Category: publishing

“A YouGov poll has found that almost 10% of Britons aspire to being an author, followed by sports personality, pilot, astronaut and event organiser on the list of most coveted jobs.”

So multimedia is taking over and books are out? “If that’s the case, why are libraries everywhere thriving? (Or, at least, thriving when the bureaucrats running them aren’t despoiling them by hiding the books and filling them with DVDs.)”

Superstore bookseller Barnes & Noble says it won’t stock OJ Simpson’s book. “Citing a perceived lack of customer interest, the chain said the book would only be available by special order or for purchase online through Barnes & Noble.com.”

“(T)he 271-year-old Bellevue Hospital is producing literature — and not just the medical kind. Among the first titles of the Bellevue Literary Press, released this spring, are a novel interweaving themes of sickness and recovery into a 1940s family drama, a collection of editorial cartoons by an accomplished physician-artist, and a nonfiction work that explores the mind-set and meaning of awkwardness. The press plans to release four more books, including another novel, in the fall.”

“Yann Martel, whose Life of Pi won the Man Booker prize, has come up with his own form of direct action: every second Monday, he sends a book to the Canadian prime minister, Stephen Harper. If the PM will not follow the arts, the arts must come to him – by post.”

“If Shakespeare had had a hard drive, if the plays had been written with a word processor on a computer that had somehow survived, we still might not know anything definitive about Shakespeare’s original or final intentions — these are human, not technological, questions — but we might be able to know some rather different things.”

In China, “writing and reading novels online has become the hobby of an estimated 10 million youth. Yet unlike the music world, where MP3s are threatening to kill off CDs, online novels in China are helping physical books fly off the shelves. Print versions of popular online works sell by the millions and publishers, as well as authors, are cashing in.”

“The legend was almost too good to be true. For decades, a mysterious figure dressed in black, his features cloaked by a wide-brimmed hat and scarf, crept into a churchyard to lay three roses and a bottle of cognac at the grave of Edgar Allan Poe. Now, a 92-year-old man who led the fight to preserve the historic site says the visitor was his creation.”

“The Scottish crime writer Val McDermid has re-ignited a row about violence in detective fiction written by women. Speaking at the Edinburgh books festival, she attacked bestselling local author Ian Rankin for suggesting that ‘the people writing the most graphic violence today are women … they are mostly lesbians as well’. McDermid, who is a lesbian, rejected Rankin’s remarks – made in an interview with the Independent last year – as ‘arrant rubbish’.”

“Ian Rankin is talking a ‘wheen o’ blethers’ with his contention that women crime writers, and lesbians in particular, are more bloodthirsty than men. … Firstly, the notion that a malevolent coven of hardboiled dykes is threatening men’s supremacy over the genre, or polluting it with their hardcore imaginings, seems to me marginally paranoid.” But there is this, too: “Women are simply more used to living with fear than men.”