Category: publishing

“This year the digital revolution has finally reached comics thanks to the iPad. Could it finally bring a struggling industry back from the brink? Or is the revenge on the nerds this time around?”

“This morning, Heeb publisher and editor-in-chief Josh Neuman announced on the magazine’s website that the snarky Jewish publication has ceased production of its print edition.” (The Heeb website will snark on.)

“Every few months news seems to arrive of another nail in the coffin of Yiddish. … [Now the city is losing] the one spot where among the huddled, dusty shelves you could schmooze about Sholom Aleichem and Isaac Bashevis Singer with a salesman who spoke the language.”

“L.P. Hartley famously wrote, ‘The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there.’ Like an immigrant from that country I am eager to describe its landscape to people who have never been there, to draw maps of its fantastic geography, to recount its strange vocabulary and customs. … [But] I can’t write like Marcel Proust. Or even like Alice Munro.”

“CliffsNotes have saved us all at some point, but the yellow and black pamphlets can get a little wordy. For book summaries sharpened to the finest – and funniest – possible points, check out ‘Better Book Titles,’ a collection of Photoshopped covers with the titles books ought to have been given.”

“With e-reader prices dropping like a stone and major tech players jumping into the book retail business, what room is left for publishers’ profits? The surprising answer: ads. They’re coming soon to a book near you.”

“It’s much more appropriate to draw a parallel between books and film. There’s a reason why movie theatres don’t show commercials in the middle of films: advertising jars you away from the narrative.” But product placement is “the perfect crime: barely noticed when executed well, highly profitable and with the alibi of ‘adding realism’ to modern characters.”

The September 2010 issue includes a chapter from the new translation by Lydia Davis. “You can see that Playboy is hoping to lure readers by touting Bovary as ‘The Most Scandalous Novel of All Time.’ … [Yet,] though Madame Bovary was truly scandalous when it was released, it cannot shock now, in part due to Playboy and its role in, shall we say, defining deviancy downward; and in part due to Bovary itself.”

“Last month literary agent Andrew Wylie shocked the books world when he announced that he would be selling 20 modern classics – including Hunter S Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint – exclusively through Amazon.com’s Kindle store, bypassing the books’ traditional publishers as well as other booksellers.”

“People who buy e-readers tend to spend more time than ever with their nose in a book, preliminary research shows.”