Category: publishing

“This fall education is a particularly hot topic in publishing. New books raise a wealth of ticklish questions, beginning with the ones about wealthy kids. What got them into those Ivy League classrooms?”

James Frey and Random House, his publisher, have agreed on a settlement of reader claims over Frey’s memoir fraud. “Neither Mr. Frey nor Random House are admitting any wrongdoing, but consumers who bought the book on or before Jan. 26 — when both the publisher and author released statements acknowledging that Mr. Frey had altered certain facts — will be eligible for a full refund.”

A rare 16th Century book was stolen out of a castle in Austria, but the theft was not noticed for a few days because the thief substituted another book. “The 1532 volume, Astronomicum Caesareum, by Petrus Apianus, disappeared from Peuerbach Castle between August 23 and 26, when a guide discovered it had gone.”

“Google does not have to eliminate the market in printed books to make this impossible. It merely has to shrink it so much that the price of books goes right down again. If no one gets paid for writing books, fewer will be written, which may not be an unmixed catastrophe, but very much fewer really good ones will be written. The only way out of this, it seems to me, is for libraries to pay for the right to distribute electronic texts.”

“Selling ad space keeps newspapers, magazines, websites and television either cheap or free for users. But so far, the model hasn’t caught on with college textbooks. Now, a small Minnesota start-up is trying to shake up the status quo in the $6-billion college textbook industry. Freeload Press Inc. will offer more than 100 titles this fall — mostly for business courses — completely free. After filling out a five-minute survey, students can download the text of the book, which can be stored on a hard drive and printed.”

Bevis Hillier has confessed to sending a fake letter to a fellow boigrapher and duping him. “Hillier, who spent 25 years researching and writing his own magisterial three-volume biography of Betjeman, finally decided to act when Wilson managed to bring out his book not much more than a year after his publishers had announced it. ‘When a newspaper started billing Wilson’s book as ‘the big one’, it was just too much,’ said Hillier, 66.”

“One of Britain’s leading language experts has attacked Lynne Truss’s bestseller Eats, Shoots and Leaves for its ‘misconceived’ and ‘deeply unnerving’ zero tolerance approach to punctuation.”

Google plans to let surfers download complete texts of public domain books. “Using Google’s Book Search service, Web surfers hunting titles like Dante’s ‘Inferno’ and Aesop’s ‘Fables’ will be able to download PDF files of the books for later reading, to run keyword searches or to print them on paper. Up to now, the service only allowed people to read the out-of-copyright books online.”

The Vatican’s chief exorcist has condemned Harry Potter. “Behind Harry Potter hides the signature of the king of the darkness, the devil,” says Father Gabriele Amorth, the Pope’s ‘caster-out of demons’.”

“Technology is rewriting the book on publishing. A number of companies help writers publish books, either on paper or online. Once upon a time, that approach was considered ‘publishing with training wheels’. But the new customers for print on demand are often savvy marketers who understand what it takes to write and sell a book and are doing it using technology whose price is falling fast.”