Category: publishing

“All it takes is typing a little dialogue, picking some characters, and bingo! You have a robot-voiced key scene from ‘Pride and Prejudice.'” Or, if Austen’s not your cup of tea, from any other work of literature in the public domain.

“Just how much does it actually cost to produce a printed book versus a digital one? Publishers differ on how they account for various costs, but a composite, and necessarily simplified, picture might look like this….”

“Difficulties in negotiating lower rents and a collapse in passenger numbers at Dublin and Cork airports, where the majority of its business is generated, were blamed for the insolvency” of Ireland’s Hughes & Hughes bookstore chain.

The publishing industry is fuelled by people who care more about having something to read, when they want and at the price they want, than about books as objects. The small, lightweight book, whether hardback or paperback, has ruled the roost for hundreds of years, above all because it was the right size. When the boffins come up with something that fits the hand as well as a Penguin or a pack of cards, that’s when their “iPod moment” will come.

“Not that there isn’t the occasional team-written novel. But the popular conception of the creative writer is still by and large one of the individual trying to wrestle language, maybe even the meaning of life, from his soul.”

“A letter by French philosopher René Descartes, stolen more than 150 years ago, has been located at a small college in the U.S. Dutch scholar Erik-Jan Bos discovered on a Google search that the 1641 letter was mentioned as part of a description of the Charles Roberts Collection at the Haverford College Library, located just outside Philadelphia.”

“In a time when good books are finding it increasingly hard to reach publication, it’s irritating that someone momentarily famous for having a high-profile job, or making an arse of themselves on a reality show, or for having an especially distressing private life, is then encouraged to heave out a novel. Maybe they do have a book in them, – but it’s very unlikely they’ll flourish under those circumstances.”

“The comics world delivered a symbolic one-two punch when the Man of Steel and, just three days later, the Caped Crusader fetched record-setting million-dollar prices at comic-book sales. Suddenly, by tripling the record sale price, comics as a collectible were being mentioned in the same breath as gemstones and paintings.”

“If current trends persist, the sheer amount of poetry “published” is likely to double, quadruple, “ten-tuple” in the decades ahead. Who is writing all this poetry?”

“There’s such rampant discounting. The idea is really to keep the integrity of books alive.”