Category: publishing

“Margaret Drabble has said that she will not write another novel because she is worried about repeating herself. The 69-year-old author of novels including A Summer Birdcage and The Ice Age told the Radio 4 arts programme Front Row last week that she had stopped writing fiction. ‘What I don’t like is the idea that I’m repeating myself without knowing it, which is what old people do endlessly.'”

“Public libraries are bustling these days, thanks in part to the swelling ranks of the jobless, but they have always been a haven for people with nowhere else to go. In some towns, that includes a fair number of people with unpleasant hygiene.” One suburban Chicago library “recently added ‘offensive bodily odors’ to its list of prohibitions,” while “other book lenders around the Chicago area have long imposed such bans.”

“Amazon’s Kindle 2 is slimmer, faster and has longer battery life than its predecessor. But the newly launched e-book reader falls short when it comes to how well it displays text, say some users.”

“Individual buyers still purchase a traditional book about 99 percent of the time. But the revolution is coming, experts say, and already has changed how scholars conduct and publish research, and how books are formatted and archived. New approaches to teaching and new riddles of copyright law are breaking to the surface across the globe.”

“Advance envy is common. ‘Writers who can’t recall their Social Security number can say to the penny how much of an advance their nemesis received. To an outsider, the numbers can seem arbitrary, even absurd. No one ever says of an advance, ‘That’s exactly what that book deserves,’ Yep, a coming-of-age first novel involving drug addiction and same-sex experimentation is worth $25,000.”

“A groundswell of outrage, concern and confusion sprang up over the weekend, largely via Twitter, in response to what authors and others believed was a decision by Amazon to remove adult titles from its sales ranking. On Sunday evening, however, an Amazon spokesperson said that a glitch had occurred in its sales ranking feature that was in the process of being fixed. The spokesperson added that there was no new adult policy.”

“The Elements of Style does not deserve the enormous esteem in which it is held by American college graduates. Its advice ranges from limp platitudes to inconsistent nonsense. Its enormous influence has not improved American students’ grasp of English grammar; it has significantly degraded it. The authors won’t be hurt by these critical remarks. They are long dead.”

“We now may see the history of journalism rewinding even farther, back to the time before the burghers and before the impresarios, when there wasn’t much of a market for news and there was a seamless connection between journalism and politics. Substantial realms of journalism, especially in newer media like the blogosphere and cable television, are already hard to distinguish from political activity.”

A new study says that Lexis, a standard source for seeing what news articles have been published where, misses a significant number of published stories. “Google News revealed that LexisNexis missed more than half of the news stories in major papers,” the researchers concluded. “LexisNexis is blind to a great many news stories because of the wire exclusion and this problem extends to major news outlets.”

“Some 200 people with print disabilities–physical impairments that restrict their ability to read print–protested in front of the Authors Guild headquarters in New York today, rallying against the Guild’s attempt to get Amazon to disable the Kindle 2’s text-to-speech function.”