“When a book has been terrifically popular, when people love the story and the characters, there’s almost a public demand that it be turned into a movie. The studio can be confident that the film will make money, and it may even turn out to be a really remarkable film.”
Category: words
A ‘Bizarre, Noble Experiment’ – When They Tried To Put Magazines On CD-ROM
“A handful of magazines saw the potential of the CD-ROM and saw dollar signs. Problem was, this was an idea without an audience at first, and there was no clue if creating multimedia content in lieu of a mag would actually work. (It didn’t.) Today’s Tedium into the world of the magazine-on-disc – the publishing world’s bizarre, noble experiment in multimedia.”
#JeSuisCirconflexe – Why The Protests Against French Spelling Changes Are So Passionate
The people who are angry about the loss of a diacritical mark are upset about the abandonment of history – but, even if they don’t realize it, it’s not really linguistic history that worries them.
Teens Have Not Stopped Reading, And David Denby’s New Yorker Jeremiad Is ‘You Kids Get Off My Lawn’ Journalism
“Ah, it appears that, fleeing human connection, lost to their reductive gender-specific pastimes of sports and, um, friends, teen hyphen agers (The teen hyphen ager! In the pizza parlor! With the smart phone!) have murdered reading. But soft – no one is dead yet, not even you, geriatric Cassandra. Nor are the teen hyphen agers brain-dead.”
Seriously? A “Museum Of Digital Reading”?
“The Museum of Digital Reading (in French, Le Petit Musée de la lecture numérique) will be the first permanent exhibition space in Europe dedicated to the history of reading devices.”
Where Do You Draw the Line Between Commercial and Literary Fiction?
James Parker: “I draw it up the side of the Boston Public Library. I draw it through the middle of Stephen King’s wallet. I draw it right between the frontal lobes of every writer who ever lived.”
Rivka Galchen: “Maybe Commercial Fiction is really great, or maybe it’s great the way a Dorito is great, but Commercial Fiction is in some way consonant with the market. … If, though, we didn’t have the term Literary to protect books of value that ¬aren’t brilliant as commerce, then we would have Melville’s Omoo and Typee but not Moby-Dick.”
Why Teens Have Stopped Reading Books
“When they become twelve or thirteen, kids often stop reading seriously. The boys veer off into sports or computer games, the girls into friendship in all its wrenching mysteries and satisfactions of favor and exclusion. Much of their social life, for boys as well as girls, is now conducted on smartphones, where teen-agers don’t have to confront one another.”
The Chilling Effect Of The Disappeared Hong Kong Booksellers
“Some publishers and authors have lost confidence in Hong Kong’s autonomy and left the territory. Others, like Bao Pu, the founder of the New Century Press, had little confidence to lose.”
Hundreds Of Thousands Flock To India’s Book Festivals
“As the festivals have blossomed, they have also turned into something more than strictly literary: a mixture of the public square and the television studio, or forums where India talks to itself.”
Sure Publishing Has Changed. But Not Editors, Really
“For all the wrenching changes in trade publishing in the past decades, I know that my colleagues and I pretty much go about the thing in a fashion very similar to the way the editors I watched and learned from were doing it in the ’70s, and they were doing in a fashion very similar to the editors they learned from. Sometimes I think we’re like blacksmiths or bespoke cobblers — how many ways are there, really, to shoe a horse or a human?”