Category: publishing

“Ruth Saberton drove to their secluded house and placed a 400 page manuscript on the doormat and a note through the letterbox asking them to read it. She was then stunned when Richard – who along with his wife hosted a regular book club on their TV show – phoned her and said he loved the novel.”

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art has launched the Reading Room, an online program that features full-length digital presentations of exhibition catalogues. The first 10 featured on the site are of out-of-print catalogues that were published between 1963 (Six More, by Lawrence Alloway) and 1981 (The Museum as Site: Sixteen Projects, by Stephanie Barron).

“The 15 individual measures, which draw on statistics from 2009, lay out in stark detail which branches are less used, clustered close to other locations, and have inadequate facilities…. The release of the data marked the latest step in a process that could end with as many as eight shuttered libraries in the face of a $3.6 million budget shortfall.”

“So far, there’s little scientific evidence about which screens are better for the eyes. Ophthalmologists say there isn’t really much of a difference between how the eye works with either e-paper or back-lit screens. Neither could damage the eye and neither of these modern screens flicker like old-fashioned TVs.”

“Every so often … filmmakers tell us what they really think about those perverse souls who cling to the fusty old medium of print — namely that they’re pretentious, manipulative, insecure and overly fond of the sauce. And, you know what? They’ve got a point, one we’d like to see them make more often.”

“With a growing number of people turning to Kindles and other electronic readers, and with the Apple iPad arriving on Saturday, it is not always possible to see what others are reading or to project your own literary tastes. You can’t tell a book by its cover if it doesn’t have one.”

“The inaugural Ted Hughes award for new work in poetry, founded by [UK poet laureate] Carol Ann Duffy, has gone to Alice Oswald, a nature poet who writes ‘very much in the tradition’ of Hughes’.”

After discovering that an Italian writer had sold a phony interview with him, attributing to him anti-Obama comments, Philip Roth got curious. He went online, in search of other interviews by the same guy, and found one, allegedly with John Grisham — also fictional, also with the anti-Obama sentiments.

“French Culture Minister Frédéric Mitterrand said at a press conference today (30th March) that he understood publishers’ and authors’ exasperation over ‘certain practices (by Google) that remain’. But he added that he would not act to defuse the situation because it was a question of private law.”