new, much shorter story and a paper sculpture, a remarkable piece of inert, unclickable technology.”

“Up to a quarter of librarians lose their jobs over the next year. Widespread library closures are expected as councils cut their services and look to volunteers in an attempt to balance budgets hit by the coalition’s spending review.”

“Will no one stand up to Google? French publishers used to be in the vanguard of opposition to the internet giant’s mass digitisation programme, the so-called Google Print Initiative (GPI). Not any more”

“The site on Saturday was ordered to take down the more than a dozen pages it had posted of America by Heart: Reflections on Family, Faith, and Flag until a Nov. 30 hearing, said a spokeswoman for HarperCollins, the book’s publisher.”

Frey genuinely sounds peeved at the attack he has come under for what detractors say is exploiting young, unknown writers. “People like to make me out to be a villain. I don’t love that. I really have no interest in being cast as a bad boy in this case.”

“Any day now the English-speaking world will start to celebrate a number one bestseller of unprecedented literary significance. That sounds like an oxymoron, but it’s actually a quatercentenary. I refer not to the collected works of William Shakespeare but a contemporary rival volume that has not only sold non-stop for 400 years but also shaped our imaginative landscape: the King James Bible.”

“It is a smash hit across the country, landing on best-seller lists and going back to press six times, for a total print run — so far — of 275,000. The publisher cannot print copies quickly enough, leaving some bookstores and online retailers stranded without copies just as the holiday shopping season begins.”

His is an “account of the novel as an ‘essentially visual’ literary form. Novels, the Nobel Prize winner argues, consist of “ordinary human details which are quite often visual details,” strung in sequence like beads on a necklace.”