Category: publishing

“Beginning Monday, readers can now vote on the best work of fiction to win the National Book Award in the past 59 years. The winner will be announced on Nov. 18 at the National Book Awards ceremony to be held at a black-tie event at Cipriani Wall Street.”

“When we eliminated the section more than a year ago, you told us you missed it — and you kept on telling us…. You told us we are a community of readers. You told us you not only like to read but you like reading about reading. And you were right.”

“Like many other authors, my books used to be launched with a simple drinks party – the usual plastic-cups-and-a-couple-of-speeches affair, somewhere at the back of Holland Park. These days, however, there has been a radical change in the way books are launched. Behind this lies the striking growth of the whole global literary festival bandwagon.”

“Social publishing website Scribd has been hit with a lawsuit which claims that it profits by encouraging internet users to illegally share copyrighted books online.”

“It is a perfect example of “event publishing”, in which the usually fusty world of books swaps its cheap-white-wine approach to launches for the kind of splashy glamour and media clamour usually associated with Hollywood blockbusters.”

“The world of literary travel writing, once associated with the drumbeat of hooves across some distant steppe, has begun echoing instead with the slow tread of the undertaker’s muffled footfall.”

“I believe that this impending Gutenberg-level shift in reading culture, along with the economic disasters of the last two years, render the challenges of present-day hard-copy publishing all the more agonizing, immediate, and dramatic.”

“So what explains the American love of Samuel Johnson? Is it rooted in a cultural inferiority complex, a compulsion to cozy up to the very authority figures who most revile us?”

“The Justice Department said that while the agreement would provide many benefits to the public, it also raised significant issues regarding class-action, copyright and antitrust law.”

“Two million out-of-copyright books that have been scanned by Google could come back into limited printed form after the search giant signed a deal with On Demand Books, the company that makes the Espresso Book Machine – a custom book printer able to produce a bound one-off 300-page paperback, with a full-colour cover, in about five minutes.”