Category: publishing

“Germany’s book culture is sustained by an age-old practice requiring all bookstores, including German online booksellers, to sell books at fixed prices. Save for old, used or damaged books, discounting in Germany is illegal… Now this system is under threat from, of all people, the Swiss. Just across the border, the Swiss lately decided to permit the discounting of German books — a move that some in the book trade here fear will eventually force Germany itself to follow suit, transforming a diverse and book-rich culture into an echo of big-chain America.”

Literary readings aren’t the staid afairs they might once have been. Now people bring their lunches, talk on their phones, check email…

“Writer J.K. Rowling’s revelation about the gay private life of a dead – and fictional – school headmaster in her popular Harry Potter series of books is conjuring both criticism from those who already wanted the books banned and calm acceptance from those who applaud her for not making it a big deal in the first place.”

“While our part of the world are not terribly interested in reading, you go to the Third World, and they clamor for books. They see books as they used to be seen here, as an entrance to a new kind of education. I don’t know if you’ve been to Africa, but it’s, ‘Please give me a book. Please send me a book. Please give me a leaf of paper.’ I will talk about this in my Nobel talk: this great reverence for learning, for education, for books, seems to have left Europe and has gone somewhere else. And what will come out of that? Who knows? I don’t know.”

“A popular English teacher has been placed on paid leave — and faces possible criminal charges — after a student’s parents complained to police that a ninth-grade class reading list contained a book about a murderer who has sex with his victims’ bodies.”

“Best-selling author Nora Roberts won book of the year on Monday at the third annual Quill Awards, which were created to bring glamour and red carpet extravagance to the world of publishing.”

“Almost 140 years after first publication of [Tolstoy’s War & Peace,] a nasty duel has broken out between rival versions of the weighty tome published in the US. The argument between the two new translations is, fittingly, one of weight. Acclaimed translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky’s faithful version of Tolstoy’s tale of birth, death, love, war and peace clocks in at 1,267 pages and features all of the 500 or so characters Tolstoy introduced… Facing it in bookshops across the US is British translator Andrew Bromfield’s reduced, ‘original’ version. The Bromfield War and Peace, first published in Britain earlier this year, runs to just 886 pages, does away with the French and the philosophical digressions, and boasts a happy ending.”

“Several major research libraries have rebuffed offers from Google and Microsoft to scan their books into computer databases, saying they are put off by restrictions these companies want to place on the new digital collections.”

“Public libraries are invisible in most debates about copyright as it affects mass consumption. Still, they are the institutions which have the longest experience of making copyright goods available fairly to people who have not paid directly for them; and in all the time libraries have been around, no one has come up with a better model. Libraries don’t abolish copyright, and in some ways are more scrupulous about it than most institutions. But they allow the price of copyright goods to be lowered to the point at which they become worthwhile both for individual buyers and for the makers.”

“After one of the most embarrassing Booker speeches in living memory, from prize chairman Sir Howard Davies, backed up by complacent, regional sales conference-style remarks from Booker boss Jonathan Taylor and Man stooge Peter Clarke, it was hard, if not impossible, to suppress the thought that our premier literary trophy should be subjected to a root-and-branch reform.”