Category: publishing

“Twenty-one publishing houses in Japan will form an organization in February to stave off potential threats to their profits from Amazon.com Inc. and other service providers in the burgeoning e-book market. … The publishers are concerned they may be left out if Japanese authors give Amazon exclusive rights to publish e-versions of their books.”

“In a recent interview about Jane Austen, Fran Lebowitz said that great art is ‘not a mirror, it’s a door.’ Mediocre art is a mirror, and either you get it or you don’t, either you relate to it or you don’t. … But your own country’s mediocre, mirror-like writing is going to hold more appeal than, say, France’s. (The Greats, the doors, the Tolstoys and Kafkas and Flauberts don’t even enter the conversation of translated literature.)”

Parker, who died Monday at his desk, “didn’t concern himself with looking back. Instead, he wrote, and in the process irrevocably altered American detective fiction, forging a link between classic depictions and more contemporary approaches to the form.”

“These are solar-powered audible Bibles that can broadcast the holy scriptures in Haitian Creole to 300 people at a time. Called the ‘Proclaimer,’ the audio Bible delivers ‘digital quality’ and is designed for ‘poor and illiterate people,’ the Faith Comes By Hearing group said.”

“And so it is that he began lobbing poems into the e-mail inboxes of every chief of staff in the Senate.” The poems, by writers like Dickinson, Rilke and Williams, are “intended to get his BlackBerry-addicted, tunnel-visioned, life-as-a-treadmill colleagues to think about the ‘huge dimensions of life that get shortchanged’ in the grinder that is Capitol Hill.”

“At his age, Holmes would logically seem to have entered the public domain. But not only is the character still under copyright in the United States, for nearly 80 years he has also been caught in a web of ownership issues so tangled that Professor Moriarty wouldn’t have wished them upon him.”

Well established as a poet “but far from being a household name,” Gross, a creative writing professor, “won the prize for The Water Table – a themed collection that is metaphysical and political and religious, but has at its heart the subject of water.”

“Librarians and bloggers who write about books for young people had widely tipped the book, by Rebecca Stead, as a favorite before Monday’s announcement.” Also Monday, Jerry Pinkney’s “The Lion & the Mouse” won the Caldecott Medal.

“[W]hen it comes to rating literary residences, poignancy counts. … Also visit worthy are writers’ residences that suggest industry and diligence, with extra points for hints of scrabbling and penury.” But authors’ birthplaces? Why should anyone care?

“The combined economic impact of the informal publishing industry is roughly equal to that of their legitimate counterparts. Pirated books printed in Lima are shipped all over the country, and have been seen in Bolivia, Ecuador, Chile, and as far away as Argentina.”