Category: publishing

“DC Comics, the venerable publisher of Superman, Batman and Wonder Woman, will introduce today an online imprint that amounts to a virtual slush pile, accepting submissions from the public and paying for the best comics that come in. The imprint, called Zudacomics.com, will permit aspiring cartoonists to register at its Web site and submit an eight-panel sample of their work. Starting in October and each month thereafter, editors at DC Comics will select 10 entries, post them for public view and invite people to vote for their favorite.”

Harry Potter fans are signing petitions asking JK Rowling to continue writing stories about the boy wizard. Rowling is on record saying: “I think that Harry’s story comes to quite a clear end in Book 7,” she said.” But I have always said that I wouldn’t say never. I can’t say I will never write another book about that world, just because I think: ‘What do I know, in 10 years’ time I might want to return to it’. But I think it is unlikely.”

“Whether escaping their problems or working through them, young readers are exploring a world through Harry Potter that is, for all its flying broomsticks and mythical monsters, a pretty conventional one. As outraged fans, parents and even Rowling herself have explained to Harry’s Christian critics, the books are traditionally moral.”

“Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers? Not any more. With so much of the job involving technology and with a focus now on finding and sharing information beyond just what is available in books, a new type of librarian is emerging — the kind that, according to the Web site Librarian Avengers, is ‘looking to put the ‘hep cat’ in cataloguing’.”

Here in the shadow of the Wallajah Mosque, a team of six puts out this hand-penned paper. Four of them are katibs — writers dedicated to the ancient art of Urdu calligraphy. It takes three hours using a pen, ink and ruler to transform a sheet of paper into news and art

This week the family of murdered Ron Goldman purchased the rights to OJ Simpson’s book. But “even if any further legal hurdles are cleared, finding a publisher for the book will prove difficult, players in the book trade said. For one thing, although virtually all of the copies that had been printed by ReganBooks were confiscated, one sold on EBay in January, and last month the entire text was leaked on the Internet, where it’s been intermittently available.”

“OJ Simpson’s controversial account of how he would have killed his wife Nicole Brown-Simpson and her friend Ron Goldman is finally to be published, following a court order issued last month. But the proposed publication will not benefit Simpson, his family or any of those involved in the original, aborted project.”

“Has Tony Soprano whacked the American novel? This question is not as facetious as it might at first seem. Novelists from Norman Mailer to Gary Shteyngart have described the show – which as yet does not exist between two covers – as a Great American Novel, and for good reason. Spread across nearly 100 hours of viewing time, The Sopranos developed characters to a degree unparalleled in American television.”

Los Angeles rare book store Heritage Book Shop is closing. But this isn’t another story of the internet pushing out a local business. “The brothers maintained that they were not forced out of business by the Internet — which has sped the demise of hundreds of used-book stores in recent years — or by the unwillingness of Generation iPod to crack open a book from time to time.”