http://www.artsjournal.com/publishing.shtml Copyright 2010 Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:13:20 -0800 http://www.movabletype.org/?v=3.33 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss "With independents blaming increased competition from the internet, supermarkets, a declining British high street and the credit crunch for their troubles, figures from the Booksellers Association show that 102 independent stores closed in 2009, leaving just 1,289 left in the UK - a decline of 27% since 1999."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/uks_indie_books.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/uks_indie_books.shtml publishing Tue, 09 Feb 2010 08:13:20 -0800 "[L]ast year, 15-year-old 'Bunny' became one of Japan's top authors of a genre called keitai -- cellphone -- novels." Likened to "Harlequin romances for young girls," keitai novels aren't great literature, but the audience for them is passionate, and it seems to be quite large.... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/in_japan_cellph.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/in_japan_cellph.shtml publishing Tue, 09 Feb 2010 06:39:53 -0800 "Now, as publishers enter discussions with the Web giant Google about its plan to sell digital versions of new books direct to consumers, they have a little more leverage than just a few weeks ago -- at least when it comes to determining how Google will pay publishers for those e-books and how much consumers will pay for them."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/ipad_strengthen.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/ipad_strengthen.shtml publishing Mon, 08 Feb 2010 18:33:00 -0800 "If the manuscripts exist, and if they ever come to the market, they are likely to become the next posthumous publishing sensation - regardless of how good they are."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/afterlife_of_a.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/afterlife_of_a.shtml publishing Mon, 08 Feb 2010 08:02:12 -0800 "The question of whether e-book prices should be significantly lower than their print analogs has become a fundamental divide in a simmering dispute between book publishers and the 800-pound-gorilla that is Amazon.com. In part the issue is about consumer choices but like the other digitization wars which preceded it -- and continue -- in music, television, film and even news, it's also about ensuring that a creative industry survives."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/whats_an_ebook.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/whats_an_ebook.shtml publishing Sun, 07 Feb 2010 22:18:03 -0800 "A host of rivals to the market-dominating Kindle electronic reader has given newfound hope to publishers that they will finally be able to dictate their own terms after being at the mercy of Amazon."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/now_open_for_bu.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/now_open_for_bu.shtml publishing Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:34:44 -0800 "Among the strange fates of many great books, the bizarre afterlife of Moby-Dick stands out as a classic example. The first edition of the novel, originally called "The Whale" (1851), was a horrible combination of a flop and a botch."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/the_odd_dynamic.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/the_odd_dynamic.shtml publishing Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:29:43 -0800 "To begin to write a book these days seems more than the average folly. Publishing appears to have been hit by a storm similar to the one that tore through the music industry a few years ago and is now causing unprecedented pain in newspapers We are told that fewer people are reading, that book sales are down, that the supermarkets which sell one in five copies of all books care more about their cucumber sales."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/writing_a_book.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/writing_a_book.shtml publishing Sun, 07 Feb 2010 09:27:01 -0800 "While some other services, such as Google Books, offer out-of-copyright works to be downloaded for free, users of the British Library service will be able to read from pages in the original books in the library's collection."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/british_library_16.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/british_library_16.shtml publishing Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:57:53 -0800 "And he's not alone. Just about everyone I know complains about the same thing when they're being honest--including, maybe especially, people whose business is reading and writing. They mourn the loss of books and the loss of time for books."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/we_miss_books.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/we_miss_books.shtml publishing Sun, 07 Feb 2010 08:26:49 -0800 "Sales of celebrity memoirs might be down, says the Bookseller, while the misery memoir bubble has burst, but what it dubs "animalit" helped to save the biography genre last year."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/animalit_really.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/animalit_really.shtml publishing Fri, 05 Feb 2010 08:10:42 -0800 Amazon, in an open letter last week to it customers, indicated it would "have to capitulate" to Macmillan's demands because the publisher "has a monopoly over their own titles, and we will want to offer them to you even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/amazon_close_to.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/amazon_close_to.shtml publishing Fri, 05 Feb 2010 06:25:56 -0800 "Fragments of a lost ancient Roman law text have been rediscovered in the scrap paper used to bind other books. The Codex Gregorianus, or Gregorian Code, was compiled by an otherwise unknown man named Gregorius at the end of the third century A.D. It started a centuries-long tradition of collecting Roman emperors' laws in a single manuscript."