Category: publishing

Amazon has rolled out a new $399 e-book that it hopes will do for the electronic book industry what the iPod did for downloadable music. The Kindle comes with wireless capability, weighs just over half a pound, and can store over 200 standard-length books.

“The famed bookseller of Kabul — whose family life was chronicled by a Norwegian journalist — has published a scathing response to that best-selling book, accusing the author of creating lies about him and abusing his hospitality and friendship.”

“The immediate reductions vary from discounts on books that have already been stickered to offering rebates to retailers. Next year, consumers can expect the prices on new books from the U.S. to range from par to 10 per cent above the U.S. prices.”

“We have no recommendations, but we hope to create a national discussion. We need a new national consensus. ‘To Read or Not To Read’ is not an elegy for print culture, but a call to action, because we are losing valuable human resources.”

“Increasingly, authors and publishers are tipping their hats to the power of 8 or 10 or 12 women (and usually they are women) sitting around a dining room table, dissecting their particular book of the month, then spreading the word to their friends.”

“We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life.”

“Fueling this trend are a growing number of literary organizations that nurture the work specifically of black writers.”

The first of four installments of John Richardson Picasso bio took 16 years and is 1,500 pages. “I don’t want to sound the knell of doom, but one of the things that gives this biography its authority – that Richardson is old enough to have known Picasso over a long period – also begins to give the reader concerns for its completion.”

“The handsome house in the corner of St James’s Square, which now has 8,000 members and one million books, has for the past 160 years been the best ‘place on the civilised earth’, but it no longer caters for those who are ‘not rich’.”

“Throughout the United States, aspiring writers are using Craigslist not just as a place to offload their futons, but as a pixeled writing workshop where they test their stabs at social satire on some of the more than 30 million visitors that the site draws each month. Their personal ads ostensibly seek a soul mate, but what they’re really looking for is an audience.”