Category: publishing

“[L]ast year, 15-year-old ‘Bunny’ became one of Japan’s top authors of a genre called keitai — cellphone — novels.” Likened to “Harlequin romances for young girls,” keitai novels aren’t great literature, but the audience for them is passionate, and it seems to be quite large.

“If the manuscripts exist, and if they ever come to the market, they are likely to become the next posthumous publishing sensation – regardless of how good they are.”

“The question of whether e-book prices should be significantly lower than their print analogs has become a fundamental divide in a simmering dispute between book publishers and the 800-pound-gorilla that is Amazon.com. In part the issue is about consumer choices but like the other digitization wars which preceded it — and continue — in music, television, film and even news, it’s also about ensuring that a creative industry survives.”

“A host of rivals to the market-dominating Kindle electronic reader has given newfound hope to publishers that they will finally be able to dictate their own terms after being at the mercy of Amazon.”

“Among the strange fates of many great books, the bizarre afterlife of Moby-Dick stands out as a classic example. The first edition of the novel, originally called “The Whale” (1851), was a horrible combination of a flop and a botch.”

“To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales.”

“And he’s not alone. Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they’re being honest–including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books.”

“Sales of celebrity memoirs might be down, says the Bookseller, while the misery memoir bubble has burst, but what it dubs “animalit” helped to save the biography genre last year.”

Amazon, in an open letter last week to it customers, indicated it would “have to capitulate” to Macmillan’s demands because the publisher “has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books.”

“Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books. The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition of collecting Roman emperors’ laws in a single manuscript.”