Category: publishing

When a Harvard scholar was recently accused of lifting several paragraphs of his new book from another author, he resorted to a now-familiar defense: it was his “research assistants” who had been sloppy and allowed the unattributed quotations. But that type of buck-passing infuriates some scholars, who are loudly questioning whether works written with the aid of multiple student researchers actually qualify as scholarship at all. “We’re not talking about razor blades or soap. We’re talking about creative endeavors. A book that bears a name is widely presumed to be written by that author.”

It wasn’t too long ago that many were predicting that the internet would kill bookstores. “The internet was supposed to bid farewell to the need for buying books in shops. When the dotcom bubble was at its peak, web gurus claimed sites such as Amazon would undercut and undermine traditional bookstores, and that ebooks would eventually do away with “dead tree” media altogether. But what no one saw coming was that the internet would, in fact, provide a lifeline for possibly the least fashionable and most technologically backward part of the marketplace: old books.”

A bitter lawsuit has roiled the National League of American Pen Women in Washington DC. “A lawsuit between two factions in the organization alleges financial misdeeds, abuses of authority, libel and fraud. The vitriol between the opposing sides is at odds with the 4,000-member group’s refined image and has disgusted many in its 176 local chapters.”

In the past year, bookstore giant Barnes & Noble has grown a significant publishing business of its own. This has made some publishers nervous, but the company says not to worry. “I take issue with the opinion that we are taking sales away from other publishers. This is just part of a long continuum of simply getting better at what we’re doing.”

Terry Teachout is a self-described “cynical old author with several books under his belt” and is amused by a first-time author’s expectations of how the publishing business works. Here’s “a more realistic perspective” on the way things work.

The recent NEA report on the decline of reading in America is a flawed document, writes Paul Collins. Its methodology isn’t clear, and the premise – that people aren’t reading literature any more reveals a narrow perspective and misleading…

The world of science fiction is in crisis. Declining sales and a lack of creativity has fans of the form concerned. “It’s not just an issue of whether or not the golden age of sci-fi faded with the passing of proponents such as Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein and Philip K. Dick, compounded by the fact that Ray Bradbury’s only recent contribution has been to complain that Michael Moore appropriated the title of his classic book Fahrenheit 411 for his documentary Fahrenheit 9/11.”

“The life and works of a man whose life is so plain and whose works are so fancy produces the kind of book that belongs less to a scholarly genre than to a performing genre, a hoop for a scholar to jump through when he no longer has anything to prove, as Lear is a role for an actor to jump through when he has done all the others. To the long run of such life-and-works books, the Harvard professor Stephen Greenblatt now offers his own reading.”

A new version of Alice in Wonderland, by Frank Beddor, has inflamed critics for its violent and bizarre retelling. “Mr Beddor, who produced gross-out movie There’s Something About Mary, and is a former world champion skier, has transplanted Alice into a modern and violent fantasy world that could have come straight out of a computer game.” But he defends the story: “Kids are used to a more violent and real world now – video games and movies are dominating, and hopefully they will love this book.”