Category: publishing

“In October, the online retailer Amazon.com will unveil the Kindle, an electronic book reader that has been the subject of industry speculation for a year. Also this fall, Google plans to start charging users for full online access to the digital copies of some books in its database.”

Simon & Schuster CEO Jack Romanos, who announced Thursday that he was retiring after a 40-year career in publishing, acknowledged that times are tight for the industry and anticipated an increasingly digital future.

Lloyd Jones, Nicola Barker, Mohsin Hamid, Anne Enright and Indra Sinha – all of whom are newcomers to the shortlist – are named to the Booker Prize short list. They will compete against previou winner Ian McKewan.

“Surveys consistently find that women read more books than men, especially fiction. Explanations abound, from the biological differences between the male and female brains, to the way that boys and girls are introduced to reading at a young age. One thing is certain: Americans–of either gender–are reading fewer books today than in the past.”

“An unseemly row over some of the most illustrious names in world literature, including Samuel Beckett and Eugene Ionesco, has broken out over who owns the rights to their work.”

There’s a new way of reading contemporary novels in the internet age. “Any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody’s going to google everything in the text … there’s this nebulous extended text. Everything is hyperlinked now. What the author is outlining here is the theory of a new and innovatively creative reading practice.”

“Necessity is the mother of invention, the old saying goes. But boredom and the desire to experiment are powerful forces too, says Canadian author Michael Winter. That’s how he came up with the idea to ‘serialize’ his latest novel on Facebook, the hot social-networking site.”

“In 1946, Orwell said English was ‘in a bad way’. In 2007, quite a lot of people would probably concede a dismay at the overall crassness of contemporary ‘cyberprose’. But such is the general nervousness and incomprehension about the internet revolution that no one is willing to articulate this.”

“Reclusive writers are living perfectly reasonable lives. The fact that they’re reclusive isn’t the phenomenon: The phenomenon is our reaction to the fact that they’re living normal lives. It has the opposite effect than what I think these writers want: People are intrigued by it. ‘My God — look!’ Your idea is to disappear and you end up with the spotlight on you.”