Category: words

“Unfortunately, self-publishing is neither radical nor liberating. And, as revolutions go, it is rather short on revolutionaries. It is actually reactionary, a contracted version of the traditional publishing model in which companies, who produce for a wide range of tastes and preferences, are replaced by individual producers each catering to very narrow range.”

“One of the great questions for the future of the net is: to what extent this extraordinary freedom will be allowed to remain in the hands of the people, and to what extent will it be limited and regulated? If a recent ruling by the European Court of Human Rights is anything to go by, perhaps we should expect more of the latter.”

“After new episodes of the show ended in 2006, and then reruns stopped airing in 2009, a team including LeVar Burton got to work on a new direction, and the Reading Rainbow iPad app debuted in 2012. Though it’s been a big success, the new goal is to expand Reading Rainbow‘s library and reach so it can accessible through any browser, instead of just on tablets.”

The demonstration conversation was scripted, the execution was slow, and one German-to-English translation came out “I have many meetings with my colleagues in Redmond, and I take the opportunity to see her fiancée my.”

“In the decades between the two world wars, no writer was more widely translated or read than the Austrian novelist Stefan Zweig, and in the years after, few writers fell more precipitously into obscurity, at least in the English-speaking world. But now Zweig, prolific storyteller and embodiment of a vanished Mitteleuropa, seems to be back, and in a big way” – new editions of his books, movie adaptations, new biographies, even a novel about him.

Sociologist Eva Illouz argues “that EL James’s novels are ‘a gothic romance adapted to modern times in which sexuality is both a source of division between men and women and a site to orchestrate their reconciliation’, and that their graphic descriptions of bondage, discipline and sadomasochism are ‘as much a cultural fantasy as a sexual one, serving as a guide to a happier romantic life’.”

“The dispute has also dragged in JK Rowling and the best-selling American writer James Patterson, and broke into the open on Friday, when the world’s largest bookseller started turning the thumbscrew on the French-owned publisher.”

“Distressed that they had never met an African-American literary lion of [James] Baldwin’s stature, the poets, Thomas Sayers Ellis and Sharan Strange, hatched a plan: They would bring young black writers and artists together to read their work aloud, to bond with mentors and to foster the sort of comradeship that had nurtured many a cultural movement.”

Literary historian John Sutherland offers a list of ten works, by authors from from Herman Melville to Toni Morrison to Emily Dickinson to Arthur Miller to James Fenimore Cooper. (Really?)

“The Next Big Book’s dashboard, which Macmillan plans to give to its employees and authors over the next few months, allows the publishing company to see what factors — from Facebook posts to book reviews to appearances on NPR’s ‘Fresh Air’ — are most influential on sales.”