Category: publishing

“Irfan Sanci, owner of publishing house Sel, is being prosecuted under article 226 of the Turkish penal code, an anti-obscenity law, for publishing a translation of Apollinaire’s Les exploits d’un jeune Don Juan (The Exploits of a Young Don Juan).”

“It is those online bookstores — the websites offering hundreds of thousands of titles, often at massive discounts — that are threatening to destroy the business models of small independent publishers and multinational giants alike, while simultaneously killing off thousands of tiny bookshops and even threatening the mega-chains.”

Research by an Oxford scholar on Austen’s manuscripts has led to the startling claim that the most elegant prose stylist in the history of the English novel in fact submitted messy, “experimental’ texts that were cleaned up and polished to their famous dazzle by her editor.

“Throughout the ages, writers have poured out their souls in reams, quires, quartos: Sophocles wrote 123 plays (although, alas – for me at any rate, others may think differently – only seven survive); Alexandre Dumas père squeezed out 277 novels…”

“I was lucky: I lived through a time when it was great to read. There were so many books that you just had to read, which would have been read by everyone you knew. Not merely read, though, but digested and discussed.”

“What’s clever here is that Google is doing this on a statistical, rather than a rule-based, basis – which I understand to mean that, like a flesh-and-blood poet, the machine is trying out lines to see which fit best.”

“When you’ve finished ranting about the typeface’s use on all four corners of the internet, it’s time to get active: one can now get “Ban Comic Sans” flyers, comics, stickers, T-shirts, hoodies and coffee mugs.”

“Government funding for the Public Lending Right (PLR) – the system by which an author receives a small royalty each time one of their books is borrowed from a public library – is to be cut by 15% over the next four years.”

“The Israel Antiquities Authority, which has been engaged in a project to scan the ancient, fragile artifacts, announced this week that is teaming up with internet giant Google to put the digitized images online. The high-resolution images will be accessible for free in a searchable database. They will also be translated into English.”

Laura Miller: “People try to bribe the tour guides at Hemingway’s house in Key West to let them type on his typewriter, as if the author’s genius had somehow infused his tools. … My motivation is entirely the opposite; I want to be inoculated against any tendency toward idol worship via a reminder that even genius is a product of flesh and blood.”