Category: publishing

Margaret Atwood tries a remote pen machine at a book signinjg, but it fails to work. “Not everyone had welcomed the gadget that Ms Atwood launched yesterday, called the LongPen, which is designed to allow authors to be in one place while signing their books, in real time, in another. Critics feared it might even spell the end of the book tour, saving writers many wearying hours schlepping from town to town, but ultimately cutting them off from their readers altogether. And it might – but not until they get it working.”

Publisher Nigel Newton says that Google’s print digitising project must be stopped. “In Dickens’s spirit, I believe we need to take action against Google. Its quest to monetise for its own benefit the literature of the world must be stopped. So I call upon internet users worldwide to boycott the Google search engine until it ceases to scan books in America without prior permission, and desists from its mission to place ambient advertising on the great literary works. Switch your search engine from Google to MSN or Yahoo today, until you hear Google has withdrawn from the type of activities that have been described in another context as acts of ‘kleptomania’.”

E.L. Doctorow’s “The March” wins the National Book Critics Circle prize for fiction for his acclaimed story of Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman’s ruthless Civil War campaign.

A library in Missouri has removed a story about penguins from its children’s section after parents complained that the book has “homosexual undertones”. “The illustrated book, “And Tango Makes Three,” is based on a true story of two male penguins, named Roy and Silo, who adopted an abandoned egg at New York City’s Central Park Zoo in the late 1990s.”

Who are the most powerful people in UK publishing? The Observer has made a list. “The list we have come up with, then, is a snapshot of an industry in flux, and it inevitably reflects the whims of our panel. To single out 50 players from a great cultural industry is almost impossible. Many of the people whose word counts for most pride themselves on their invisibility. Still, we think we have made good choices about a new generation of players.”

“Ten years ago the bestseller lists were topped by the frustrated Bridget Jones, a fictional creation less interested in sex than in the cigarette she could smoke afterwards. A decade on and chick lit now seems curiously chaste, as lascivious as a warm mug of Horlicks. But a new kind of explicit bedside reading, both fictional and autobiographical, means the three-for-two counter in Waterstone’s now displays the kind of X-rated material more traditionally found in a cornershop in Soho.”

“Self-publishing enables anyone to upload a book in digital form to a website, which then formats it complete with a cover. It costs anything from £4.50 (single proof of one book) to more than £500 for full personalised involvement of the publishing house at all stages, from starting up to getting a link to Amazon.”

“William Shakespeare died in pain of a rare form of cancer that deformed his left eye, according to a German academic who claims to have discovered the disease in four genuine portraits of the world’s most famous playwright.”

Best-selling writers in the UK have signed on to write simplified mass-market books. “The books are aimed at people who struggle with reading or have lost the habit of carrying around a good book. But the plots and subject matter have been pitched to appeal to a wider audience. Each book has fewer than 128 pages and language is simple, with short sentences and a limited number of words of three syllables or more.”

“Forty-one per cent are overwhelmingly in favour of books with a happy ending, as against 2.2% who like it sad. Women were 13% more likely than men to say they want it all to end happily. Almost one fifth of men expressed a preference for books with ambiguous endings.”