Category: publishing

“Just standing in the library made me remember how no other literary experience makes you feel so acutely you are part of a vast community of book-lovers, self-improvers, unfettered imaginations, armchair travellers and generally like-minded souls. Like countless others, I am the adult libraries built.”

“The way the books industry is interacting with digital media is developing faster than many had foreseen, with the latest example an attempt to offer fans of author Iain M Banks exclusive unseen chapters, his original notes and commentary for his latest novel,” delivered via smartphone apps.

“If serial rereading is one way to define worship, then one of Borges’s most revered gods was Robert Louis Stevenson. This even though in Borges’s time, Stevenson’s work was basically considered kid stuff. … Borges not only commented on books that didn’t exist. He read books – pulpy and arcane alike – that few others bothered to see.”

“William Jacques, nicknamed ‘Tome Raider’ after stealing hundreds of rare books in the late 1990s, drew up a ‘thief’s shopping list’, targeting the most expensive books that he could access. He used a false name to sign in to the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley library in London before hiding valuable books under his tweed jacket, Southwark Crown Court was told.”

“Reads that speak to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and questioning teens have traveled light years since John Donovan’s ‘I’ll Get There. It Better be Worth the Trip’ led the way in 1969…. Still, until now few LGBT titles became blockbusters. That changed with two boys named Will Grayson and a very large, very GLEE-ful linebacker named Tiny.”

“1. Siegel: ‘Fiction has become culturally irrelevant.’ People buy books, read books, are right now camping on sidewalks to see ‘Twilight: Eclipse,’ a movie based on a book, and they camp out in bookstores too, when a novel they’re eager for is sold at midnight. Maybe these people are not part of our culture?”

Allen Barra: “One hundred years from now, critics will still be arguing about the real nature of the relationship between Tom and Huck, or why Gatsby gazed at that green light at the end of the dock across the harbor. There is no ambiguity in To Kill a Mockingbird; at the end of the book, we know exactly what we knew at the beginning: that Atticus Finch is a good man, that Tom Robinson was an innocent victim of racism, and that lynching is bad.”

“Owner JoAnne Kohler, 47, opened the independent bookstore in August 2008. She named her store Tea Party because she liked the association with ‘independence, revolution, anti-corporation.’ A short time later a conservative movement that was also fond of the historical event became a force in national politics. And that’s when the misunderstandings began.”

“What happens once the self-publishing revolution really gets going, when all of those previously rejected manuscripts hit the marketplace, en masse, in print and e-book form, swelling the ranks of 99-cent Kindle and iBook offerings by the millions? Is the public prepared to meet the slush pile?”

“Without a doubt, the next male or female Hemingway, Faulkner or Fitzgerald is out there somewhere, hard at work. But with the exception of a few ambitious-and obsessively competitive-fiction writers and their agents and editors, no one goes to a current novel or story for the ineffable private and public clarity fiction once provided.”