Category: publishing

“Hundreds of Nook owners have posted complaints online, including on Barnes & Noble’s Web site. ‘It freezes almost daily,’ Stacey Hendricks, a student at University of Louisiana at Lafayette, said in an e-mail to Bloomberg. ‘Assuming Barnes & Noble doesn’t whip this situation into shape pronto, I’ll likely be switching over to the iPad.'”

“The winner will be chosen from Mantel, Rosie Alison (for The Very Thought of You), Barbara Kingsolver (for The Lacuna), Attica Locke (for Black Water Rising), Lorrie Moore (for A Gate at the Stairs), and Monique Roffey (for The White Woman on the Green Bicycle).”

“Publishing exists in a continual state of forecasting its own demise; at one major house, there is a running joke that the second book published on the Gutenberg press was about the death of the publishing business.” Threatened now by Amazon’s tough-guy tactics, the business is looking to Apple and even Google as allies.

Monday, the start of the London Book Fair, “was described as a ‘surreal’ first day, with LBF organisers now actively assessing a ‘missed appointments’ day on Thursday…. Andrew Franklin, managing director of Profile, said: ‘It’s looking really forlorn. It’s been very hard to conduct business because there is no [one] here to conduct it with.'”

“Prize competitions for something as subjective as fiction often seem irrelevant or superfluous, but the winners do get a lot of attention, for what that’s worth in the complicated world of make-believe. Often, the honorees are familiar names, drawn from lists of familiar names, but when a nobody wears the laurels, we have mixed reactions from puzzlement to disdain.”

“When Bowker’s 2009 book industry stats were released yesterday many in the industry were stunned to see an unfamiliar company name, BiblioBazaar, leading a surging new segment of “non-traditional” publishing stats with a whopping 272,930 titles produced in 2009–almost as many titles the entire “traditional” publishing business cranked out last year. Could it be? Could one little-known company really produce so much volume?”

First of all, there is this lazy assumption that a few posts on an Amazon page are in some way equivalent to a book review…

“The row has sent shock waves through the normally genteel world of academia as claim and counter-claim have been circulated by email to other top writers.”

“The latest winner of the International prize for Arabic fiction – the “Arabic Booker” – puts Arab countries’ censorship in the spotlight.”

“I am, as should be apparent, poking fun at those benighted souls who believe that someone other than William Shakespeare–the most prominent candidates being Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford–wrote “Hamlet,” “Macbeth” and “Romeo and Juliet.” In a saner world, nobody would need to poke fun at them, for nobody would give them the time of day, there being no credible evidence whatsoever to support their claims.”