Category: publishing

The 82-year-old Merwin “has won just about every major award an American poet can, among them two Pulitzer Prizes, for The Shadow of Sirius in 2009 and for The Carrier of Ladders in 1971; and the National Book Award in 2005 for Migration: New and Selected Poems.“

“Having long been confined to writing only in their own, local languages and largely ignored by the literary mainstream, Dalit authors are now being swooped on by some of the country’s biggest publishers, such as Radhakrishna Prakashan which is translating their work into Hindi, the lingua franca of northern India and beyond.”

On audiobook, Laura Miller advises. “Listening is less work than reading from a page; it feels like a treat rather than an assignment, and treats are what vacations are all about. If your attention goes a little out of focus during a long paragraph of 19th-century landscape description, who’s to know?”

“Movies didn’t finish theater. TV didn’t destroy movies. E-books won’t destroy paper and ink. The Internet and e-books may set back print media for a while, and they may claim a larger audience in the end. But a lot of people who care about reading will want the feel, the smell, the warmth, the deeper intellectual, emotional, and spiritual involvement of print.”

“Google is on the verge of completing a deal with the American Booksellers Association, the trade group for independent bookstores, to make Google Editions the primary source of e-books on the Web sites of hundreds of independent booksellers around the country, according to representatives of Google and the association.”

“For a dime an issue, Kyle Petersen publishes a quarterly literary magazine. He charges his customers nothing. And he’s seen enough success to debut Issue No. 2 on Thursday…. Published inside a book of matches, each issue of Matchbook Story has room for only a single 300-character tale.”

AL Kennedy: “Time was, writers didn’t have to appear – they didn’t need to support and maintain an appearance. … Everyone was equally covered in mammoth blood and filth, or olive oil and filth, or leprosy and filth, and all was well.” No such luck these days.

“Authors receive just over six pence per loan, up to a cap of £6,600, through the Public Lending Right (PLR) scheme, something many describe as a ‘lifeline’. … [T]he scheme’s budget is being reduced this year by 3%, to £7.45m, and authors are desperately concerned that further reductions will be forthcoming in the autumn….”

They “are joining forces to create a one-stop website for checking out e-books, including access to more than a million scanned public domain books and a catalog of thousands of contemporary e-book titles available at many public libraries.” Also on tap: “scans of a few hundred older books that are still in copyright, but no longer sold commercially.”

“Salander opened the door a crack and spent several paragraphs trying to decide whether to let Blomkvist in. Many italic thoughts flew through her mind. Go away. Perhaps. So what. Etc. ‘Please,’ he said. ‘I must see you. The umlaut on my computer isn’t working.’ He was cradling an iBook in his arms.”