Category: publishing

“The literary creations of authors stopped being sacred territory roughly 20 years ago, when the estates of late authors began leasing out the copyrights to old works.” But a “troika of high-profile revivals, all within a 10-day period, brings these after-death sequels to a new level of prominence.”

“[T]he arrival of HuffPost Books has some in the journalism world chilled at the prospect of less rigorous thinking about books even as many others are thrilled that the queen of bloggers and new media will devote a portion of her website to books.”

“[S]ome sellers and owners of electronic reading devices are making the case that people are reading more because of e-books,” while publishing executives note e-book sellers’ financial interest in promoting that argument. “Some publishers are also not quite willing to accept the notion that books can make a mainstream resurgence.”

The new book by Denis Sassou-Nguesso, the president of Congo-Brazzaville, “boasts, in large type on the cover, that it contains a foreword written by Nelson Mandela, South Africa’s first black president. … Mandela has issued a statement saying he did not write the foreword. Nor has he read the book.”

Target, Wal-Mart and Amazon are duking it out, offering ever-lower book prices in a contest that “could be particularly damaging to booksellers,” who, unlike their mega-retailer competitors, can’t afford to “sell the books at a loss.”

“Owner Peter Aaron said the store’s lease at the Globe Building expires in late January, when a maxed-out line of credit he had been using to run the business also comes due. … Sales plummeted after the meltdown on Wall Street last fall, he said, breaking the store’s already-tenuous hold on profitability.”

“Poets need to be insane to write great things, the theory goes, and poets’ visionary writings are the only cure for our larger human derangement. This theory almost never works out very well in practice, though.” Consider the cases of Edgar Allan Poe (the arch-typical despairing, drunken poet) and Dylan Thomas.

“China’s delegation to this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair are starting to trickle back home after the event closed Sunday and they are bringing with them news of a world that is waking up to the charms of their nation’s long literary traditions.”

“French publishers and news providers are cooking up original ways to fight the perceived threat of cultural domination by U.S. technology giants like Google and Amazon.”

“The Federal Trade Commission, which set the blogging world aflame two weeks ago with new guidelines governing truth-in-cyberspace-advertising, ‘never intended to patrol the blogosphere,’ said Mary Engle, an FTC lawyer who addressed KidlitCon 09, a conference of kids’ book bloggers….”