Category: publishing

“[B]uyers may be sinking cash into a technology that could become obsolete. … E-reader technology is changing fast, and manufacturers are aiming to address the devices’ drawbacks.”

“It is an enduring mystery of English literature: What secrets lie entombed beneath the thick scribbles that Charles Dickens made as he wrote, and rewrote, the 66 pages of A Christmas Carol in 1843?” See for yourself: the Morgan Library has “agreed to allow The New York Times to photograph and display the entire handwritten manuscript online.”

The Elliott Bay Book Co. “is facing the likely choice of either moving across town or closing altogether when its lease is up Jan. 31. In some ways it is the familiar story of an independent bookstore getting hammered by book chains, online retailers and big-store discounters. But there are peculiar Seattle wrinkles.”

“The Benevento Missal, which was stolen from a cathedral in southern Italy soon after the Allies bombed the city during the Second World War, has been in the collection of the British Library (formerly the British Museum Library) since 1947.” The book falls under the Holocaust (Return of Cultural Objects) Act.

“Villagers from Westbury-sub-Mendip in Somerset can use the library around the clock, selecting books, DVDs and CDs. Users simply stock it with a book they have read, swapping it for one they have not.” Says a parish councillor: “This facility has turned a piece of street furniture into a community service in constant use.”

“It takes a good three days to record a medium-sized novel. Just you and the words, for hour after hour. There are pitfalls you really only discover when you’re reading aloud. … And then there are other problems.” Such as some actors’ notoriously “loud stomach noises.”

“Midwives, collaborators, co-authors, co-writers, writers-for-hire, book doctors, ghosts–call them what you will–give aid and adjectives to athletes, politicians, movie stars, moguls, miscreants and the briefly famous who are asked to tell their stories and don’t know how.” Which doesn’t mean, of course, that the writing pro will get credit for the work.

In giving the nod to Jonathan Littell for his novel, “The Kindly Ones,” the jury cited “one incestuous scene that unfolds on the bed of a guillotine and another that invokes the myth of Cyclops, ‘whose single eye never blinks.’ These marred what the judges called an impressive work.”

In a recent holiday outlook report, Sarah Rotman Epps of Forrester, a research and business-consulting firm, predicted yearly sales of 3 million e-readers by the end of 2009, noting that e-reader sales reached 1 million in 2008. “With 30 percent of sales occurring in the holiday season,” Forrester’s report added, “we expect sales in 2010 to double.”

“A trap people fall into is an earnest anatomical description of sex. The difficulty with the anatomical is that it can read like a bit of a textbook. “To stop it doing so, they will put in flowery metaphors from the animal kingdom, but you don’t need that detail.”