Category: publishing

“It’s ridiculous, this pageant of the weird where everyone gets together to celebrate books by ritually destroying their bodies for a weekend and pretending that they’re on a first-name basis with celebrities, but you cannot deny the fact that all of it, from the hundreds of lonely nights of nerdy solitude to the once-a-year chaos of BEA, is done out of love. Love for books. Well, books and free shit.”

Techies are taking another shot at making a digital book that someone might want to read a book on. Alex Beam is skeptical…

Canadian book buyers are grumbling because though the Canadian dollar has risen dramtically against the US dollar, they’re still being charged a premiukm. “It’s very conspicuous to people, so they have been murmuring their discontent. The breaking point came when the Canadian dollar hit 90 cents. The murmur turned into a crescendo. There is no beneficial exposure (to the strong dollar) on the part of booksellers; that windfall is going to someone else. But we are in the line of fire.”

Did Dan Brown plagiarize large sections of The Da Vinci Code? “One of the things that was interesting about it was that you can have a strong case in the this-doesn’t-smell-right sense and that has no bearing on the legal definition of copyright infringement.”

Zadie Smith has won this year’s Orange Price for fiction for her book “On Beauty.” “Her previous two novels, White Teeth and The Autograph Man, were shortlisted in 2001 and 2003 respectively but failed to win. Ali Smith’s The Accidental – nominated for last year’s Man Booker – and Nicole Krauss’s The History of Love were among the six books vying for the title.”

Project Gutenberg and World eBook Library plan to make ‘a third of a million’ e-books available free for a month at the first World eBook Fair. Downloads will be available at the fair’s Web site from July 4, the 35th anniversary of Project Gutenberg’s founding, through Aug. 4. The majority of the books will be contributed by the World eBook Library. It otherwise charges $8.95 a year for access to its database of more than 250,000 e-books, documents and articles.”

BookScanning has become popular for a few reasons having to do with the culture of journalism and publishing. In general, the publishing world treats money the way old-line WASPs once did—as a subject that genteel people simply don’t discuss. The only question considered to be more indelicate than how much one was paid to write a book is how many copies it has sold.

The business model of publishing is sure to change with digital publishing. But that has many in the business anxious…

Mrs Beeton was the legendary cooking writer. But a new biography accuses her of plagiarizing everything. “Isabella Beeton was only 21 when she began cookery writing. Her first recipe for Victoria sponge was so inept that she left out the eggs. Seven years later she was dead. How did she come to write the seminal book? ‘The answer is she copied everything’.”

Cheryl Reed is the new Chicago Sun-Times books editor: “I’m hoping in these pages to cultivate a community of readers, to celebrate good books whether they have a high profile or none at all. I want to highlight good storytelling, not just beautiful language, but books that enthrall and captivate, that keep you up at night poring over their pages.”