Category: publishing

“There is something increasingly reassuring today about the physicality of print books, about using one’s hands and fingers as well as one’s mind and brain as the instruments of reading.”

Says the 81-year-old author of her decision, “I’m delighted. Not that I didn’t love writing, but I think you do get to a stage when you sort of think about your life in a different way. And perhaps, when you’re my age, you don’t wish to alone as much as a writer has to be. It’s like, at the wrong end of life, becoming very sociable.”

“Matthue Roth, a thirty-four-year-old writer and video-game designer, is usually met with befuddlement when he tells people he has written a children’s book of re-told Kafka stories.”

“Random House has signed him to transform the New Yorker piece into a book, also called “Every Good Boy Does Fine” – a phrase that anyone who has taken piano lessons will recognize as a mnemonic children use to memorize the notes on the musical staff when it bears a treble clef.”

“German researchers have created a new DRM feature that changes the text and punctuation of an e-book ever so slightly. Called SiDiM, which Google translates to “secure documents by individual marking,” the changes are unique to each e-book sold. These alterations serve as a digital watermark that can be used to track books that have had any other DRM layers stripped out of them before being shared online.”

“Briefly, the demands of family are such that I must return to New York. This is a bittersweet time for me as I have truly loved the work I do here — and have been aided by a stellar staff.”

“That’s notable because King, to support the print book being published by small indie Hard Case Crime, decided not to issue an e-book of this particular novel.”

“On Monday, the Justice Department’s lawyers homed in on a condition in Apple’s contracts with the publishers: the “most favored nation” clause, which required publishers to allow Apple to sell e-books at the same price as the books would be sold in any other store.”

“I’m not sure if it can absolutely change things, but literature can certainly become a stay against the tyranny of pessimism and misery. Misery and pessimism stand in opposition to value. And we all need to feel valuable. This is where stories come in.”

“For centuries, the basic task of literary scholarship has been close reading of texts. But for digitally savvy academics such as Moretti, literary study doesn’t always require scholars actually to read books. This new approach to literature depends on computers to crunch “big data”, or stores of massive amounts of information, to produce new insights.”