Category: publishing

“A person in the industry with knowledge of the dispute, which has been brewing for a year, said Amazon was expressing its strong disagreement by temporarily removing Macmillan books. … Macmillan, like other publishers, has asked Amazon to raise the price of e-books to around $15 from $9.99.”

A new translation of Patrick Dennis’s 1955 novel, which inspired a Broadway hit and two Hollywood film adaptations, is the surprise sensation of the Italian fiction market. “Even after 15 reprints and sales of 280,000 copies since May (30,000 during the pre-Christmas rush), publishing pundits are still puzzling over the book’s popularity.” Says the translator, “We’re completely mystified.”

That’s what the newspaper’s top execs reportedly think. So why bother with it? “The answer is that a paywall comes with a certain amount of option value. Once it’s implemented, nytimes.com will have two revenue streams rather than one, and diversification in and of itself is quite a good thing.”

“There have been constant rumours for 45 years that Salinger went on working – some people have claimed that he had as many as 10 full-length novels in his safe. Will we now see the publication of some posthumous, full-scale works? Some clue to the quality of these works, if any, may lie in his last publication, never issued in book form.”

“The success of Jaipur’s book bash, now the biggest literature festival in Asia, is in part thanks to India’s burgeoning appetite for the written word. As the country’s economy has boomed, and its middle class has grown, book sales have shot up. Most books in India are still sold in small family-run shops, but book chains are moving into malls and airports.”

It “runs about 120 pages and has no appreciable form, reading like an unedited, freewheeling character description. I know several avowed Salinger fanatics who have never made it through the thing, and I don’t blame them … I see the messiness of ‘Seymour: An Introduction’ as Salinger’s final confrontation with all the strains of his earlier fiction: sentimentality, depression, Eastern philosophy, isolation, and the guilt of being happy.”

“Possibly the biggest surprise about the new iBooks application of the new device was that Random House’s logo was left out of the onstage display of the participating partners. All six other major New York publishers, including Hachette Book Group and Simon & Schuster, were included….”

“The new generation of e-books will, in essence, merge the laptop and the book. Now if my narrative starts to drag, or I digress, readers can click onto their favorite news site to see what’s up with health care, or click onto TMZ to see what’s up with Brangelina. How do I compete with that?”

“The traditional book, judging by [Apple CEO Steve] Jobs’s announcement, and a recent eulogy of sorts by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, is headed for [the] cultural compost pile…. This raises two issues: what the loss of book stores does to communities, and what the brave new publishing world will mean to authors and readers.”

“[U]ntil now, Amazon’s grip on the e-book market has been so complete that publishers have had to accept its terms on everything, including the price of e-books.” Apple may be offering a more palatable, profitable arrangement.