Category: publishing

“What about the future of the long chunks of text that have already been published as physical objects with paper pages bound between covers? There are, after all, many such things around.”

“It’s fashionable to lament the status of the novella: unjustly neglected, the ugly duckling of the literary world, etc. Actually the novella seems in pretty healthy shape to me.”

“The late JG Ballard’s archive now occupies a stack of bland cardboard boxes in the basement of the British Library, a warren of strip-lit shelves beneath the vast irregular plaza that separates the building from the teeming Euston Road.” The setting “seems so faithful to the kind of spaces that Ballard made his own.”

“Hello, my name is Michele and I’m proud to be a chick-lit author. I write the kind of novel that gets spattered with margarita and suncream rather than soaked in Booker-type praise. You know the books I mean.”

“The follow-up to The Da Vinci Code sold more than 140,000 copies in its first week, setting a new benchmark according to industry magazine The Bookseller. Brown’s latest novel beat the record set by its predecessor in 2005, adding on some 16,000 sales.”

“According to Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal, they are too high, too uniform, and the method by which they are set is too much like a violation of antitrust practices.”

“In what might be the latest sign of trouble for brick-and-mortar bookstores, the mega-chain Barnes & Noble announced on Tuesday that its board was putting the company up for sale.”

“New York’s independent bookshops were supposed to be long gone by now. After a decade of slow financial strangulation at the hands of the big-box stores, the web, the Kindle, and, finally, the recession, the fact that there are still Strands and McNally Jacksons standing seems positively miraculous.”

“I wonder if people went through the same thing in the mid-1400s as they sat in coffee shops with their pesky paper books? And how long will it take before e-books are accepted as equals with their paper counterparts?”

Raymond Scott, an unemployed 53-year-old with a lavish lifestyle and a lot of debt, took a copy of the First Folio “which was stolen from Durham University in 1988 to the renowned Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC where he asked to have it verified and valued, claiming he had found it in Cuba.”