Category: publishing

“As the Kindle and Nook march on, people’s reading choices will increasingly be hidden from view. We’ll go into people’s houses or squeeze next to them on the subway, and we’ll no longer be able to know them, or judge them, or love them, or reject them, based on the books they carry.”

The nonprofit Curriki fits into an ever-expanding list of organizations that seek to bring the blunt force of Internet economics to bear on the education market. Even the traditional textbook publishers agree that the days of tweaking a few pages in a book just to sell a new edition are coming to an end.

“The chastening of the literary imagination has been shadowed by the advance of sexual imagery and linguistic frankness into almost every other area of public life.”

“For me, Booker’s problem – not a bad one to have – is its high profile. It is so much the premier prize, it is seen as providing a litmus test for British and Commonwealth literary culture as a whole.”

“The current NEA bosses have cut $2.7 million and 193 participants from the shiny jewel of the former Dana Gioia regime, a devastating rejection of a federal initiative that Mr. Gioia once suggested reversed the country’s decline in reading.”

“The news that Ã…sne Seierstad, Norwegian author of The Bookseller of Kabul, has been successfully sued by one of her book’s characters will be greeted as either a blow to artistic freedom of expression or a victory for the world’s misrepresented and powerless poor.”

“The great thing about them was that the economics of them meant that it only worked with huge numbers at cheap prices, so most of them are still around. But there are some great rarities, and it is not unknown for particularly rare copies to fetch around £500.”

“Sales of tell-all celebrity biographies have been negatively impacted by the information that is available on the Internet or in print.”

This year’s Man Booker longlist is a vigorous rebuke to critics who argue that fiction is moribund…

“There’s a deep-seated resistance to digital versions of a centuries old traditional of printed books, which have rightly enchanted, educated and enlightened readers since movable type. So what will it take for ebooks to become mainstream?”