Category: publishing

Why would a book that sold only modestly when it first hit stores suddenly become a huge hit in paperback? The answer is complicated, but suffice to say that book clubs, word of mouth, and the influence of big-box retailers all have something to do with it.

“It’s not an idle question. The novel is one of the most vital cultural resources we have–a private, potent means of sharing the unspeakableness of daily life with one another. So it’s only natural to wonder who’s taking care of the novel–who’s taking up the torch and where exactly they’re taking it. Or whether it has gone out. The novel is one of the platforms from which the voice of a generation speaks. And if you listen closely, you’ll start to wonder if the current generation has a voice at all.”

The earliest collected edition of Shakespeare’s works is being sold at aucion and is expected to sell for between £2.5m and £3.5 million. “What makes a book so valuable? And why would even a multi-millionaire be prepared to pay such a sum? However ludicrous the prices fetched by paintings, you can see why a wealthy person or institution would be willing to stump up. There it is on the wall: beautiful, unique, luminous. But the First Folio is not aesthetically delectable. The print quality is not wonderful and there are many printing errors. It contains an artwork, the Martin Droeshout engraving that is our only certain likeness of the bard, but it is a cack-handed portraiture. And the book is not unique. It is not even rare.”

It’s an oft-repeated charge that students’ writing is worse than it used to be. But is that provably true?

Storing data for the future is getting more difficult, not less. To start, what form do you store books in? “We’re talking of moving past gigabytes of information into terrabytes [a thousand gigabytes], into petabytes [a thousand terrabytes], and into exobytes [a thousand petabytes]. We need to install now an architecture into which you will be able to plug in whatever is the storage system of the day, in the future.”

Jim Guigli has won this year’s San Jose State University bad writing competition with this passage: “Detective Bart Lasiter was in his office studying the light from his one small window falling on his super burrito when the door swung open to reveal a woman whose body said you’ve had your last burrito for a while, whose face said angels did exist, and whose eyes said she could make you dig your own grave and lick the shovel clean.”

Gwyn Thomas has been named Wales’ second poet laureate. “Thomas stated his intention to use the role to raise the profile of his country’s poets, saying that he hopes to draw attention to the poets of Wales and their work, and try to show that poetry is a unique medium to respond to the world in which we live.”

Two historians who lost their case charging Dan Brown with plagiarizing “The Da Vinci Code” have decided to appeal. “Random House, which won the copyright case earlier this year at the High Court in London, expressed disappointment at the decision by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh to appeal.”

“A lawsuit filed on June 16 by an American scholar alleges that Stephen Joyce, grandson of the writer James Joyce, along with estate trustee Sean Sweeney, improperly withheld access to materials and attempted to intimidate academics… In the struggle to define copyright as it applies to literary rights, web rights and the extent of time a work is withheld from public domain, the Joyce estate’s fearsome vigilance stands out.”

The publishing industry appears to be the latest corner of the arts world to discover that consumers will flock to almost anything given away for free. “That seems to be the lesson of the first few days of the World eBook Fair, a one-month experiment in free downloadable books produced by Illinois-based Project Gutenberg. The fair began Tuesday, and already more than 1.5 million books have been downloaded.”