Category: publishing

“Much thinking, in the humanities, has shifted from the answer-oriented to the question-centred. It’s a commonplace, these days, that what makes any idea vital is its capacity to keep the mind engaged.”

“Vandals spray-painted the word ‘pedophile’ on the wall of a museum dedicated to famous writer Vladimir Nabokov in St. Petersburg … The wall was spray-painted by the same group of self-styled ‘St. Petersburg Cossacks’ who … have been sending ominous letters to the museum, accusing the writer of propagating pedophilia and threatening ‘God’s wrath’.”

“While libraries continue to fulfill their mission as the repositories of printed books and periodicals, they increasingly have come to play a new role as provider of digital access to those who don’t have access to high-speed broadband or personal computers.”

Self-publishing: Still something to sniff at, or a way to publishers’ minds, hearts, and checkbooks?

Seriously – college kids appear to prefer print to screen. So why should publishers, authors, or librarians worry?

In another first for a country emerging from a half-century of repression, the festival is “putting the spotlight on dozens of the country’s authors, a number of whom once spent time in prison for their writings.”

One of the departing editors “bemoaned the lack of ads “even during the busiest release season,” and warned that literary criticism in Canada is in crisis.

“It may be more. It may be less, though I don’t think it will be.”

“When you place Wikipedia in a longer timeframe, it seems that the historical anomaly was not today’s online collaboration, but the 20th century’s professionalized, bureaucratically produced tomes.”

“Prosecutors in Naples said two more people had been arrested on suspicion of taking part in a ‘premeditated, organised and brutal’ sacking of the city’s 16th century Girolamini library … where thousands of rare and antique books were last year found to have disappeared.”