Category: publishing

Though the promotional materials make it sound great, various “missing features are symptoms of B&N’s bad case of Ship-at-All-Costs-itis. But the biggest one of all is the Nook’s half-baked software. To use the technical term, it’s slower than an anesthetized slug in winter. And it’s buggy.”

“The vote, every five years, has been called a ‘kamikaze convention’, and this year descended into embarrassing farce when Ruth Padel felt compelled to resign after nine days in the job. For some, the arcane voting rules are the problem,” while others “believe the voting changes could make the election even more of a bun fight.”

The magazine’s president says that “the change is not about generating increased revenue from readers, … [but rather] about becoming more focused on an entertainment industry clientele, rather than the casual reader, and about stemming a decline in paid circulation.”

Simon & Schuster and Hachette Book Group will fight back against the $9.99 e-book by releasing their digital books several months after the hardcovers. “I can’t sit back and watch years of building authors sold off at bargain-basement prices,” Hachette’s chief executive said. “It’s about the future of the business.”

“The Open Book store in Shorewood has sent an apology to its member-owners for misrepresenting itself as a co-operative venture but is continuing to solicit money before correcting its status.”

“‘Our hope,’ Eggers notes, ‘is that readers will say, “I forgot all these things that newsprint can do.” I think it’s life-affirming when you say, “Let’s just write it at the length it needs to be and not keep shrinking everything.” ‘ Of course, it’s easy to make such an argument when you’re not dealing with the issues facing the commercial press.”

“Deacon Maccubbin, Lambda Rising’s founder, said that he has accomplished all he had intended when he opened the gay-oriented bookstore in 1974 and that ‘it’s time to move on.'” His goal, he said, had been “to prove that there was a market for bookstores in the country to begin stocking gay and lesbian books.”

Independents that “import an eagerly awaited book from Britain several months before its release in the United States and then jack up the price” are finding success. The book, Stieg Larsson’s “The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet’s Nest,” “tied for No. 5 on the best-seller list of the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association in the United States in October.”

“Based on the traditional Twelve Days of Christmas, [Carol Ann] Duffy’s 12 stanzas begin with an emotional critique of the war in Afghanistan and close with a passionate plea to the world leaders who congregate in Copenhagen tomorrow to discuss climate change.”

“This Christmas may well mark the moment when the Nintendo idea of writing – and reading – takes precedence over the DeLillo idea of it. The growth in sales of the Amazon Kindle and the Sony Reader – which can store thousands of texts, classic and otherwise, and which may eventually provide digital access to every book ever written – suggests that we are at an iPod moment: books, in particular novels, may well be about to face the fate of records and CDs.”