Category: publishing

“My problem with message-board language brings up a prior problem in journalism: the difficulty of translating spoken language into written language. Who wants to deny readers a chance to laugh and to get the full flavor of Internet-culture wackiness? It’s flat-out lying to pretend that everyone (or anyone) spells well online.”

“With the stroke of a finger on a touch screen, a visitor can flip through pages written 100 years ago and summon an image of this letter, or any other entry. With audiotapes, four short films and software that brings light and breath to aging manuscripts, it amounts to a digital resurrection, allowing Yeats to stride again along the hinge of the 19th and 20th centuries.”

“When Google unveiled its Book Search project in late 2004, no country protested louder against this digital battering-ram of “Anglo-Saxon” hegemony than France. Now even France has started to succumb. The municipal library in Lyon – the second largest in the land – has signed up with Google Book Search to digitise half a million titles already in the public domain.”

“The 230 surviving First Folios are now the most minutely studied published works in history. The folio is unusual in that two centuries of records trace the path of specific copies. The pursuit of folio-spotting remains unparalleled in literature.”

“Despite winning several awards, the 62-year-old Ryan was virtually unheard of before her appointment as laureate. A resident of Fairfax, Calif., she described herself in a recent interview with The Associated Press as a “modern hermit.”

“They put my picture, my face, on the front, on the cover with no permission. They don’t ask me — they use my name advertising their product. I don’t care about fiction, I care about reality.”

“Is The Shack the Blair Witch Project of the modern book world? Does it demonstrate that with modern e-tools literary talent can find a way around the cumbersome apparatus of the publishing industry? Is it a portent?”

“These ‘choose your own adventures’, half work of fiction, half roleplaying game, appear to be enjoying something of a resurgence, perhaps partly due to nostalgia and partly due to a generation weaned on the internet looking for the same interactivity in books.”

Raymond Scott, the 51-year-old man accused of stealing a 400-year-old Shakespeare folio, is not your garden-variety thief. In fact, he insists that he’s not a thief at all, and points out that if he had actually stolen the volume in question, he probably wouldn’t have walked into a Washington library last month and asked them to authenticate it.

“Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1994, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.”