Category: publishing

“A writer is always more than a writer in Turkey, much more so than in America. We don’t discuss the writing, but we discuss the writer herself. Eventually, every writer has to face the question — are you ready to be a public intellectual?”

Publishing electronically, it only takes “a small amount for cover designs and the time investment necessary to edit the books; and because it’s print on demand, there are no setup costs associated with each print run, the writers receive a healthy royalty for each book sold and profits can be ploughed back into design and marketing.” And the marketing? How about MySpace?

“Canadian publishing veteran Ed Carson, 58, is leaving the presidency of Penguin Canada in May, to be succeeded by his ‘great friend,’ David Davidar, 47, who came to the Toronto-based company in early 2004 as publisher after serving as Penguin India president for several years. Under the new regime, Davidar will function as both president and publisher.”

Amazon.com isn’t backing down from a fight with the Humane Society, which wants the online retailer to stop selling magazines devoted to the brutal sport of cockfighting. Amazon claims that, since the magazines aren’t illegal, refusing to sell them would amount to censorship.

London author Stef Penney has won the Costa Book of the Year award (formerly the Whitbread Prize) for her debut novel, The Tenderness of Wolves. The book is set in Canada, which is notable since the agoraphobic Penney has never been there.

“Rising rents and competition from the chains have imperiled independents for years, but San Francisco used to think it was immune. Cody’s and other Bay Area stores helped spark the Beat movement, encouraged the counterculture, fueled the initial protests against the Vietnam War. In a region that sees itself as smart and civilized, bookshops were things to be cherished. No longer, apparently.”

Indian and Pakistani writers are suddenly hot in America, as vague awareness of the subcontinent turns to curiosity about its culture. The rise in South Asian lit can probably be traced back to Salman Rushdie, but the real catalyst for the new interest in such authors is likely due to “the increasing visibility of Indians and Pakistanis in the U.S.”

“A Saudi-run school in London uses textbooks which describe Jews as monkeys and Christians as pigs, according to papers filed with an employment tribunal by a former teacher.”

The university is “the 12th library to open its collection to Google. The libraries of Stanford and the University of Michigan, the alma maters of the company’s two founders, are already being scanned for Google Book Search. Google CEO Eric Schmidt ’76 is a member of the University Board of Trustees. Book digitization at Princeton will take place over the next six years.”

Plenty of detective stories are set in suburbia, Marilyn Stasio writes, even though “suburbia just doesn’t attract the same kind of dark, brooding sleuths who are drawn to the mean streets of Big Bad City, U.S.A. What we tend to get, instead, are the comedians, the cranks and the kooks…. But the grounds for satire, no less than murder, depend on where you live — and what constitutes a killing offense in your community.”