Category: publishing

“For obvious reasons then, the Quill honor hasn’t quite the same cachet as the National Book Awards which still picks winners the old-fashioned way: The vote of judges who have read the books. Still, the ‘people’s choice’ approach has its appeal.”

“Few literary heavyweights cast their wit about like Lewis Lapham, 72, and fewer still are capable of publishing an independent historical journal that wears its anachronisms so gleefully. The journalism legend and erstwhile Harper’s editor is launching a new print journal, Lapham’s Quarterly.”

A judge has approved a settlement for readers who said they were defrauded by James Frey because the author’s “memoir” wasn’t truthful. “Although the book was a huge hit that exploded in sales after Oprah Winfrey chose it for her book club, only 1,729 readers came forward to benefit from the settlement.”

“I am not suggesting that reading novels can change the world. I do suggest, and I do believe, that reading novels is one of the best possible ways to understand that all the women, in all the windows, are, at the end of the day, in urgent need of peace.”

“The magazine’s long-time claim to fame has been erudite literary nonfiction that ‘breaks ideas,’ as correspondent James Fallows put it in Cambridge. Today, though, the Atlantic seems drier, wonkier, more focused on grabbing readers (and advertisers) by following the stories of the day, and less interested in examining subjects no one else is talking about. And while the move from Boston doesn’t deserve all the credit — or blame, depending on your perspective — for this change, there’s reason to think the magazine’s relocation is playing a major role.”

“J.K. Rowling has completed her first book not to feature teen wizard Harry Potter – an illustrated collection of magical fairy stories titled ‘The Tales of Beedle the Bard.’ Only seven copies of the book are being printed, Rowling said Thursday. One will be auctioned next month to raise money for a children’s charity, while the others have been given away as gifts.”

“It’s an old and reassuring story: bookish boy or girl enters the cool, dark library and discovers loneliness and freedom. For the past ten years or so, however, the cities of the book have been anything but quiet. The computer and the Internet have transformed reading more dramatically than any technology since the printing press, and for the past five years Google has been at work on an ambitious project, Google Book Search.”

“Author J.K. Rowling and the maker of the “Harry Potter” films are suing a small publisher in Michigan over its plans to release a book version of a popular Web site dedicated to the boy wizard.”

“Figures supplied by the magazine seem to show a more than 70 percent increase in its paid circulation and doubled newsstand sales since Mr. Gourevitch took over. It’s still not an industry powerhouse, with distribution a relatively small 14,000 copies per issue. And as the memory of Plimpton fades, the onus will increasingly be on Mr. Gourevitch to convince readers (and writers) that this relatively small endeavor is more than just an extension of Plimpton’s personality–that without his promotional power it can be not only solvent, but relevant.”

“There will never again be public access to the paper records, the index to where in the country all the births, marriages and deaths were registered, but – as so often with government IT projects – the timetable for the online version intended to replace them has collapsed. According to a spokesman for the Office for National Statistics, which is responsible for the General Records Office, ‘the present target is to have the online index available by mid-2009’. In the meantime, researchers are invited to use microfiche, which means, one furious researcher said, that ‘not even God himself is going to be able to find most of this stuff’.”