Category: publishing

“[T]he world of fiction and the world of real flesh-and-blood people are not quite as separate as one might imagine,” Alexander McCall Smith writes. “Although we eventually learn to distinguish between the world of make-believe and the real world, I suspect that many of us continue to experience fictional characters and events as being, in some way, real.”

“College dons have become embroiled in a bitter row over plans to axe more than 150 jobs at Cambridge University Press – the oldest continually operating book publisher in the world. … Management argues that the move has been forced on them as the industry changes from lithographic to digital production. But critics claim the redundancies will be the beginning of the end for a world-renowned operation….”

“A list of Jews saved by Oskar Schindler that inspired the novel and Oscar-winning film ‘Schindler’s List’ has been found in a Sydney library, its co-curator said. Workers at the New South Wales State Library found the list, containing the names of 801 Jews saved from the Holocaust by the businessman, as they sifted through boxes of Australian author Thomas Keneally’s manuscript material.”

“Its trick is to project an infrared pattern onto the open page spread. This lets a pair of infrared cameras map the three-dimensional shape of the pages by detecting distortion to the pattern. This in turn allows the distortion of the text to be determined – and therefore the degree of correction needed to read it accurately.”

“The £193m Library of Birmingham will tower over Centenary Square in the heart of the city with capacity to accommodate more than three million visitors a year, according to the city council, which is backing the project with £159m in public funds. Only the British Library, which operates by appointment only and does not lend, will be larger.”

“If books become a digitized commodity, the money won’t be there to produce high-quality ones (and authors all become de facto volunteers). So then we’ll have pseudo-books instead–a cordoned-off collection of curated blog posts masquerading as timely books, distributed online to hand-held reading devices along the lines of Kindle or a netbook.”

“Weighing in at a whopping 1,120 pages, Under the Dome is a return for the bestselling author to the arm-breaking heft of his classic novels The Stand and It. King told an audience at the Library of Congress in Washington DC last year that he’d first had the idea for the book 25 years ago, and made a stab at writing it.”

“A few lucky types seem to memorize great swaths of poetry without even trying. For the rest of us, the key to memorizing a poem painlessly is to do it incrementally, in tiny bits. The process of memorizing a poem is fairly mechanical at first. But then something organic starts to happen. Mere memorization gives way to performance.”

“The most popular Nobel literature laureate, Gabriel García Márquez, has reportedly laid down his pen. We’ve been here before: in 1974, the year after the Chilean coup, he vowed not to pick up his writing tools until General Pinochet fell, though thankfully, by the 1980s he was back at his desk. Yet the octogenarian writer, whose One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967) has sold more than 30m copies, has long been at pains to pass on his mantle.”

“Employees at the University of New Mexico Press learned yesterday that three of their colleagues would be let go at the end of April and that nine more positions — in order fulfillment and customer service — might soon be outsourced. That kind of news is all too common these days. More unusual is what happened next.”