Category: publishing

“They’re sort of like the brainy, geriatric version of the ads on Match.com. Nothing as vulgar as a photograph, of course, and quite a bit of talk about culture signifiers. The women – it’s about 90 percent women – are always slender – so slender, in fact, that you could probably fit six of them into the backseat of a Chevrolet.”

“Tóibín is one of the most highly regarded Irish writers of his generation, loved by his readers and admired by his peers, but when it comes to major book prizes he is something of a bridesmaid. He so often nearly wins them but doesn’t – until, that is, tonight when he was named winner of the Costa novel of the year award.”

“In this increasingly virtual age of open access and universal availability, it’s important for readers to keep in mind what it is that a publisher does for an author. A publisher … selects, nurtures, positions and promotes the writer’s work. An e-book distributor is not a publisher, but rather a purveyor of work that has already been created.”

How to change the fact that male writers and subjects are seen as inherently more laudable than female writers and subjects? “First, we have to see prejudice. The top prizes’ discrimination against women has been largely ignored. We can’t ignore it any longer. PW hasn’t yet owned up. Neither has the Pulitzer committee — though there’s hope.”

“E-books could open up a worldwide market for small press publishers and make distribution problems a thing of the past. Possibly I’m just feeling hopeful with the coming of a new year but, having initially been a skeptic, I think e-books may well be just the thing the failing publishing industry needs.”

“Books are the indivisible sum of their parts, and an e-reader will never make reading accessible in the manner that the iPod has made music. But perhaps there is more to the notion of the playlist than first meets the eye.”

“Clearly it’s trying to appeal to the lowest common denominator and recommending popular books concerning popular culture is not the best thing for young people at all.”

“Too often, the mavens and pundits are talking through their hats. They’re guilty of turning superstitions into rules, and often their proclamations are nothing more than prejudice representing itself as principle.”

“In terms of craft, the best that could be said for The Da Vinci Code was that it cleared the basic hurdle of activating a reader’s desire to know what will happen next.” Many books did better artistically — but Dan Brown’s novel had a cultural and commercial reach that others couldn’t even approach.

“The Big Lebowski has spawned its own shaggy, fervid world: drinking games, Halloween costumes, bumper stickers (‘This aggression will not stand, man’) and a drunken annual festival … The movie is also the subject of an expanding shelf of books,” including scholarly studies. Why? “Where cult films go, academics will follow.”