Category: publishing

“The decision to close the store is based on student buying patterns and the proliferation of online competition, according to Christopher Newport University. Students have begun flocking to websites that sell discounted books, e-books, and textbook rentals, officials said.”

“James Patterson’s $70 million in earnings vaults him to No. 1 on our list, up from second place two years ago. The prolific thriller writer’s latest deal, signed last fall, involves penning a carpal tunnel-risking 17 books by the end of 2012 for an estimated $100 million.”

“The World Cup in South Africa, climate change, the credit crunch and technology have all left their mark on the way we talk, the new edition of the Oxford Dictionary of English reveals, as the latest crop of new words to be added to its pages is published today.”

Carmen Bramly’s debut novel, “Pastel Fauve, due out next week, is about a 14-year-old girl losing her virginity and the precocious young author began working on it at the same age.”

“Part library and part museum, the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library in Vonnegut’s hometown will chronicle his life and his long literary career. Museum founder Julia Whitehead says it will include a replica of his writing studio, an art gallery featuring Vonnegut’s distinctive line drawings and a gift shop.”

“Jeff Deck and Benjamin Herson, two word nerds and earnest agents of TEAL – the Typo Eradication Advancement League – visited Philadelphia Monday, and within 90 minutes Center City was the better for it, orthographically speaking.”

“It’s lovely, how this enthusiasm for books and writing draws us together like molecules in liquid, gathering and binding us. We willingly become entangled in a sort of literary waltz, a pleasant to-and-fro of fresh discovery. But what about when someone presses a book on you, assuring you that you’ll simply adore it … and you don’t?”

A new publishing house in Chennai is catching book buyers’ eyes with anthologies – under titles such as Mad Scientists! Hard-Boiled Detectives! Vengeful Goddesses! Murderous Robots! Scandalous Starlets! – of South India’s once-popular penny-dreadfuls.

“Someone going into a luxury suite and having a Kindle,” says Robert Darnton, a book historian and director of the Harvard University Library, “could be the equivalent of a traveler in the 19th century who stops off in a reading club” to rent one of the latest novels.

“Lexicographers are hoarders, and they still have 6×4in cards with words, written in ink with dip-pens, dating back to the days before Tolkien invented Middle Earth and was shovelling away at drifts of lexical items in the corrugated-iron shed that once sheltered the OED.”