Category: publishing

Some legal scholars say they shouldn’t – and that publishers are “just another cartel.”

“There are important reasons why the proposed merger – which would mean the company Twitter is already calling “Random Penguin” would have a 27 per cent share of the UK’s book market – might have serious consequences for the way we read.”

“Pearson, the British media conglomerate that owns Penguin, said Thursday that it was discussing a potential deal with Random House’s owner, Bertelsmann of Germany. The merger, if completed, would create a combined entity that would control nearly 25 percent of the United States book market.”

“Rumors of Amazon’s activity in Brazil have been circulating for years, with more and more coming each day. The fact is, you can’t really call them rumors any longer.” But rumors/reports are suggesting that Amazon is trying to acquire the Saraiva group, which owns a successful chain of bookstores and one of the country’s top publishers.

“An experiment from major authors including Neil Gaiman and Cory Doctorow, which allows readers to pay the price of their choice for a collection of ebooks, has shattered all expectations, racking up sales of more than $1.1m (£700,000) in under two weeks.”

The defunct program “is called the JLPP, or Japanese Literature Publishing Project, a service launched in 2002 … to promote the translation of modern Japanese literature into four languages, English, French, German and Russian.” The decision to end JLPP was based, it turns out, on a badly botched report.

“Our position is simple. If you bought it, you own it, and you can resell it, rent it, lend it or donate it.”

“We want to say that on the one hand are the good books, the hard books, the books that require dedication of the reader, of the work readers do. The books that Real Writers (apparently a self-selecting class) write. And then there are these others. Yet it’s a strange thing to watch book culture, which is itself in a perpetual stage of fear about its own decline, slice off pieces of its very own flesh.”

“After all, literary fiction can be plotted just as vigorously as genre fiction (though it doesn’t have to be). … A good mystery or thriller isn’t set off from an accomplished literary novel by plotting, but by the writer’s sensibility, his purpose in writing, and the choices he makes to communicate that purpose.”