Category: publishing

“Increased spending, more books on the shelves and a steady stream of visitors – it doesn’t sound like the usual story of England’s libraries. But, according to the latest statistics, the familiar tale of library woes may not tell the whole truth.”

“Her argument is that we need more investment in books. Students must not be allowed to accept as truth anything they can find through Google, including ‘facts’ given credence by Wikipedia. User-generated content, she maintains, is creating an age of banality and mediocrity, and stifling debate.”

“If it were anyone else but Vladimir Nabokov, I’d suggest doing the decent, respectful thing and letting The Original of Laura go up in smoke. But given that we’re talking about the trickiest literary jester who ever lived, I think we can assume that the whole thing is a kind of Nabokovian practical joke from beyond the grave.”

“The Vancouver bookstore that for more than two decades has battled against Canadian customs officials over material alleged to be obscene is up for sale – but the co-owner of Little Sister’s Book and Art Emporium, a Vancouver institution, says it has nothing to do with his legendary legal troubles. In fact, Jim Deva says he will sell only to someone willing to keep up the fight.”

Those “customer reviews” you can find on Amazon may seem like a populist answer to the ivory tower of literary criticism, but increasingly, the more prolific “voices of the people” may not be as independent and disconnected from the machinations of the publishing world as they appear.

“A recently published compendium of [Robert Frost’s] personal notebooks is coming under attack from two critics who say that the editor of the volume, Robert Faggen, mistranscribed hundreds, if not thousands, of Frost’s words.”

“Best-selling author Ishmael Beah and his US publisher have stood by his claim to have spent three years as a refugee and then child soldier in Sierra Leone’s civil war despite The Australian finding evidence that his ordeal lasted one year, not three.”

“Despite various efforts by dozens of scholars since 1943, vast portions of the letters written by and to America’s Founding Fathers are unavailable to the public. Some of the documents won’t be readily accessible until the middle of the century. The slow pace of their publication – largely attributed to insufficient funding and staff – has provoked the ire of scholars.”

“Latest statistics reveal that in 2007 the “indies” made a remarkable comeback. According to annual figures from the Booksellers Association (BA), the decline in the number of independent booksellers was halted last year after numbers had plunged in 2006, when indies were closing at a rate of almost two a week. Yet 81 new independent bookshops opened in 2007, more than making up for the 72 which closed the same year.”

In Japan, “of last year’s 10 best-selling novels, five were originally cellphone novels, mostly love stories written in the short sentences characteristic of text messaging but containing little of the plotting or character development found in traditional novels.”