Category: publishing

In the UK, “a review of ebook lending in libraries commissioned by the government has found that libraries risk becoming irrelevant if they do not start lending digital books.”

“Now a new edition of Lawrence’s poems, many rendered unreadable by the censor’s pen, will reveal him as a brilliant war poet whose work attacking British imperialism during the first world war was barred from publication.”

“Science fiction and fantasy have always been genres prone to movements and manifestos … Cyberpunk, New Wave, Steampunk, New Weird … Now, however, a new generation of writers seems to be coming to the fore – a generation without a manifesto or a unifying purpose.”

“Following on the news of BBC Worldwide’s sale of Lonely Planet to NC2 Media at a sizable loss, comes the news that Google will cease production and publication of printed guidebooks carrying the Frommer’s brand name. Of course, … as we knew last year: Google only bought Frommer’s for the metadata.”

“There are two aspects to the e-book that seem … profoundly to alter the relationship between the reader and the text. With the book, the reader’s relationship to the text is private, and the book is continuous over space, time and reader. Neither of these propositions is necessarily the case with the ebook.”

“If it is OK to include quotes on a website, why not on a Twitter feed now and again? Why is the writer who bigs themselves up in their author bio less egotistical than the person who mentions those same things in another written medium?”

“A little over a year ago, when we approached one of France’s main publishing houses to discuss e-books, they quite candidly said they didn’t even have an e-book strategy. It was as though e-books were not even within their scope. It was disconcerting. And yet, a few months later, it took no convincing at all to get other French publishers on board for direct-to-digital English translations.”

Lauren A. White on how reading Baratunde Thurston’s satirical self-help guide on the New York subways became a social experiment.

“Following the arrest of Marino Massimo de Caro, the former director of Naples’s Girolamini library over the theft of 1,000 books from the historic institution,” he and several accomplices “confessed to stealing more books from the Biblioteca dell’Osservatorio Ximeniano and the Biblioteca Scolopica San Giovannino, both in Florence.”

“Greed is eternal, but when the money flows as plentifully upward as in London circa 1873 or New York circa 2013, and is as unequally distributed, it becomes a moral toxin, saturates the world of culture, makes relationships more competitive, turns desire into the pursuit of status … And, as in Trollope’s London, money and its pursuit can have a democratizing effect.”