Category: publishing

“More than half of the adults polled said they had difficulty getting their children to read books outside school.”

What could be less controversial than a distinguished gathering of poets reading on London’s South Bank? Not much, you might think. Extraordinary then – in the week of the 2010 International Festival of Poetry – to discover that when the first poetry festival was launched, in 1967, Donald Davie wrote an article in the Guardian headed: “Go home poets” and dismissed the festival as “vulgar nonsense”.

Hundred of words such as ‘suffarcinate’, ‘jobler’ and ‘welmish’ have fallen out of everyday use. But they’re not dead yet . . .

“It’s seeking a total of £25,000 ($40,480 Cdn), of which half has already been raised, to properly conserve the low-grade blue writing paper Dickens used to write A Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield and the unfinished The Mystery of Edwin Drood.”

“No American novelist has been honored as much as Jonathan Franzen this year, from a cover story in Time magazine to a chair on Oprah Winfrey’s TV show. Yet, the biggest prize has eluded him this time — the National Book Award.”

“And the 43rd president may stand to make even more money. Nixon’s book sold 300,000 copies of the plain old hardcover edition. The first print run for Bush’s is 1.5 million.”

“Bill C-32, now making its way through Parliament, has a clause that will allow the free use of copyrighted material for “educational” purposes. Instead of, say, buying new textbooks, schools could simply hand out photocopies – or digital copies – of parts of existing ones. Think of the savings. If schools are no longer paying for textbooks, how can publishers keep publishing them?”

“Last Tuesday the French Senate voted for a law imposing a fixed price on eBooks for sale within French territory – that is, just as with print books in France, everyone has to sell a given ebook for the same price. No discounting.”

“As e-readers move towards the mainstream, publishers’ increasing interest in web-first publishing could leave luddites waiting up to six months longer than the cool kids to read their favourite author’s latest novel.”