Category: publishing

“Perhaps, in these recessionary times, we might be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing, as flesh and blood writers are asked to don the masks of their own characters to create a whole new line of books. After all, fictional writers must be far easier to deal with than real-life ones, and they don’t demand big advances.”

It is hardly the Nobel Prize in Literature. But following well-established awards practice, Philip Stone, the magazine’s charts editor and “awards administrator,” released a congratulatory statement on Thursday. Sadly, it was not a ringing endorsement of the winner.

“For the Kindle, the Sony, the Plastic Logic, or any of the other iterations we’ll be seeing in the near future to supplant 600 years of habit, the challenge is to do what Apple has done: design a device for readers that is beautiful and functional enough to become a cultural totem, and ensure that it not only connects seamlessly to a brilliantly organized, bottomless market of written material but that it also allows access to every other market on the planet.”

“A New York court ordered a book collector to return a 16th-century volume valued at $600,000 to a museum in Stuttgart, more than six decades after it was stolen by a U.S. army captain at the end of World War II.”

“Fewer than 10 percent of the 1.3 million legally blind people in the United States read Braille, and just 10 percent of blind children are learning it, according to a report released Thursday by the National Federation of the Blind, which is based in Baltimore. … Today, Braille is considered by many to be too difficult, too outdated, a last resort. Instead, teachers ask students to rely on audio texts, voice-recognition software or other technology.”

In an essay that begins by noting that he didn’t go to the last day of the Christian Book Expo, publisher Michael Hyatt, who organized the event, analyzes why attendance was abysmal. “If consumers had come, this would have been an incredible show. The ‘product’ itself was superb. Programming, production, logistics, displays–everything was first class. … So then, why didn’t it work? We built it. But they didn’t come. Why?”

“Joanna Smith Rakoff had just turned in a major set of rewrites on her novel, Brooklyn, when her editor at Scribner broke the news to her over dinner that she would have to change its title. It seemed that Irish novelist Colm Tóibín, a Scribner author since 2000 who has been twice short-listed for the Booker Prize, wanted to use it for his forthcoming book, which was scheduled to come out this spring, just a month after Ms. Rakoff’s. Would the young debut novelist mind terribly getting out of the way?”

“What all this [hype] is really about is trying to sidestep the reality that books are pretty useless to us. They don’t keep us warm (unless you finally fling that unputdownable freak in the fire), they don’t feed us, they wreck our environment by costing trees, and sometimes they’re plain poisonous.”

“Their names have largely been forgotten over time — TE Hulme, FS Flint, Edward Storer — but 100 years ago today, a young and edgy group of bohemians met together for the first time and changed the face of poetry for good. Enthusiasts are celebrating 25 March as one of our most significant literary anniversaries, though one that most people know nothing about.”

“Christopher James has triumphed in the National Poetry Competition for his wryly affectionate poem about a funeral. James’s poem, Farewell to the Earth, was chosen by judges and poets Brian Patten, Frieda Hughes and Jack Mapanje.”