Category: publishing

Comics are increasingly attracting scholarly interest. “There’s now an academic journal and a scholar’s discussion list for those who study comics. While they didn’t have exact numbers, scholars at Comic-Con estimated that hundreds of academics in the U.S. are specializing in comics.”

Jerome Weeks thinks books could be big on TV. “Here’s my pitch: a book (or arts) program with news reports, stories from the field and irreverent opinions. Think of it as The Daily Show on books. In fact, Jon Stewart already interviews authors a great deal, so it’s not such a stretch to move the emphasis from politics to books. Do I really think this’ll fly on cable? Or even on satellite radio? Well, Dan Rather tells me that Mark Cuban’s hiring. HDNet can sure use some fresh programming.”

When a book becomes a hit movie, you’d figure that the publisher who got the whole thing started would come in for a healthy slice of the profits. You’d be wrong – they generally don’t see a dime. “Galled by decades of this kind of equation, New York publishing houses have launched ventures intended to get a bigger piece of the Hollywood action. And who could blame them? Publishers hardly ever control the film rights to the books they put on the market.”

“The print-on-demand business is gradually moving toward the center of the marketplace. What began as a way for publishers to reduce their inventory and stop wasting paper is becoming a tool for anyone who needs a bound document. Short-run presses can turn out books economically in small quantities or singly, and new software simplifies the process of designing a book.”

“Advocates say a phonetically based technique called cued speech can improve literacy rates among deaf students even if not used primarily for speaking. They point out that the average 18-year-old deaf high school graduate reads on a third- or fourth-grade level. The system is gaining popularity with new research, a grass-roots movement and new funding aimed at improving reading scores under the federal No Child Left Behind Law.”

As usual, the release of a new Thomas Pynchon book is shouded in mystery. “This much is known about the new book: It’s called “Against the Day” and will be published by Penguin Press. It will run at least 900 pages and the author will not be going on a promotional tour.”

A new survey of the online blogosphere, as it’s come to be known, reveals that fully 8% of Internet users now keep a blog of some description, and that bloggers in general are “a mostly young, racially diverse group of people who have never been published anywhere else and who most often use cyberspace to talk about their personal lives.”

“Last week, Amazon.com put up a page that listed Untitled Thomas Pynchon at a svelte 992 pages and bore a description purportedly written by the master himself. In fact, it purported quite well indeed and also rather charmingly, promising an archetypal Pynchonian buffet of settings, characters, and old tricks (“Characters stop what they’re doing to sing what are for the most part stupid songs. Strange sexual practices take place. Obscure languages are spoken, not always idiomatically.”) Then the description just vanished from the page. Was this a hoax?”

George L. Jones has been appointed new head of Borders. Jones helped turn Target develop its “bargain upscale aesthetic” and revived the Scooby-Doo character for Warner Brothers. And for Borders? Jones isn’t saying yet, except to say he wants to better distinguish the chain from cmpetitor Barnes & Noble…

English, once thought to be the heart of humanities, is in a bad way. It has been “theorised” to destruction, writes John Sutherland.