Category: publishing

A Canadian publisher says it’s considering publishing OJ Simpson’s controversial book. “The Montreal-based company’s employees were initially disgusted by reports of the book’s topic, according to a statement released today. Now, the company said, in the name of free speech, it wants to give it a try.”

The historic trove of manuscripts at Egypt’s St. Catherine’s Monastery is being digitized. “Consisting of 3,300 manuscripts in 11 languages — many of them richly illuminated in gold leaf and bright, jewel-like colors — the library’s collection is second in number and importance only to the trove at the Vatican.”

Author JK “Rowling has cited two reasons over the years: concern about online piracy (which has never been a major problem for the Potter books), and the desire for readers to experience the books on paper. E-books, hyped as the future of publishing during the dot-com craze of the late 1990s, remain a tiny portion of the multibillion dollar industry.”

The final Harry Potter is six months away. But “not only is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows topping the charts of Amazon.com and Barnes & Noble .com, a deluxe edition, priced at $65, is No. 2, outselling the You diet book, Sen. Barack Obama and an Oprah Winfrey-endorsed memoir by Sidney Poitier.”

Kitchen Sink, a much-celebrated quarterly art and culture magazine based in Oakland, is in serious danger of folding after only a four-year run. “It was always a labor of love, existing month to month, so when its distributor, the San Francisco-based Independent Press Association, folded several weeks ago, ‘it just compounded the problems we were already having,’ said Publisher Carla Costa.” The IPA’s collapse has left several publications in the lurch, and everyone is scrambling for new options.

British publisher Penguin has officially launched its wiki novel project, offering anyone who cares to participate the chance to help write a full-length book online. “‘It may end up like reading a bowl of alphabet spaghetti,’ Jeremy Ettinghausen, head of digital publishing at Penguin UK said, adding there were no plans as yet to publish the completed work.”

Author J.K. Rowling has announced on her web site that the final installment in the wildly popular Harry Potter series will be released in July. “Bloomsbury, her British publisher, said it would publish a children’s hardback edition, an adult hardback, a special gift edition and an audio book on the same day… The Potter franchise is so important to the company’s earnings that it announced the publication to the London Stock Exchange.”

France’s highest appeals court says it will allow a modern sequel to Victor Hugo’s classic “Les Miserables”. The author’s great great grandson says he’s bitterly disappointed in the decision. “I am not just fighting for myself, my family and for Victor Hugo but for the descendants of all writers, painters and composers who should be protected from people who want to use a famous name and work just for money.”

“There is no shortage of people who can, with a little encouragement, write. There are lots of skilled craftspeople. Even more say they want to write, and many of those find their way into university courses, adult education or privately run seminars on the novel, genre, short story and importance of plot. But desire and training don’t equal genius or that je ne sais quoi that allows a writer to connect, to slip refractive glasses over a reader’s eyes, to say, ‘see this’.”