Category: publishing

“Quirk Books, the folks who brought you Pride and Prejudice and Zombies … and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, have moved on from bloodying the frock of Jane Austen … [to] Leo Tolstoy. No, the company’s fourth augmented classic isn’t going to be War and Pieces of Brain, nor will it be The Undeath of Ivan Ilyich. It’s Android Karenina.”

“Why is it so hard for foreign authors to get published in the US? … There are a number of explanations for this phenomenon, very few of which have to do with stereotypes of American readers as being culturally insulated or lacking curiosity about the outside world.”

“Google has agreed to hand over a list of books by Chinese authors that it has scanned in recent years” and “also apologized for any misunderstanding that might have angered authors and said it would work to forge an agreement on digitizing books by early summer.”

“The existence of modern search technology should push us to improve historical research. It should tell us that our analog, necessarily partial methods have had hidden from us the potential of taking a more comprehensive view.”

“Nobel prize winners Orhan Pamuk and JMG Le Clézio are going head to head with last year’s hottest translated author Roberto Bolaño for the title of 2010 best translated book. The prize, set up in 2007 to combat the lack of translated titles on ‘best of the year’ lists, is run by the international literature website Three Percent, part of New York’s University of Rochester.”

Reflections from Philip Hensher, Thomas Keneally, A.S. Byatt, James Meek, Ian Rankin, Marina Lewycka and Howard Jacobson.

“A spokesman for the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority said today that ‘books and magazines were always allowed and still are on U.S.-bound planes.’ Books and magazines, however, weren’t included in a list of 13 ‘items’ that Transport Canada approved Dec. 28 for carry-on purposes.”

“[T]hree groups — the National Writers Union, the American Society of Journalists and Authors, and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America — pointed to what they saw as the overly confusing and ultimately unfair rules that would govern what Google could do with the books if the settlement were to be approved in federal court.”

“Mr. Dick’s 1968 novel, ‘Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?,’ which served as the basis for the 1982 cult film ‘Blade Runner,’ follows a bounty hunter chasing androids known as Nexus-6 models.” The author’s daughter “believes Google referenced that work in coming up with the name for its new phone,” the Nexus One, which “runs Google’s Android operating system.”

“[B]ack in its day, B. Dalton Bookseller was one of the nation’s top retailers and on the cutting edge of technology. Founded by the Dayton department stores in 1966, it underwent phenomenal growth in the 1970s and 1980s, eventually expanding to nearly 800 locations in 1986, when Barnes & Noble bought it. Yes, it was a different time.”