Category: words

“Like the rest of the book publishing industry, Harlequin is dealing with declining revenue and income, a product of the continuing shift toward digital books. The mass-market, grocery-store paperback, long the company’s bread and butter, is rapidly disappearing.”

“Expert Village made a step-by-step video about the poor man’s copyright, and though it mentions at the end that the mail-it-to-yourself trick won’t hold up well in court, the video still presents it as a viable option. It seems that the tactic may be more valuable in the U.K. and France (where it’s known as the ‘Soleau envelope’).”

Junot Díaz: “I can’t tell you how often students of color seek me out during my visits or approach me after readings in order to share with me the racist nonsense they’re facing in their programs, from both their peers and their professors. In the last 17 years I must have had at least three hundred of these conversations, minimum.”

“He teaches two courses within MIT’s Comparative Media Studies/Writing Department, one on fantasy ‘world-building’ and one section of advanced fiction. They both seem too good to be true.”

“‘There was an idea in the past that if you had a lot of really good books and put them on the shelves, people would come,’ Mutter says. ‘And most booksellers recognized that that doesn’t work anymore.'”

“Right now, most digital comics are just print comics scanned. You’re writing for an old medium. The screen is widescreen. Why are we not writing and doing art for those as the delivery system, rather than as just a secondary way to look at [comics]?”

“It’s time to wonder whether these people who come to see us talk about our books are really asking dumb questions, or the wrong questions. Why are writers so determined to focus exclusively on their novels, as if there were no continuity between writing and life?”

“In fact, the Jewishness of Mads humor cannot be overstated: It was, for many people outside New York, the first place they ever heard words like knish and shnook. … We would not have had Spy magazine without Mad, nor The Daily Show, nor Colbert, nor CollegeHumor.com, nor Gawker.”

To some, it was “uncomradely” that fellow radicals would deploy the capitalist tool of intellectual property law to keep Marx’s and Engels’s writings off the Internet. And it wasn’t lost on the archive’s supporters that the deadline for complying with the order came on the eve of May 1, International Workers’ Day.

“Maybe it’s time to start thinking of paper and screens another way: not as an old technology and its inevitable replacement, but as different and complementary interfaces, each stimulating particular modes of thinking.”