Category: publishing

It’s not only that the screen is a “four-by-five window onto an overcast afternoon.” Nor is it merely the “grim and Calvinist” font, or that the text-to-speech feature bats less than a thousand. There’s also a lot missing from the library: “I spent an hour standing in front of some fiction bookcases, checking on titles. There is no Amazon Kindle version of ‘The Jewel in the Crown.’ There’s no Kindle of Jean Stafford, no Vladimir Nabokov, no ‘Flaubert’s Parrot,’ no ‘Remains of the Day’….”

“The discovery of four satirical ‘playlets’ by PG Wodehouse, seen by the public for the first time in 100 years this weekend, prove that the humorist – who is often viewed as apolitical – had a strong interest in public affairs from his youth.”

“A growing number of civil libertarians and customer advocates wants Amazon to fundamentally alter its method for selling Kindle books, lest it be forced to one day change or recall books, perhaps by a judge ruling in a defamation case — or by a government deciding a particular work is politically damaging or embarrassing.” A petition to be presented to the company this week asks it “to give up control over the books people load on their Kindles.”

“Novelists have long tucked made-up fictions inside their real ones. … A few deft lines can conjure perfect examples of untutored rawness (Mattie Ross, the 14-year-old heroine of Charles Portis’s True Grit, has a manuscript entitled “You will now listen to the sentence of the law, Odus Wharton, which is that you be hanged by the neck until you are dead, dead, dead! … [etc.]“), sublime dullness (“The Purpose of Clothing Is to Keep Us Warm,” in Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy-Casares’s Chronicles of Bustos Domecq) or anything in between. Why write the whole book when you can get so much mileage out of the title alone?”

“An author whose bank account was frozen because he co-wrote a book with a former criminal is preparing for a legal battle that could have serious consequences for authors, journalists and media proprietors.”

Suppose that the books of, say, Milan Kundera or Isabel Allende or Naguib Mahfouz had been unavailable in English until this year. So it is with Shahriar Mandanipour, whose new Censoring an Inranian Love Story is the first of his works to appear in English translation. Says David Mattin, “It will be for many, I suspect, a first encounter not just with Mandanipour but with Iranian fiction of any kind. … Quite a loss, given that these writers are the current voice of a literary tradition that stretches back 2,500 years.”

“Many publishers are saying their fall catalogs are their strongest in years, and after last fall, an unqualified disaster that left the industry demoralized and diminished, much is at stake as their hopes are tested. … With optimism, however, comes worry–particularly because shoving every major release into the same three months could very well result in a traffic jam that will benefit no one.”

It “becomes the first major list to include Amazon Kindle e-book sales. The move reflects both the growth of e-book sales and Kindle’s role in that market.”

“A law firm known for bringing class-action suits on behalf of consumers against Internet companies says it’s readying a case against Amazon for deleting George Orwell books on users’ Kindles. ‘This is an incredible situation,’ says Jay Edelson of the law firm KamberEdelson. ‘What Amazon did was plainly illegal’.”

“Amazon.com is pushing deeper into the academic book market. The online retail giant will do on-demand reprints of some 400,000 out-of-copyright books from the University of Michigan library, in a deal announced today. Amazon has been actively targeting academia, trying to convince universities to adopt the Kindle DX as a textbook replacement and outsource reprints of older academic titles to its print-on-demand service, BookSurge.”