Category: publishing

“The 59 literature organisations funded by the Arts Council are absorbing the implications today of the swingeing 29.6% cut to its budget announced yesterday”

“Libraries are early and enthusiastic adopters of digital innovations. But these innovations bring the values of the marketplace with them. Through innocuous incremental stages, academic libraries have reached a point where they are now guided largely by the mores of commerce, not academe.”

The line between what we call a “book” and something that’s just a really long chunk of published text–what you might call the “not quite a book” category–continues to blur in the electronic publishing world.

“A fascinating new piece of research this week looks in detail at the success of newspaper websites and attempts to find statistical correlations with sliding print copy sales. As one goes up, the other must go down, surely? These are the underpinnings of transition. But ‘in the UK at least, there is no such correlation’.”

“The judges are given five months to read upwards of 150 books, then they reread the longlist of 12 and, in a final round, go back once more over the shortlist of six. … The Man Booker is not so much a contest of literary merit as a test of indestructibility … The winner is the book that takes the longest time to fall apart.”

“Rhyming at the ends of lines has not always been the historical norm. Far from it. The Odyssey and the Iliad and the Aeneid, the poems of Pindar, Anacreon, Sappho, Horace, and Catullus, and Martial – that is, all of the Classical works that inspired European poets – are metrical. But none use end rhyme.”

“If writing an entire novel in 30 days strikes you as damn near impossible, just head over to the NaNoWriMo website and check out how many people have actually done it: More than 165,000 people participated in 2009, and more than 30,000 managed to crank out the 50,000-word goal.”

“They lie in education, they lie in politics, they lie in banking, they lie in labor; there’s liars all over the place. Sports? Full of liars. And there are liars in journalism, but if there are liars, journalism will out them.”

Farhad Manjoo: “While Gawker is dropping the blog format, sites of magazines like Wired and The Atlantic are embracing it. (At both outlets, all articles, other than those that first appeared in print, are published in a blog-like format.) … The design shifts – with blogs looking more like magazines, and magazines looking more like blogs – aren’t just superficial.”

It’s no surprise that the rise of the touring children’s author has come hand in hand with the reduction in space for children’s books in the press. Author events are now a key marketing strategy. But rather than seeing this additional task as a chore, there’s a whole generation of children’s authors and illustrators who embrace it as a core part of what they do.