Category: publishing

A full-colour version of electronic paper, which forms the display of these devices, is to be demonstrated later this month.

“If, as many writers and publishers hope, people turn to books in times of social difficulty, let them do so without the unpredictable patronage of television executives.”

“So what am I supposed to do? I’ve written more than a dozen books, although some, to be fair, were just second and third editions. While one was briefly in Amazon’s list of top 100 sellers, most have been the publishing equivalent of bunts. They paid me for my time. The kind of book I write, thick with equations that play to computer lovers, is also the first to be pirated. It’s a canary.”

“I am appalled and saddened by the anonymous smear campaign against my former mentor Derek Walcott. … I can only hope that Oxford decides to stop the election and allow everyone more time to reconsider what has just happened. Derek Walcott should not walk away from this post.”

“A brutal but beautiful novel about life in Colombia in the midst of the civil war which has ravaged the country for decades has won the Independent foreign fiction prize. Evelio Rosero, a prize-winning author in his own country but hardly known outside it, this evening became the first Colombian author to win the prize,” worth £10,000, which he splits with his translator, Anne McLean.

“In its first significant foray into publishing, Amazon has acquired world English rights to a self-published novel by a midwestern teenager called Legacy. The acquisition is the first for the e-tailer’s newly launched publishing banner, AmazonEncore. … Jeff Belle, v-p of books at Amazon, said the new publishing program, while focused on self-published books with promise, could also target out-of-print titles from major houses.”

“A former gravedigger and debut novelist has penned a sequel to J D Salinger’s seminal work The Catcher in the Rye which is due to be released next month. Swedish/American travel writer, John David California, wrote 60 Years Later Coming Through the Rye after a becoming ‘captivated’ by the story of Holden Caulfield.”

“She’d had an epiphany of sorts while meditating that morning. It was time to apologize for what she put him through on that fateful day. She explained that her uncharacteristically harsh evisceration of him was coming, unfairly, from her own ego and sense of having been personally betrayed–a redemptive moment fitting, you might say, of The Oprah Winfrey Show.”

“Elizabeth Edwards has been willing to talk about most anything in interviews about her new memoir that details her husband John’s affair, but only under one condition: Interviewers must agree not to mention the name of the other woman in their broadcasts or stories. … No newspaper has agreed to the restriction so far, according to David Drake, Edwards’s publicist.”

Ron Rosenbaum: “I love airport best-sellers because I see them as our Nostradamuses, the literary canaries in the dark coal mines of our paranoia. They sniff out and serve up fictionalized but ‘realistic’ prophecies of coming doom of one sort or another.” Lately these novels have been turning to what Rosenbaum calls “nuke porn.”