Category: publishing

A 2010 Arizona law “that prohibited school districts from offering courses that, among other things, ‘promoted resentment toward any race or class” and “advocated ethnic solidarity instead of being individuals.’ … [led to] the removal of books from school libraries, including such incendiary texts as The Tempest.” Enter the book traffickers …

“One of the intriguing aspects when teaching translation is watching students struggle with sentences that say things they didn’t expect them to say.” Tim Parks offers examples – from D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Niccolò Machiavelli – of when translators changed the meaning of sentences without, apparently, even realizing it.

“For whatever reason, Gatsby was consigned to my particular version of the list of classic books one pretends to have read while making small talk at dinner parties. My status as a Gatsby virgin, though personally embarrassing, proved useful to my editors.” J. Bryan Lowder takes a multiple-choice test and tries to write a high-school essay on the book after seeing Baz Luhrmann’s film version.

“If you’re a publisher, copy protection is all that stops the pirates from freely circulating your goods. Your revenue will crash. Maybe you’ll go out of business. But there’s another school of thought, which says that nobody pirates software except cash-poor kids who wouldn’t have bought it anyway.”

Maybe. (Well, probably. It’s a little fuzzy though.)

“Barnes & Noble would lose the unit that added attention and store traffic…and kept its stock higher. It’s not a clear parallel yet to Borders, but it’s hard to ignore the comparison.”

“The voice at the other end of the line gave a sigh, like a mighty oak toppling into a great river, or something else that didn’t sound like a sigh if you gave it a moment’s thought.”

“What they show is that it’s the modern age that’s based on fantasy. If we know anything, it’s that our actions will produce a world that’s quite different from anything we can presently foresee or imagine.”

“The first of my five favourite tediums is Jane Eyre (1847) pacing up and down the third storey at Thornfield Hall, longing for a bigger life and ‘a power of vision which might overpass that limit.'”

“For these women, Lawrence’s embrace of gender is not a bug; it’s a feature. Acknowledging the way gender matters to ideas isn’t (or rather, isn’t only) about imposing hierarchy based on which bits you happen to have. It’s also about affirming the weirdness and power and centrality of bodies – and of those people who have traditionally been most associated with bodies, which is to say, women.”