Category: publishing

“Closing libraries is always a bad idea, but for the Google generation, it could be disastrous. In a time when information literacy is increasingly crucial to life and work, not teaching kids how to search for information is like sending them out into the world without knowing how to read.” Librarians can help — but only if they have jobs.

“The neat streets of Oslo are not a natural setting for crime fiction. … And Reykjavik, Iceland’s capital, is now associated more with financial misjudgment than gruesome murder. Yet in the past decade Nordic crime writers have unleashed a wave of detective fiction that is right up there with the work of Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Elmore Leonard and the other crime greats.”

“I’m not sure whether the Times will by now have announced that Virginia is missing. I’m afraid there is not the slightest doubt that she drowned herself about noon last Friday,” Clive Bell wrote in a detailed 1941 letter that’s part of an archive newly opened to the public.

“Last week, as she was about to board a flight to Paris, police seized the passport of Simin Behbahani, who is 82 and nearly blind. Behbahani was interrogated all night long and then sent home — without her passport. … Neither the police nor the Revolutionary Court has asserted any legal basis for taking her passport.”

“Arguing that certain passages in her fictional depiction of a business rocked by threats, voodoo and staff abductions are defamatory, they are taking her to court and demanding €2m (£1.8m) in damages.”

“[D]evotees of SXSWi never hated publishing or wanted us to roll over and die: They just wanted us to repurpose. This past weekend several publishing experts suggested how that repurposing might look. While last year’s future of publishing panel met with hostility, this year the response was generally civil — a major improvement.”

Rosie Alison’s first novel, “The Very Thought of You,” “has not thus far been deemed worthy of review by a single British national newspaper.”

“Amazon appears to be responding to the Apple threat by waging a publisher-by-publisher battle, trying to keep as many books as possible out of Apple’s hands, while preserving as much flexibility as it can to set its own prices.” If publishers don’t agree to its terms, Amazon says, it will stop selling their books.

“‘There’s not been much wit and not much joy, there’s a lot of grimness out there,’ Daisy Goodwin, the author and TV producer, told the Guardian. ‘There are a lot of books about Asian sisters. There are a lot of books that start with a rape. Pleasure seems to have become a rather neglected element in publishing.'”

“The work is entitled Achilles and mixes references to the ancient battlefield hero with allusions to battles on the football field and to Beckham himself. The cross-over was very apparent to a woman who admits to being a big fan of the game.”