Category: publishing

The British Library has bought an archive of papers from Samuel Coleridge Taylor’s estate. “In the nearly two centuries since Coleridge’s death, the papers have been kept by family members in the village of Ottery St. Mary in Devon, southwest England, where the creator of Kubla Khan and The Rime of the Ancient Mariner was born.”

It is “the great paradox of modern publishing. While there are more books published than ever before, it is more difficult to get published than ever before… This is supported by evidence of publishers rejecting new writing that does not have a celebrity attached while scaling down the money paid to mid-list authors to a level where there is barely an incentive for them to get out of bed.”

Life is too short to be reading books you don’t like, writes Nick Hornby. So often we read books we think we ought to read. But what is the point?

“Joyce Carol Oates, a writer known for exploring the margins of society in richly imagined novels shot through with sometimes lurid violence, is the winner of this year’s Chicago Tribune Literary Prize,” a lifetime achievement award. Other Tribune prizewinners this year include Louise Erdich (for her novel, The Painted Drum); Taylor Branch for At Canaan’s Edge, his examination of Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement; and children’s book author Kate DiCamillo.

“Wikipedia and its contributors are excruciatingly self-aware. Wikipedia has developed many charming quirks and in-jokes in its five short years of existence, nearly all self-reflexive, including a habit of obsessively linking to its own articles. But, far more interesting, it has also collectively developed a robust sensibility about what is permissible in its own pages. Nearly every Wikipedia user has occasionally come across a little tag at the top of an article: ‘Stop!’ it says, ‘The neutrality of this article is disputed. Please see the discussion on the talk page.’ This little tag, I’m convinced, is the secret to Wikipedia’s success.”

Orders for Gunther Grass’ new autobiography have almost doubled since the Nobel author revealed he had been a member of the Hitler SS.

Barnes & Noble reports profits were up 23 percent in the second quarter. The increase wasn’t because of bigger sales, though. “Sales decreased 1 percent to $1.16 billion from $1.17 billion last year, largely due to year-ago sales of best-seller Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.”

“In yesterday’s book world, no one except publisher and author — and sometimes not even author — knew how many copies of a book were sold. Sales figures were proprietary. [But today,] when a veteran writer’s agent submits a manuscript to a new publisher, the publisher calls Bookscan to check the writer’s track record – ‘the track’ – to see how many copies of previous books were sold. If the numbers are flat or trending down, the publisher may pass.” And a bad sales record can stick to an author like glue, to the point that many authors are beginning to use pseudonyms in an effort to “fool the track.”

The New York Public Library is undertaking a major reordering of the materials in its main reading room. “After 95 years as one of the city’s grandest public spaces, the reading room is letting go of the arcane, impenetrable ordering system to which it has clung for generations and replacing it with something a person might actually be able to understand… The [old] system is used only by the New York Public Library. Its greatest drawback is that no one but the system’s librarians really understands it.”

“It’s a truism that great novels have something to tell us not only about life but about our own lives. But for decades literary criticism has neglected or scorned this useful truth in favor of ‘theory’ and its barbarous jargon. How refreshing then to read a study which dwells without apology, and with genuine insight, on the ways in which novels impinge upon our own experience. This is Edward Mendelson’s ‘The Things That Matter: What Seven Classic Novels Have to Say About the Stages of Life’.”