Category: publishing

“Of course we can’t stop reading. Of course there’ll be a market for books. But what kind of books? That’s the question.”

“For a while now, readers have had the best of both worlds: all the benefits of the old, high-profit regime–intensive reporting, experienced editors, and so on–and the low costs of the new one. But that situation can’t last. Soon enough, we’re going to start getting what we pay for, and we may find out just how little that is.”

“JK Rowling’s The Tales of Beedle the Bard has been selling at a rate of two copies a second around the world, according to the first international sales figures for the book… [the title] has sold 2.6m copies worldwide since it was published on 4 December.”

“The recordings were made in February 1980 by Larkin and his Hull University colleague John Weeks, a sound engineer, but remained on a shelf in the garage in which they were recorded for over two decades, until they were discovered in 2006 when Weeks’s son was clearing it out.”

Two years ago in London, publishers were “ringing showbiz agents and asking whether their biggest clients had ever thought of doing a book.” It worked: “Throughout this autumn, at least seven or eight of the Sunday Times non-fiction top 10 have been memoirs by television faces.”

Having infuriated book buyers, the publishing industry and Oprah Winfrey, the author of the faked memoir A Million Little Pieces is writing what he calls ” the third book of the Bible,” which will depict Jesus Christ living with a hooker and performing gay marriages.

“The only reason we’re so well-informed about journalists’ suffering is they have easy access to a megaphone. The underlying cause of their grief can be traced to the same force that has destroyed other professions and industries: digital technology… Wherever digital zeros and ones can dislodge analog processes, they either have or are. Call it a digital slay-ride.”

“A respected research institute wanted Chinese classical texts to adorn [the cover of] its journal, something beautiful and elegant, to illustrate a special report on China. Instead, it got a racy flyer extolling the lusty details of stripping housewives in a brothel.”

“Borders Group Inc … the second-largest U.S. bookseller, will accept books from publisher HarperStudio on a nonreturnable basis, departing from a decades-old publishing tradition, the Wall Street Journal reported. Industry practice dating from the 1930s allowed retailers to return unsold titles to publishers for full credit and without incurring shipping costs, the newspaper said.”

“Marcel Proust’s letters to his housekeeper will go on sale today at Sotheby’s in Paris. The author of ‘In Search of Lost Time’ sent letters, postcards and telegrams to Celeste Albaret, who worked for him for almost nine years.”