Category: words

“Our obsession with the Great American Novel is perhaps evidence of the even greater truth that it’s impossible for one to exist.”

“Long before Hollywood became obsessed with superheroes, the studios looked to the publishing world for content and inspiration.”

“Certain works of fiction have so many memorable lines that they’ve entered everyday language.” Think Austen, Dickens – and many more.

Sometimes good books sell well; sometimes good books sell poorly; sometimes bad books sell well; sometimes bad books sell poorly. A lot about publishing is unfair and inscrutable. But…

“See, when Zuckerberg actually hosted the first book club ‘meeting’ – a Facebook Q&A yesterday with the book’s author, Moises Naím – he faced a problem familiar to far more plebeian bookclubs: Hardly anybody showed up. (And of those who did, few had actually read the book.)”

“What used to be an inconvenient niche industry for the gung-ho (a six-CD jewel-case monstrosity, or worse, a giant box of cassettes!) has performed death-defying backflips around its wilting print counterparts in recent years. And it’s only getting better.”

“Movie and TV studios can count on ticket sales and advertising dollars even as they offer their content on Netflix. Musicians can still sell concert tickets even if streaming services like Spotify cannibalize CD sales. But for book publishers and authors, the main source of revenue is still selling books. So why would they agree to participate in what amounts to an always-accessible lending library with an infinite number of copies?”

“At the end of World War Two, when the US Army seized the Nazis’ publisher Eher Verlag, rights for Mein Kampf passed to the Bavarian authorities. They ensured the book was only reprinted in Germany under special [and controlled] circumstances – but the expiration of its copyright in December 2015 has prompted fierce debate on how to curb a publishing free-for-all.”

“Let us simply say, then, that the following books are works we think ought to be read by more people, works that we keep coming back to but that aren’t talked about as much as we would like.”

“For the time being, the data being gathered concerns general patterns of behavior rather than what happens between each of us and our personal E-readers. But we have come to live with the fact that anything can be found out. Today “the information” is anonymous; tomorrow it may well be just about us. Will readers who feel guilty when they fail to finish a book now feel doubly ashamed because abandoning a novel is no longer a private but a public act?”