Category: publishing

Brewster Kahle “made his name indexing and storing the web in his Internet Archive. His non-profit organisation, stationed in an unassuming colonial home in San Francisco’s Presidio, has moved on to grab and upload all kinds of media: public domain films, audio archives, and amateur endeavours such as Project Gutenberg, which has been painstakingly hand-typing public domain texts since the 70s. Now he has taken the idea of digitising the text of books one step further, and is storing not just the text, but, incredibly, high-resolution snapshots of book pages, good enough to reproduce every fold, blotch and texture of the world’s catalogue of public domain works on your screen.”

The book digitizing project throws texts of books up on the web in searchable form.

Shah Mohammad Rais, better known as the “Bookseller of Kabul”, says he fears blood vengeance after Åsne Seierstad’s bestselling book about him has been translated in an Afghan language.

John Banville seems to be enjoying the controversy over having been chosen the winner of this year’s Booker Prize. “Frankly, I am gratified to see myself vilified, and the jury being vilified. It cheers me up. I must have done something right to annoy so many people.”

Yup, it’s National Novel Writing Month. “Now in its seventh year, this global write-fest was the brainchild of Chris Baty, a Californian freelance writer, and has grown from 21 participants in 1999 to over 42,000 last year, all trying to meet the 50,000-word finish line by midnight on the last day of the month and make it onto the NaNoWriMo roll of honour. This year, an estimated 60,000 speedwriters are taking part and there are local chapters scattered across the UK, from Brighton to Birmingham.”

After 47 years at Simon & Shuster, star editor Michael Korda is retiring. “The 72-year-old industry veteran, who was born in England and remains one of the most well known and well-respected editors in New York, will leave his top post at the end of the year and take on the role of editor in chief emeritus.”

“Imagine a card catalog that (a) lists every book in every library anywhere, (b) shows you the title of every such book containing the search phrase of your choice (‘Crimean War,’ ‘HIV genome,’ ‘clown fetish’), and (c) gives you this information whether you’re online in your bedroom or at an Internet café in Ulaanbaatar. This index is what Google Print is poised to be, and yes, it does stretch the definition of ‘card catalog’ to the breaking point. Just keep in mind the one way in which Google’s version scarcely differs from the classic: If you want to read more than a snippet or two of the texts you’ve located, you still have to go get books.”

“College students now spend more than five billion dollars a year on textbooks, while states spend another four billion on books for elementary and high-school students. And the revenue is not being spread around: five publishers account for eighty per cent of new college-textbook sales in North America. But dominance has its discontents, and textbook publishers are routinely denounced as price gougers. The average price of a book is around fifty dollars, and many, particularly in the sciences, will run you well over a hundred.”

After a pause to assess opposition, Google has resumed its book digitizing project. “But in an apparent attempt to reassure critics, the search giant said on its blog that it would focus on books that were out of print or in the public domain. Google is pumping $200m (£110m) into creating a digital archive of millions of books from four top US libraries – the libraries of Stanford, Michigan and Harvard universities, and of the New York Public Library – by 2015.”