Category: publishing

“Artificial intelligence has already changed health care and pop music, baseball, electoral politics, and several aspects of the law. And now, as an afterthought to an afterthought, the algorithms have arrived at literature, like an army which, having conquered Italy, turns its attention to San Marino.”

“Though best known for his humour and travel writing, the Calgary writer won for his dark novel 419 … a provocative tale of an email scam and a woman who sets out on a wide-ranging search for those she believes responsible for her father’s death.”

“On the surface the book trade is as tumultuous as the seas off New York. But there are some unexpected constants. In the first six months of this year, ebook sales grew by 188% over the previous January-June, but overall sales of non-digital books are declining only slowly. When a product is cheap and readily accessible, people really do buy more of it.”

“Last year at this time I made a joke here about the self-consciously self-aggrandizing crowd who populate the Giller gala and how that doesn’t make for great TV. The Association of Canadian Publishers took great umbrage. My assertion, in reply, that I was entitled to make jokes, didn’t go over well. The association let me know it took a very dim view of joking. Little wonder the funny tends to be AWOL in the Canadian book racket.”

“Don’t believe the guff about ‘rich content’ and ‘high-growth emerging markets’. This is consolidation and both authors and readers will have less choice and less diversity.”

“[The author] said he had rejected the national narrative prize [Premio Nacional de Narrativa] for his novel The Infatuations because of a lifelong aversion to receiving public money. He is on record as a critic of the way Spain hands out state-backed literary prizes.”

Lorin Stein, editor of The Paris Review, suggests that the answer lies with technology. It’s not just that the ways people consumed entertainment changed (“short stories [in popular magazines] lost out to M*A*S*H* and Banana Republic”); it’s that changes in the way we work (and think) tend to lead us to a related but rather different genre.

“It is the beautiful daughter of a rambling, bloated ill-shaven giant (but a giant who’s a genius on his best days). And this child is the means by which many first know our greatest writers. Readers come to Thomas Mann by way of Death in Venice, Henry James by The Turn of the Screw, Kafka by Metamorphosis, Joseph Conrad by Heart of Darkness.”

HarperCollins – owned by the News Corporation, Rupurt Murdoch’s many-tentacled empire – may win a bid for Penguin. How do Penguin authors feel? “A number of writers warned that Penguin’s reputation would be damaged by a Murdoch takeover.”

“The American Antiquarian Society houses the largest collection of materials printed in the United States. Its library has books, newspapers, letters, even board games dating from 1640 to 1876.”