Category: publishing

After essayist Jill Lepore made a couple of uncharitable comments on Ayelet Waldman’s new book Bad Mother, Waldman tweeted, “May Jill Lepore rot in hell.” And in response to Caleb Crain’s review of his The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work, Alain de Botton staged a small hissy fit in a comment on Crain’s blog. (Don’t these people read Miss Manners?)

The Open Library’s goal “is to create a single page on the web for every book that has ever been published; an enormous, searchable catalogue of information about millions of books. … But with information about books already being processed by hugely popular websites such as Google and Amazon, the question remains – why bother?”

“Seattle-based Amazon notified associates” – independent Web sites which link readers to the e-tailer in exchange for a commission on any resulting sales – “in Rhode Island and Hawaii that the company was no longer working with them as of Monday and Tuesday, respectively, because the states have passed laws to collect sales taxes on these transactions.” This move follows similar action by Amazon against associates in North Carolina.

“A high-profile group of children’s authors, publishers, teachers and librarians is calling on the government to make school libraries statutory.” Campaign supporters “are concerned that while prisoners have the statutory right to a library, schoolchildren do not, and they believe it is essential that children get the habit of reading for pleasure.”

“Amid all the dismal reports about the death of fiction, here’s a refreshingly bold act of optimism: a new bimonthly magazine called Electric Literature. And it’s not just MFA kids self-publishing their diatribes against Mom and Dad. The first issue sports stories by such heavyweights as Pulitzer Prize-winner Michael Cunningham and National Book Award finalist Jim Shepard.” To contributors, Electric Literature “pays real money: $1,000.”

“There’s a certain thread running through a lot of novels that have sold well in the UK in the last few years. They share nothing so exact as a genre or type, but they have exotic titles, a powerful story and a literary bent. Oh, and a badge. A badge that says ‘Richard and Judy’.” Now the daytime-TV duo’s show is ending. What’s the publishing industry to do?

“It has taken many months for the import of the settlement to become clear. It is exceedingly complex, and its design — the result of two years of negotiations, including not just the parties but libraries as well — is, not surprisingly, imperfect. It can and should be improved. But after long months of grappling with it, what has become clear to us is that it is a remarkable and remarkably ambitious achievement.”

“Authors generally try to stay classy in the face of negative feedback, bravely showing up for their readings and working the publicity circuit despite whatever Michiko and company proclaim. When they do respond to a critic, it’s more likely to present a clarification or correction of something the writer has apparently gotten wrong. … Sometimes, however, the quarrel is less about being right and more about lashing out.”

“The Northshire Bookstore, in quaint Manchester Center, Vt., has all the classic trappings: exposed beams, wood tables stacked with hardcover bestsellers, comfortable leather chairs nestled into alcoves.” It also has a print-on-demand Espresso Book Machine, a first for an independent bookstore in the U.S. If its experiment is successful, “it will show how small brick-and-mortar bookshops might be able to match the overwhelming variety of products offered by a giant online retailer like Amazon.com.”

Furious about a negative Boston Globe review, novelist Alice Hoffman took to Twitter to write nasty things about the critic, whose phone number and e-mail address she gave out. “Tell her what u think of snarky critics,” she tweeted. But Hoffman “comes off like an aspiring literary gang leader, dispensing orders 140 characters at a time.” And not being all that cautious about those characters, either: She got the critic’s phone number wrong.