Category: publishing

“The Strasbourg-based court ruled in favour of a petition from publisher Rahmi Akdas, who in 1999 printed a Turkish translation of French writer Guillaume Apollinaire’s 1907 novel ‘The Eleven Thousand Rods,’ which has passages on sadism, homosexuality, paedophilia and necrophilia.” The publisher had been convicted of morality crimes.

“Veteran iTunes customers will recognize the locks as FairPlay, a digital rights management software that once limited how many times digital songs can be copied onto different computers. … Next month, Apple will be dusting off those digital cuffs for books, according to sources in the publishing industry.”

“If writers are any good, it’s usually because they spend weeks alone, in a room, with a computer (or paper if they’re old-school).” But you wouldn’t know that from films. “Literary biopics usually cater to the fantasy that writers are drunk, mad, sex-obsessed geniuses inspired by the holy spirit (50% proof).”

“The act of reading is going through a number of radical transitions, but perhaps none is more fundamental than the shift from reading on paper to reading on screens. As consumers decide whether to make this jump and which technology to use, one key question is how reading on a screen affects the eyes.”

Disentangling fact from fiction in a spat that looks like a nasty blog-war is tricky, but it’s clear from the reports I’ve read that Hegemann, a child of the internet age, simply does not understand, or recognise, the charge of plagiarism. To her, coming from the cut-and-paste world of blogs and Facebook, what she’s done is no more than “mixing” (she seems to use the English term, by the way.)

Publishers in Britain expect book readership would increase as electronic readers became more popular, but to be part of this growth the book industry must “become more competitive and more responsive”

“Preliminary figures from a new American Library Association survey of how libraries fared in 2009 show that nearly 75 percent of them were handed significant government budget cuts, forcing libraries to reduce services. Pennsylvania registered a 27 percent reduction in state library aid.”

“The single biggest advantage to the ebook is this: no one can see what you’re reading. You can mourn the loss of book covers all you want, but once again I say to you: no one can see what you’re reading. This is a giant leap forward, one that frees you up to read whatever you want without being judged by the person sitting opposite you on the tube.”

Her books were lent 16 million times by British public libraries in the 10 years to June 2009 – or almost 5,000 times a day.

“This sentence contains the thesis of the blog post, a trite and obvious statement cast as a dazzling and controversial insight.”