Category: publishing

Mexican insurgent Subcomandante Marcos is collaborating on a novel – which is being serialized in a leading newspaper. Writing a whodunit may sound odd thing to do when you are running an insurgency, but Marcos has never fitted the traditional Latin American guerrilla mould.”

Deciding on a new poet laureate for California is an exercise fraught with complications. “On one side are lawmakers and constituents who want to honor a local poet – a man who writes rhymes for greeting cards, say, or a woman with a couple of self-published volumes to her credit. On the other side are writers and other intellectuals, urging the governor to name a serious poet, someone whose work is critically acclaimed but whose name is not widely known among ordinary people.” So who to picK/ Why not Merle Haggard…

Do you care what the political persuasion of the bookstore you buy from is? “Does it make the decision easier for you to know that 98% of B&N’s corporate political donations went to the Democrats, while 61% of Amazon’s went to the Republicans? Or maybe you’ll be encouraged to get offline entirely and shop at an old–fashioned brick and mortar store upon hearing the news that Borders gave 100% or its donations to Democrats?”

Publishing giant Random House says it is considering selling its wares directly to the public online. This would put the publisher in competition with e-tailers such as Amazon and Barnes & Noble. “Among factors driving such talk are sluggish sales in the industry overall and a role reversal at Barnes & Noble, which publishes more and more books under its own name. B&N has released literary classics, histories and novelty books, vying with traditional publishers for reader dollars.”

The US has changed a policy that had banned American publishers from working with dissident authors in certain counries. “The rule change by the U.S. Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control comes after Nobel Peace Prize winner Shirin Ebadi sued the United States because its economic embargo on Iran blocked U.S. publication of her memoirs. The new rule allows U.S. publishers to engage in ‘most ordinary publishing activities’ with people in Cuba, Iran and Sudan, while maintaining restrictions on interactions with government officials and agents of those countries.”

The new Collins Online gives readers an opportunity to suggest words for inclusion, as well as debate whether they should be included. “This is a completely new concept which will provide direct contact between the people who compile dictionaries and the end users. It allows us to open up the process of suggesting and selecting words.”

“Anyone who really cares about books is bound to find the way in which they are sold and marketed deeply depressing. To walk into the average high street bookstore at this time of year is to beinstantly assailed by a riot of three-for-two promotions, Christmas catalogues packed out with what Victorian scholars used to call biblia abiblia (“books that are not books”), Robbie Williams, the two motor-cycling actors, and cookery gurus. A glance at this week’s Bookseller chart, meanwhile, discloses that of the country’s 50 bestselling titles, exactly two might possess some kind of literary merit.”

Google’s plan to digitize large chunks of the knowledge contained in major U.S. libraries is sure to get lots of attention, but the fact is that major digitization efforts have been underway in Canada for some time. “Many major libraries and national archives are digitizing parts of their collections, not as a way of replacing physical libraries, but as an extension of their reach… Library and Archives Canada, which combines the former National Library of Canada and National Archives of Canada, has been especially active, scanning millions of pages of documents a year. It has now put all of the publications, including pamphlets and books, printed in Canada in the 18th and 19th century on-line for the public to access.”

“Alas, the era when the old-school Scribner editor Maxwell Perkins turned F. Scott Fitzgerald’s sheaf of scribbles into This Side of Paradise appears to be well and truly over, with many publishing houses appearing to be not much more than glorified Kinko’s that acquire, bind, print and ship out.” Editors who acquire books at big publishing houses rarely actually edit anymore; the job is outsourced to freelancers…

Google and some of the world’s biggest libraries announce a deal to digitize their collections. “The goal is to expand the Web beyond its current valuable, if eclectic, body of material and create a digital card catalog and searchable library for the world’s books, scholarly papers and special collections. Within two decades, most of the world’s knowledge will be digitized and available, one hopes for free reading on the Internet, just as there is free reading in libraries today.”