Category: publishing

Nominated for her multi-prize-winning “Wolf Hall,” Hilary Mantel “is joined on the 20-strong list by fellow Booker nominee Sarah Waters, previous Orange Prize winner Andrea Levy, and seven first-time novelists. Now in its 15th year, the Orange Prize celebrates excellence, originality and accessibility in women’s writing.”

“Borders quietly unveiled a program late last month that invites book club groups to convene at its cafe spaces instead of in club members’ homes. The step is geared toward helping the money-losing bookstore chain drum up sales and reshape itself into a local gathering place instead of a faceless superstore.”

“[W]ith the hit Swedish film version opening March 19 in the U.S., a question looms: Will fans be as willing to squint at subtitles as they were to read a translated book?”

The Onion News Network addresses another of the serious issues of our time. (And how will we make papier-mâché piñatas? Think of the children …)

“Think of a bookplate as a wedding ring binding the reader to the book, and vice versa. The symbolism isn’t so far apart: ownership, possession, desire.” Physicality, it turns out, is crucial to that particular expression of bibliophilic intimacy.

“Electronically produced drafts, correspondence and editorial comments, sweated over by contemporary poets, novelists and nonfiction authors, are ultimately just a series of digits — 0’s and 1’s — written on floppy disks, CDs and hard drives, all of which degrade much faster than old-fashioned acid-free paper.” The technology ages faster, too.

It’s a kind of schizophrenic world right now for reading. More and more, we are being faced with the prospect of abandoning the traditional ink-and-paper form in favor of the digital conduit of content, accompanied by the cries that “the age of print is over” and surveys that argue that fewer and fewer adults are reading “literature” — novels, poems and plays.

Because they cost less to produce, consumers think e-books should be cheap. But publishers are afraid that if the price goes too low, they may never recover from the diminished expectations.

“Variety’s cost-cutting decision to lay off two of its most prominent critics and others last Monday sent shock waves through Hollywood. For generations, Variety’s critics had a clout that far outweighed their number of readers, providing early readings on coming films and Broadway shows to an audience of powerful industry insiders.”

“If there’s one word that summarizes the gap between other media and interactive fiction, I’d say it’s `exploration.’ There is no single, imperative path through the work. The person behind the keyboard is not a passive consumer of the story, not observing the story, but actually in it, doing stuff.”