Category: publishing

Harper Collins say it will digitize 20,000 books in its catalogue in a bid to rein in potential copyright violations on the internet. “The move comes as the US publishing industry is bringing lawsuits against web search leader Google over its effort to scan copyrighted books in libraries – a move the industry fears would set a dangerous copyright precedent.”

Comic books may be an American invention, but Japanese comic book culture has taken things to a whole new level…

Both are digitizing books. But “Google is working from the top down. It’s very centralized. Project Gutenberg is the opposite: It’s decentralized, it’s grassroots. From the consumer’s point of view, if you’re trying to get a quotation from a book, you could get the book from Project Gutenberg and cut and paste, say, the whole “Hamlet” soliloquy. On Google, you can’t. Also, ours is totally non-commercial. You won’t find advertising on any of our pages.”

Retailer Whitbread is pulling out of sponsoring its annual book awards. “The hotel and restaurant firm, which set up the awards in 1971, says it is pulling out because it no longer sells products using the Whitbread name. It is looking to find a new sponsor for the book awards, which include the £25,000 book of the year prize.”

The storm over erroneous entries on Wikipedia is more thunder than substance. “Of course, the flip side of the enormous flexibility provided by the Wiki format is that “anyone” includes people who are driven by motivations other than community spirit. But vandalism, malice, racism, spam, and the like can be kept to a minimum, as long as there are more good guys than bad guys. This is obviously happening at Wikipedia, or no one would be using it.”

“Since the arrival, at the very end of 2004, of the number grid game sudoku, Britain – like Israel, France, India and the US – has become a puzzle nation. The statistics are amazing. Sudoku puzzles now feature in most national newspapers, and are moving on to mobile phones and pay-to-play websites. The magazine Puzzler Sudoku was first launched in March with a circulation of just 15,000. It now sells 300,000.”

“So-what books have been proliferating. A lot. Some reasons: They’re light and user-friendly. They require no attention span. They supposedly make good gifts, although 78 percent of recipients will glance at this kind of book exactly twice before consigning it to oblivion. That’s not a real statistic. Neither are most of the statistics that show up in these things.”

The British Office of Fair Trading will investigate Waterstone’s proposed purchase of rival Ottakar’s. “The OFT received more than 350 letters from consumers, publishers and authors opposed to the £96m deal, which was announced in September. Yesterday the watchdog said that the weight of opinion was a key factor in its decision to send the proposed deal to the Competition Commission for scrutiny.”

Arguably, American newspapers are badly-served by the publicly-owned profit model. But aren’t newspapers as institutions more important than their business model? “The St. Petersburg Times, with its Poynter connection, is a rare example of a nonprofit. How could other newspapers be liberated from the for-profit world to concentrate on their mission? There are two tax-favored models before us: public broadcasting and real estate investment trusts.”

“Writing workshops, for their ubiquity, are currently the most significant phenomenon influencing American literature. Enrollment into them has become de rigueur for people with a calling to write, and is assumed by increasing numbers (including publishers) to be as necessary a first step toward a writing life as college would be toward a professional life. But because the self-styled “best” of these workshops comprise such a poor lot of dull, mechanical stories, it becomes necessary to ask: What goes on in these programs, and how do they influence today’s writers, for ill or for good?”