Category: publishing

As the U.S. economy deteriorates and millions wrestle with questions about their faltering 401(k)s and when — or if — to cash out long-term stock investments, major publishers are scrambling to cash in.

Say you spend just one hour a day reading about books – in a year you’ll have burned up two weeks of your waking life. Never had time for Moby Dick or Remembrance of Things Past or Crime and Punishment? There’s your reading window.

One in 10 Britons admit cheating the system at school by watching film versions of classic novels instead of reading the original texts, a survey says.

“Chetan Bhagat, an investment banker, has become the biggest-selling English-language novelist in India’s history… The novels, deliberately sentimental in the tradition of Bollywood filmmaking, are priced like an Indian movie ticket — just 100 rupees, or $2.46 — and have won little praise as literature… But he has touched a nerve with young Indian readers.”

“Publishers are not in the business of verifying every fact. They concentrate mainly on checking for plagiarism and libel. It’s not part of their tradition to challenge the contents of their authors’ work, but to judge whether the book will succeed in a very competitive market.”

“Reading changed history. More than that, it changes the brain. It creates new pathways in the brain, and, by doing this, makes us think in new ways. When you read, you see letters written on a page, then you recognise them as representations of sounds made by the human voice, then you join the sounds together to make words, then you fit the words together into sentences. This takes an amazing amount of ultra-fast processing. Brains that do this are different from brains that don’t.”

“Some of the UK’s best young novelists are working with computer games designers to create digital short stories, each inspired by a classic work of literature but featuring games, blogs and web tools.”

“Despite the credit crunch, an entire industry has sprung up to cater to an increasing number of customers willing to spend thousands of pounds on luxury books from the shelves of the world’s most exclusive shops.”

“In 1869, a year before Charles Dickens died, he wrote in his will that he wanted to be remembered for his work alone. No plaques, no statues. Now, almost 140 years after his death, Dickens’ final request has sparked an impassioned debate among his most ardent fans – and his family are suggesting his dying wish be laid to rest.”

Independent publishers can shape the tactics of the big battalions, who imitate their successes and lure away their heroes. They also have more fun, which may be why so many of them have escaped from big publishing.