Category: publishing

Another unconventional choice of jurors for the Orange Prize reopens the debate about the meaning of the wards.”Unlike reviewing, with its onus on individual responsibility, literary juries are fundamentally about discussion and collective decisions, about championing (and rubbishing) books, but also being open to others’ opinions. The balance is therefore key. The ultimate aim is to serve not just writers, but readers.”

“That a book derived from free online content has sold so well may allay some fears that giving something away means nobody will want to pay for it. It also encourages publishers who increasingly scour the Internet for talent, hoping to capitalize on the audiences that a popular Web site can deliver.”

New offices for one thing. For another, David Levine, the 80-year-old artist whose iconic caricatures have filled the pages of the paper since its very first issue, has developed macular degeneration, an eye condition that has severely impaired his ability to draw the kind of piercing, detailed portraits he is known for.

“If many researchers have had to scan rare documents or books for their own perusal, there’s a potential treasure trove of material that exists among their combined efforts. Rather than let all that scholarship rot, or waste away in data files, the George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media sees an opportunity to create an open archive of scholarly resources in the public domain.”

We tend to think of Latin as something that might season our dreary vernacular, per the cutesy suggestion of books such as “Put a Little Latin in Your Life.” But our very best prose and public oratory does not have just a “little Latin.” It’s Latin through and through — in tempo, structure, and diction.

“Sotheby’s will sell a copy of the Magna Carta in New York next week, the first to be sold by public auction. But the Bodleian elegantly gazumped the auction house by displaying its four copies together for the first time in 800 years. Only 13 others survive – and one of those bears the scars of medieval mice teeth.”

“W00t,” a hybrid of letters and numbers used by gamers as an exclamation of happiness, topped all other terms in the Springfield dictionary publisher’s online poll for the word that best sums up 2007.

The Kindle is a “$400 handheld ebook reader that Amazon shipped recently, to vast, ringing indifference. The device is cute enough – in a clumsy, overpriced, generation-one kind of way – but the early adopter community recoiled in horror at the terms of service and anti-copying technology that infected it.”

“According to a 2003 United Nations report into human development in the Arab world, more books are translated into Spanish each year – 10,000 – than have been translated into Arabic in the previous 10 centuries. Now this situation is being rectified by the sheikhdom of Abu Dhabi, one of the seven Muslim United Arab Emirates, which last month officially revealed its plans to translate 100 epochal foreign-language texts into Arabic by the end of next year.”

“Book reviewers are largely divided between those who believe in something you might call the ‘objective’ book review, and those who don’t — attitudes toward specific practices in the field follow almost syllogistically from one premise or the other.”