Category: publishing

“For readers, 2009 was a year of miracles that brought massive price cuts on popular titles, and unprecedented choices in how to consume them. It was not the year the book died – not yet. It was the year ‘long-form content’ finally threw off its cellulose shackles….”

“Amazon’s top 10 Kindle bestsellers currently include a large portion that are free. The list now has eight free books. Only two in the top 10 — one each from major bestselling authors Dan Brown and James Patterson — will generate any revenue.”

“After Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab allegedly attempted to set off explosives on a flight to Detroit on Christmas Day,” airline “passengers want to know what they can do to keep themselves entertained” on board. The safest bet? An old-fashioned, non-electronic book.

Robert Frost used the log “when he taught grammar school more than a century ago. … ‘It’s very important,’ [Methuen] Mayor William M. Manzi III said in a telephone interview today. ‘It’s actually more than a book just with a signature in it. It’s actually in Robert Frost’s hand.'”

“In a strongly-worded letter of resignation the award-winning science fiction and fantasy author said the Guild’s decision to support Google in its plans to digitise millions of books meant she could no longer countenance being a member.”

“It is has been a strange, fragmented decade in literature, suitable for these multitasking years.”

“Do these blurbs – many of which could be transferred from book to book without great difficulty – actually sway readers? I mean, if you believed them then you’d think every book published is, like, really amazing.”

“There’s the extra difficulty in divining what Amazon means when it says the Kindle is the biggest selling item on its site: it feels that the hype is a bit off base because, while I’ve seen people reading chart-topping books on the bus and train, I have yet to see a Kindle in the wild.”

“With Dan Brown at number three and John Grisham, Danielle Steel and James Patterson also in the top 10, the first literary, or non-genre, author doesn’t emerge until number 37 – Ian McEwan with sales exceeding 4m books. He is just ahead of Sebastian Faulks, the only other literary novelist in the top 50.”

“It was a forlorn scene; the literary fiction and big name biographies that the shop once sold to Islington’s bookish were long gone, leaving a small and somewhat more prosaic selection on display by the door.” Oh, look! “Letters to Penthouse VIII,” only 79p.