“A group of conservative Muslim clerics in India have called on the organisers of the annual Jaipur literary festival to drop speakers who were involved in a demonstration of support for Salman Rushdie at last year’s event before the opening later this week.”
Category: publishing
Brazil’s $35 Million Promotion Campaign For Literature
“The Brazilian government is anteing up over US$35 million to fund a program over the next eight years that aims to inject Brazilian literature into international markets by funding translations into other languages, grants to publishers outside of Brazil to promote Brazilian publications …, and travel grants to send Brazilian authors on world publicity tours.”
The Rarest Books We Still Have
“Printed by Johann Gutenberg in Mainz, c.1455, the first book printed from movable types in the western world. Forty-eight copies survive; only thirty-one are perfect. A single leaf sells for £50,000; a complete version would be worth tens of millions of pounds.”
On Amazon, The Literary Pile-On Claims Victims
“Attack reviews are hard to police. It is difficult, if not impossible, to detect the difference between an authentic critical review and an author malevolently trying to bring down a colleague, or organized assaults by fans.”
British Writers Who Get Pubs Wrong Deserve The Opprobrium They Get
“Any false note in a pub scene (pints of bitter served in the wrong kind of glass, the publican calling time an hour too soon) may be fatally damaging to the reader’s suspension of disbelief.”
Far From Killing The Classics, The Internet Makes Them More Accessible Than Ever
Aside from providing free e-books of everything out of copyright, the online world rewrites and re-creates meaning for the authors’ original works.
Protect The Kids! Brazil Seals Fifty Shades of Grey
“Judge Raphael Queiroz Campos issued the order Jan. 14 after he saw children in one of city’s bookstores looking through erotic books.”
The Book: Cultural Necessity Or Outdated Container Of Content?
“Do physical books really matter any more? Is there something special about them, or are they just a historical artifact whose time has come and gone?”
How To Get More People Into The Library – Pole Dancing?
“Pole dancing is a new way of drumming up support so I suppose if it works what the hell, we may as well give it a try. But books as tennis bats? I’m absolutely appalled.”
Library Of Congress And The Firehose – How To Capture The Twitterverse
“A stream of information flows from 500 million registered twitterers (counting duplicates, dead people, parodies, imaginary friends, and bots) who thumb their hurried epistles into phones and tablets and PCs, and the tweets pour into Twitter’s servers at a rate of thousands per second–tens of thousands at peak times.”