Category: publishing

“My own peculiar worry about Academe 2020, offered with less than 20/20 foresight, may seem less catastrophic: the death of the book as object of study, the disappearance of “whole” books as assigned reading. Does that count as a preposterous figment of extreme academe, or is it closer than we think?”

“Catherine Anyango, whose drawings are peppered with David Zane Mairowitz’s adaptation of the text, had her doubts about tackling the Polish-born novelist’s most famous work. Those reservations had more to do with the original medium than the enduring controversy over Conrad’s views or the familiarity of Heart of Darkness.”

“Poetry rained from the skies on Saturday night in Berlin as 100,000 bookmarks printed with poems by 80 poets from Germany and Chile were dropped on the city from a helicopter.”

The OED is going online. But there are already a number of free online dictionaries ready to cater to your logorrhea…

“Inventing the printing press was not the same thing as inventing the publishing business. Technologically, craftsmen were ready to follow Gutenberg’s example, opening presses across Europe. But they could only guess at what to print, and the public saw no particular need to buy books.”

The five-floor outlet across Broadway from Lincoln Center, “one of the city’s largest and most prominent bookstores, [has] a sprawling space with a cafe on the fourth floor and an enormous music selection. For devoted theatergoers, it was a reliable site for readings and events that focused on the performing arts.” Due to a rent increase, the store will close in January.

“In the first place, the method is slow. My interview with Jonathan Lethem took a couple of weeks, with reading assignments before each session. … In the second place, the interviews are collaborative. After our interns type up the transcripts, the interviewer and subject sit down and edit them – together. … When writers have total control, George [Plimpton] realized, they feel safe. And when they feel safe they open up.”

“Publishers of the Oxford English Dictionary have confirmed that the third edition may never appear in print. A team of 80 lexicographers began working on it following the publication of the second edition in 1989. It is 28% finished.”

“Rebel shareholders have opened fire on music shops chain HMV over its management of Waterstone’s, Britain’s largest books retailer. Investors want HMV chief executive Simon Fox to sell the book business if a turnaround strategy unveiled in March fails to boost returns by this time in 2011.”

Jonathan Franzen’s new book is the most anticipated publishing event of the year. “Within this Franzenfrenzy there is the whiff of Franzenfury, or Franzenfreude, as the novelist Jennifer Weiner has called it.”