Category: publishing

“Amazon.comInc. on Wednesday plans to unveil a new version of its Kindle e-book reader with a larger screen and other features designed to appeal to periodical and academic textbook publishers, according to people familiar with the matter. … [New York] Times Co. Chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr. is expected to share the stage with Amazon Chief Executive Jeffrey Bezos at the event….”

“The author of ‘The Road,’ ‘All the Pretty Horses’ and several other novels was named the winner Monday of the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for lifetime achievement in American fiction. The prize is worth $25,000.”

“Three organizations representing 139,000 libraries today asked the judge overseeing Google’s settlement with authors and publishers to make sure that the company doesn’t violate the privacy of readers who would use its vast digital books collection. They also petitioned U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin to ensure that Google doesn’t set the price for access to its digital books ‘beyond the reach of many libraries.'”

“Student Monitor’s fall 2008 survey of full-time undergraduates reveals that 16 percent of undergraduates “bought most of their textbooks online,” up from 12 percent in fall 2007. Additionally, Student Monitor reports that “the share of students who purchase most of their textbooks from their on-campus bookstore continues to trend down: fewer than six in ten students (57 percent) purchased most of their textbooks at their on campus book store,” compared to 64 percent in fall 2006 and down from 72 percent in fall 2005.”

“We simply publish too many books. We need more midlist novels and less of the celebrity books that challenge the bottomline of publishing conglomerates. The supply chain is broken. In the 20th century you got books to distributors and they got books into stores, and reps from publishers into stores telling buyers what to order… that doesn’t work anymore.”

“There will be no blockbuster drought. But the economic implosion seems to have exacerbated the long-lamented difficulty of publishing fiction by newcomers who don’t look immediately marketable or by veteran writers with “bad track,” as the industry calls disappointing sales. The trend may benefit smaller presses.”

“So many users said they like Kindle because they suffer from some form of arthritis that multiple posters indicate that they do or do not have arthritis as a matter of course. A variety of other impairments, from weakening eyes and carpal-tunnel-like syndromes to more exotic disabilities dominate the purchase rationales of these posters.”

“In the best case scenario for Google, it will have something resembling the library of the future online sometime in 2010, but given the number of lawyers eying this deal and the potential amount of money at issue, one can be pretty sure the legal battle will drag out far into the 2010s.”

“Exclamation marks – those forms of punctuation derided by the funless and fastidious – are making a comeback, thanks to an internet renaissance that is bleeding over into every form of written communication. Once it was bad form to end a paragraph with an exclamation mark. Now it’s borderline obligatory.”

“Authors, publishers and the print industry appear to have lost momentum against the Cheaper Books argument, with their 11th hour pleading for the special case threat to children’s books acting as a sandbag to protect Australian publishing from what appears to be an unstoppable flood of public opinion in favour of change.”