Category: publishing

“Did you think it was funny? Did you think that we just wouldn’t notice it if it ran the Tuesday before Thanksgiving? When we were out of town, or rushing to get ready for the holiday weekend? Do you know that almost worked?”

“Did they read the whole book, or lose interest after a few pages? Did they skip certain chapters? Did they highlight and revisit favourite passages? Now the makers of the Kobo, Kindle and Nook are collecting hard data about exactly how their customers read.”

“The Persephone readers of Bishop’s Castle are, like Persephone readers everywhere, avid and highly particular. They have joined the nearest thing British publishing has to a cult, and their enthusiasm for it is enough to heat even a creaking and under-funded town hall.”

Rose Stryon: “He secretly felt a great many things that he did not say aloud, and he wrote them to special friends, and he allowed his sense of humor a lot of free play, his brilliant words took a lot of interesting turns that they may not have in our daily life.”

“The buggy whip industry did not disappear overnight. But certainly many a tanner looked at the sputtering fruit of Henry Ford’s assembly line and began to lament the passing of the old ways.”

“Paradoxically, although the experience of receiving Tweets over several days is quite long, the completed Twitter fictions tend to be quite short. So what is the advantage of publishing in this format? Does it make us experience literature anew or is it just a parlour game?”

“An exercise in literary serendipity, the machine offers no menu to choose from. You simply drop your toonie into the slot et voilà – the non-fiction title emerges.”

“Bright red posters with the words “We Pay Our Taxes!” have started to appear in book shop windows; a clear reference to recent allegations that the online bookseller has diverted hundreds of millions of pounds of profit to tax havens.”

“Days of the Bagnold Summer by Joff Winterhart will compete with works by Hilary Mantel, James Meek and Stephen May for the Costa novel of the year, while a biography-cum-memoir by Mary Talbot, drawn by her husband Bryan Talbot who also worked on Judge Dredd and Batman, is one of four books in the best biography shortlist.”

“Either we stop arguing and agree that libraries are doing their best to reinvent themselves, and that with a bit of help, financial and ideological – they belong to the future, or we let them run down until they disappear. Who is going to pay for this new expanding network of libraries?”