Category: publishing

“It’s not so hard to be funny for a thousand words or so, the typical length of a New Yorker magazine Shouts & Murmurs feature, or for the duration of a newspaper column. Dave Barry was almost always funny in the newspaper and succeeded at magazine length many times. Funny for the duration of a book?” That’s a true test — and almost no one passes.

“Jessa Crispin, founder of the literary review magazine Bookslut.com, is packing up and heading to Berlin in search of inspiration. … Bookslut.com, known for its biting wit and snarky book reviews, will be celebrating its 7th anniversary this week before Caroline Eick, Crispin’s assistant, will take over as the managing editor.”

“We read to free ourselves from the grind and the misery and big ticking time-bomb questions of life. We read for the same reason we walk alone in the woods or squeeze our ears between headphones. We all need contemplative time, time away, time in another world altogether. For me, that happens when I pick up a good book — or, for that matter, a good newspaper.”

“As tributes to the late, great JG Ballard continue to roll in from all quarters, his publisher has quietly cancelled publication of what would have been his final book. HarperCollins had planned to bring out the non-fiction title, which would have been an account of Ballard’s discussions with his doctor, this September. But the author, suffering from cancer, was too ill to work on it….”

“Bookmakers have stopped taking bets on who will be the next poet laureate after a weekend during which there was widespread speculation that Carol Ann Duffy will be appointed to the role later this week. … If Duffy has been chosen, her appointment is certain to have been helped along by the DCMS’s decision – for the first time – to ask the public for suggestions as to who should follow Motion.”

“Can we in future expect bookshops to consist of rows of ATM machines and little else, like a modern city-centre bank? Will booksellers be transformed into technicians, on hand to help with hitches in the machinery or user incompetence, like the sales assistants in any supermarket who hover by the self-service tills?”

“Total book sales are projected to dip 0.5% in 2009, to $35.04 billion… Sales will be down or flat in all the trade segments, but will increase in the professional, higher education and standardized testing segments.”

The appeal came in the form of a letter — known as the ” Heidelberg Appeal” — sent last week to German President Horst Köhler, Chancellor Angela Merkel and the heads of Germany’s 16 federal states. It alleges that “intellectual property is being stolen from its producers to an unimagined degree and without criminalization through the illegal publication of works protected by German copyright law.”

“In books, the recession is putting the marketplace under huge pressure at the very moment when e-publishing is beginning to make a serious impact on the mainstream. I freely admit that I don’t fully understand what is happening, but I sense that, for anyone who does, there’s a killing to be made.”

“The publishing world is all caught up in weighty questions about the Kindle and other such devices: Will they help or hurt book sales and authors’ advances? Cannibalize the industry? Galvanize it? Please, they’re overlooking the really important concern: How will the Kindle affect literary snobbism?”