Category: publishing

“A good book is an artifact made with passion, study, or struggle. … Someone is bound to invent a way of digitizing the paintings of Rembrandt to make possible an image that is better than we could get by gazing at the original. But we still would want to see the paintings. The human touch cannot be digitized.”

“NDiaye has written a dozen books, from novels to short story collections and plays, and in 2001 she won the Prix Femina. She was born in 1967 in Pithiviers, south of Paris, to a French mother and a Senegalese father.”

“The latest publishing phenomenon to sweep America, which has just arrived over here, features a new heroine: the young woman who is seriously overweight – and doesn’t care.”

“Since wholesale book prices are traditionally around fifty per cent off the cover price, and these books are now marked down sixty per cent or more, Amazon and Wal-Mart are surely losing money every time they sell one of the discounted titles. The more they sell, the less they make. That doesn’t sound like good business.”

“Once again it has become fashionable to argue that Russian fiction is over, buried under the rubble of the former Soviet Union. Critics have decreed that no classic works of Russian literature have emerged in the past 18 years. That may be true, but green shoots are now pushing through the fallen masonry.”

“Not only has the colony grown, but quite quietly, it has thrived. An unscientific survey by The Plain Dealer unearthed more than 30 active Northeast Ohio writers with national readerships or contracts with major publishing houses.”

“Two Chinese writers’ groups claim that Google has scanned Chinese works into an electronic database in violation of international copyright standards. The organizations are urging China’s authors to step forward and defend their rights.”

“Why should the fact that a novelist changes the merchandiser of his books be of more headline interest than, say, Martin Amis changing his dentist? Who cares? When the book trade was a cottage industry we did; it’s questionable if we do any more.”

The opportunity for women’s writing to reach a wide audience online is limitless, at least in theory. Of course, the preponderance of bylines in the most august-and the most high-paying-magazines and newspapers are still male. But as those dinosaurs fade into obscurity, the scales will naturally shift in women’s favour. Unless, of course, they won’t. It’s just possible that they won’t.

“Canwest Global Communications will tell an Ontario court Friday that it will be forced to shut down the National Post, which has lost $62 million [Can] in the last four years, if the newspaper isn’t shifted into a company that holds its other dailies.” The conservative-leaning paper has reportedly never turned a profit.