Category: publishing

“With book sales falling, it may not be long before prose writers jump ship for a medium that offers some of the most exciting possibilities of the new century.”

“The circumstances surrounding the writing of Nineteen Eighty-Four make a haunting narrative that helps to explain the bleakness of Orwell’s dystopia. Here was an English writer, desperately sick, grappling alone with the demons of his imagination in a bleak Scottish outpost in the desolate aftermath of the second world war.”

“Improved technology is allowing researchers to scan ancient texts that were once unreadable – blackened in fires or by chemical erosion, painted over or simply too fragile to unroll.” The new finds include “never-before-seen versions of the Christian Gospels, fragments of Greek poetry and commentaries on Aristotle.”

“Launching a new publishing venture in the current economic climate is risky enough, but Toronto-based writer and translator Musharraf Ali Farooqi is really going out on a limb. Not only is his new company, Urdu Project, dedicated exclusively to publishing English translations of classical and contemporary works of Urdu literature, but he has chosen, as his debut offering, a centuries-old, 24-volume fantasy epic.”

“It’s not even 10 inches tall, it’s just one-third of an inch thick, and it costs nearly $500. But Amazon.com Inc.’s Kindle DX, unveiled Wednesday, has already been assigned a huge job: reversing the fortunes of the struggling newspaper industry.”

Farhad Manjoo: “Rather than satisfy Google’s mission of organizing the world’s information, critics say, the deal gives Google and the publishing industry unrivaled power in the new market for digital books. Looking at the settlement, it’s hard to disagree.”

“The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún features Tolkien’s translation of two epic poems from Norse mythology, The New Lay of the Völsungs and The New Lay of Gudrún.” Unlikely best-seller material? Perhaps, but Waterstone’s said it “was on course to make the top three of the best-seller chart by the week’s end.”

“Would he really have done it? Fortunately for the digestive tract of David Kipen, the residents of Kelleys Island in Ohio proved to be a literary-minded lot and he wasn’t forced to make good on his promise to eat a copy of To Kill a Mockingbird if the entire population of the island failed to read the book.”

Two memoirs of the eponymous Mr. Ponzi – a “self-serving” one by the swindler himself and a more honest one (hitherto lost) by his erstwhile publicist – are “part of a trove of 2,200 books, manuscripts and pamphlets on swindlers and their frauds, hoaxes and confidence games acquired a year ago and recently catalogued by John Jay College of Criminal Justice.”

“The reclusive son of JRR Tolkien has broken his silence to admit fears that fans of his father’s work may be ‘put off’ by the verse form of his latest posthumous publication. Responding via fax to a series of questions about The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, published for the first time today, Christopher Tolkien expressed the hope that it would show a different side to the author of the much-loved classic The Lord of the Rings.”