Category: publishing

“The only other events as important to the history of the book are the birth of print and the shift from the scroll to bound pages. The e-reader, now widely available, will likely change our thinking and our being as profoundly as the two previous pre-digital manifestations of text.”

“China was the ‘honored guest’ this past week at the Frankfurt Book Fair…. But what Beijing hoped would be a celebration of its cultural achievements turned into a tug of war between control and free speech, as much a showcase for Chinese dissidents as the state’s approved writers.”

“Ezra Pound’s injunction to writers was ‘make it new’. But if the dice are loaded, and the people who are calling the odds are not readers but marketing people, what hope for new fiction?”

“‘Garbage’ and ‘hysterical propaganda’ was one angry reaction at the world’s biggest book fair this year when Google, the world’s biggest Internet search service, defended plans to turn millions of books into electronic literature available online.”

“Like the thriving theater culture in Chicago … San Francisco’s writers have come to recognize and trumpet the idea that this city prizes their craft, its solitary difficulty and what can emerge from it, even though there isn’t much of a publishing industry here.”

“The Edinburgh International Book Festival, once described as ‘a cosy tea party in Charlotte Square’, has been stirred by furious opposition to its new director, Nick Barley. Within hours of being appointed last week Barley, 43, was the subject of a Facebook campaign demanding that his appointment be rescinded and labelling him ‘incompetent’.”

“Three of the five candidates [for the National Book Award] in the fiction category were not born in this country; two of those three live abroad. … And what does it mean to write an ‘American’ book, if you don’t need an American address to do it?”

“Considering that barely a word has been changed from the original, the warning on the cover of a new, illustrated version of the Book of Genesis – “Adult Supervision Recommended for Minors” – might seem surprising. Until, that is, one reads the name of the illustrator: R. Crumb.”

“‘It is turning the Bible into titillation,’ said Mike Judge, of the Christian Institute, a religious think-tank. ‘It seems wholly inappropriate for what is essentially God’s rescue plan for mankind’.” No, says the Bishop of Croydon: “[R. Crumb] set out to say; ‘this is important, fundamental myth’ and it seems to me he’s done a good job.”

The Encyclopaedia Britannica is “launching a quest to find the oldest complete set in private hands. Put together in the back streets of Edinburgh by an editor, an engraver and a printer, the first version of the encyclopaedia was released in weekly sections – costing six pence each, or eight pence if printed on smart paper – from July 1768.”