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/portions_of_anc.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/portions_of_anc.shtml publishing Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:53:00 -0800 http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/a_brief_history_2.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/a_brief_history_2.shtml publishing Thu, 04 Feb 2010 21:49:18 -0800 "The letters came from Sri Lanka or the Netherlands or Arizona. They included deeply personal admissions--cancer diagnoses, bankruptcy, divorce--and were often written in Salinger's own brash style or, at the very least, incorporated the slang of the period he chronicled. 'Dear Jerry, you old bastard,' they tended to start. 'I gotta tell you.'"... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/someone_had_to.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/someone_had_to.shtml publishing Thu, 04 Feb 2010 05:39:10 -0800 "Novels by National Book Award winners Pete Dexter, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Proulx and William T. Vollmann have been banned in recent years. Award finalists Katherine Dunn and Barry Hannah are on the Texas no-read list, too, as are Pulitzer Prize winners Alice Walker, Robert Penn Warren and John Updike."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/more_than_40000.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/more_than_40000.shtml publishing Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:30:09 -0800 The 46-year-old poet, "who teaches at the University of San Francisco, has won the $100,000 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University. His books include 'Tea,' 'Lunch,' 'Cocktails' and 'Chronic.'"... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/100000_poetry_p.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/100000_poetry_p.shtml publishing Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:22:40 -0800 Alexander the Great "esteemed it a perfect portable treasure of all military virtue and knowledge." The death of Gorgythion prefigures the poppies of Flanders Field. West Point cadets study the epic. The scene of Achilles dragging Hector's body from a chariot has been replayed in Mogadishu and Fallujah. There's even "spin": a 1st-century historian argued that Homer "suppressed the truth," which was that the Greeks lost.... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/how_the_iliad_i.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/how_the_iliad_i.shtml publishing Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:35:51 -0800 http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/dantes_inferno.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/dantes_inferno.shtml publishing Tue, 02 Feb 2010 21:25:47 -0800 "Macmillan's success in bending Amazon to its will represents a tipping point in the book industry -- a shift in power from online distributors to content owners, who after all, have an effective 'monopoly' on every product in their catalogs."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/in_amazons_game.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/in_amazons_game.shtml publishing Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:21:03 -0800 Laura Miller: "Ultimately, if the iPad takes off, the Kindle is in serious trouble. In order to maintain the complete, current selection of titles that is one of its device's great features, Amazon has to be willing to come to terms with publishers."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/how_the_ipad_ha.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/how_the_ipad_ha.shtml publishing Tue, 02 Feb 2010 06:09:43 -0800 "Amazon, which pulled Macmillan's titles from its site, came out of the fight with egg on its face. The publisher, meanwhile, won new fans. ... Amazon also lost the public relations battle with literary agents, a group that the giant retailer has been trying to woo in recent months."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/scuffle_with_ma.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/scuffle_with_ma.shtml publishing Mon, 01 Feb 2010 20:09:21 -0800 A parent's very specific request that her eighth grader not be required to read aloud from "The Diary of a Young Girl: The Definitive Edition" sparked a swift, blanket decision to ban the book from the school system. After intense criticism, it's reversing course.... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/va_school_syste.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/va_school_syste.shtml publishing Mon, 01 Feb 2010 19:17:49 -0800 "The date on which the award was given was also moved from April to November, creating a gap when a wealth of 1970 fiction could not be eligible. Among the big names in the running for the Lost Man Booker - which will be awarded in May - are Iris Murdoch, David Lodge, Muriel Spark, Joe Orton, Melvyn Bragg, HE Bates, JG Farrell, Ruth Rendell, Nina Bawden, Brian Aldiss and Susan Hill."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/the_year_the_bo.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/02/the_year_the_bo.shtml publishing Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:31:10 -0800 "Amazon [had] shocked the publishing world late last week by removing direct access to the Kindle editions as well as printed books from Macmillan, one of the country's six largest publishers, which had said it planned to begin setting higher consumer prices for e-books." By Sunday evening, the online retailer relented, agreeing to restore Macmillan titles "even at prices we believe are needlessly high for e-books."... http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/01/amazon_gives_in.shtml http://www.artsjournal.com/artsjournal1/2010/01/amazon_gives_in.shtml publishing Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:18:14 -0800