Category: publishing

“It’s tempting to see the end of Borders as another consequence of the hurricane that is hitting the usually tranquil boulevards of the British book world. Tempting, but wrong.”

If there are still good books, they are largely irrelevant to a form and business that is largely about the creation of the artifact–identifier, symbol, leave-behind, brand enhancer. Books are a sales tool. They’re propaganda. And they’re fake. A lie. So many are just simply not written by the people the publisher tells you they are written by. Somebody should sue.

“Borders, which went into receivership this week, was not very good, which is why I cannot get too worked up about its passing. What’s more, I think it is possible – fingers crossed and resting on my first edition of Love in a Cold Climate – that its disappearance might mark a watershed in British bookselling.”

“Fifteen years of heavily publicized, open-bar galas have made a name for the winner of the annual Giller Prize, but this year the charmed circle of recognizable Canadian authors magically expanded.”

“Never mind that few of these confessions can be of interest to anyone except the people writing them, never mind that few of these people know how to tell a story or write literate prose, never mind that the market is now so thoroughly saturated that it is just about impossible to separate what little wheat there may be from the vast ocean of chaff. What matters is that… we live in an age of “more narcissism overall, less concern for privacy, a strong interest in victimhood, and a therapeutic culture.”

“After being denied two of the big awards for which she was nominated this year, last night Ms. Lyon won the $25,000 Rogers Writers’ Trust Fiction Prize for The Golden Mean, her popular novel narrated by a boldly imagined Aristotle.”

Nathaniel Rich: “To describe The Original of Laura as a novel would be like mistaking a construction site for a cathedral. Yes, the blueprints might call for flying buttresses and oriel windows, but for now it is only a mess of wheelbarrows, uncut limestone, and piles of sand.”

“A consortium of magazine publishers including Time Inc. and Condé Nast are jointly building an online newsstand for magazines in multiple digital formats, according to people familiar with the plans.”

Adam Gopnik: “Vicarious pleasure? More like deferred frustration. Anyone who cooks knows that it is in following recipes that one first learns the anticlimax of the actual, the perpetual disappointment of the thing achieved. … [If] the first thing a cadet cook learns is that words can become tastes, the second is that a space exists between what the rules promise and what the cook gets.”

“Borders, which also has the Books Etc brand, was thought to be in discussions with rivals including Waterstone’s-owner HMV about selling the business, but concern is now growing that the retailer is on the brink of collapsing into administration.”