Category: publishing

“Literature is conventionally taught as a person-to-person aesthetic experience: the writer (or the poem) addressing the reader. Teachers cut out English’s middlemen, the people who got the poem from the writer to us, apparently confirming his point that we have to deny the economics of cultural value in order to preserve the aesthetics. But, once we’re outside the classroom, how rigidly are these conventions adhered to? How many people today really imagine “art” as a privileged category, exempt from the machinations of the marketplace?”

“For those of us who are serious about book-reviewing, here are a few of the questions that nobody—not even the New York Times—has yet been able to answer: In the world of serious literary criticism, where do newspapers belong? The credentials of their editors are often more journalistic than literary, an interesting conundrum assuming that literary merit is the stated goal. Regarding the visual and performing arts, newspapers are mostly event-oriented, with a dominant focus on what’s commercially viable (rock music, blockbuster museum shows). Yet book sections often feature books that will sell a relative handful of copies compared to those they overlook.”

“About 7.3 billion text messages are sent within the United States every month, up from 2.9 billion a month a year ago. Compared with an ink-and-paper letter, messages may seem disposable. The relative inconvenience of typing out words using a numeric keypad — the letter “c,” for example, requires three presses of the “2” button — and the brevity of the message may seem a hostile environment for heartfelt discussion. But the discipline of having to distill thoughts into short bulletins, then waiting to receive the response, allows users to pour more meaning into the writing, some text-message users say.”

“Israel leads the world in per-capita new titles per year – more than 4,000, or about 70 a week. ‘I think that there is no need to publish more than 1,500 to 2,000 new books a year in Israel, tops. In France, 25,000 new books are published every year, but its population is 10 times the size of Israel’s. In other words, they publish about half the quantity that we do, and France is a cultural superpower. Everyone there reads books on the streets and in the Metro’.”

A British judge has blocked publication of a book by Niema Ash about folk singer Loreena McKennitt. “The ruling requires Ash to delete seven of 34 sections complained about by McKennitt as violations of privacy or confidentiality, before Ash can again publish the book.” The judge said that “most of the material to which McKennitt objected was either trivial, anodyne, not intrusive or not inherently confidential, but nonetheless awarded the singer 75 per cent of the trial costs and £5,000 for ‘hurt feelings and distress.’ The court costs alone are expected to amount to more than $1-million.”

“South Korean publishers rushed to put books on celebrated scientist Hwang Woo-suk on store shelves only to find him embroiled in a scandal and their products becoming one of the biggest flops of the holiday season.”

Amazon has begun “Amazon Connect, begun late last month to enhance the connections between authors and their fans – and to sell more books – with author blogs and extended personal profile pages on the company’s online bookstore site. So far, Amazon has recruited a group of about a dozen authors, including novelists, writers of child care manuals and experts on subjects as diverse as real estate investing, science, fishing and the lyrics of the Grateful Dead.”

Were New York Times staffers unfairly favored in the Times’ best books list of the year? (six NYT writers’ books made the list). Times public editor Byron Calame investigates: “What’s fair is particularly challenging in the world of the book section. There, reviewers are expected to express their opinions, but readers also have the right to expect that books are assessed based on their merits, not just on a critic’s ideology or personal grudges and preferences. The complications only grow when some of the authors are on the staff of The Times.”

“The big book story this year was the death of fiction. Literary media, like the make-or-break-an-author’s-reputation New York Times Book Review, have cut back on reviews of novels in favour of non-fiction coverage. Globally, fiction sales are down. Publishers and agents returning from the Frankfurt Book Fair reported that Canadian fiction, despite its stellar international reputation, wasn’t generating the heat it used to. Even J.K. Rowling was in a slump, with Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, the sixth book in her wizard series, not flying off the shelves as quickly as in the past.”

Turkish writer Zulkuf Kisanak “has been fined 3,000 lira (£1,300) under a much-criticised law against insulting Turkish identity. He was first given five months in jail, but an Istanbul court then reduced the sentence to a fine. He is among more than 60 writers and publishers, including novelist Orhan Pamuk, to face charges under the law.”