“In the early to mid-nineteen-sixties, both before and after the Surgeon General issued his famous report on the dangers of tobacco, Mad took on the industry more than any ‘respectable’ magazine. Free from any dependency on advertising, Mad could be fearless, and it was. Its campaign of ridicule was unrelenting.”
Val McDermid: “Like most writers, you start off feeling your way. I don’t think many of us launched ourselves into the world of writing books fully formed.”
“For many writers, research is a big yawn. The past is a foreign country, and who cares how they do things differently there? Research is reading disintegrating papers in dusty libraries; sifting through shoe boxes in ancient attics; interviewing people who don’t know when to stop talking.”
“Rowling’s point seems to be that this is a culture narrowly interbred. It’s also one of ego-maniacs. And the writers, or would-be writers, are the worst of the batch.”
“Do I have the right to write about a firefight in Falluja, if I wasn’t there? Does it demonstrate respect and admiration for the soldiers, and show evidence of their importance in our culture? Or does it insult those who risked their lives, if I take literary possession of that experience?”
“The death of the standalone e-reader might be good news for consumers, who will have one fewer gadget to buy and lug around. But it’s bad news for the book industry.”
“Amazon is attempting to convince publishers in the United Kingdom that it should be allowed to print its own copies of their titles to sell to its customers whenever the publisher is low on inventory.”
Could authors and publishers be starting to run out of titles? It can look that way…
The legislation – actually nicknamed the “Anti-Amazon Law” by the French media and lawmakers, and intended to protect the country’s many independent bookstores – forbids any bookseller from offering free shipping along with a 5% discount, already the maximum allowable in France.
She was the great-aunt of P.L. Travers, the writer who created Poppins, and Travers wrote about her in a 1941 short story, originally intended as a private Christmas gift, which will published this holiday season.
“The number of people using websites and apps to find out about the news has overtaken the number reading printed newspapers for the same purpose in the UK, according to the country’s media watchdog.”
“Barnes & Noble unveiled plans Wednesday to break apart into two companies, separating its retail unit from its struggling Nook Media business. The bookstore operator said it plans to complete the separation by the end of the first quarter of 2015.”
“It was the kinkiest secret in the Soviet Union: Across from the Kremlin, the country’s main library held a pornographic treasure trove. Founded by the Bolsheviks as a repository for aristocrats’ erotica, the collection eventually grew to house 12,000 items from around the world, ranging from 18th-century Japanese engravings to Nixon-era romance novels.”
“The Perseus Books Group, founded by the late Frank Pearl in 1996, is being sold to the Hachette Book Group. Through the deal, Hachette will then sell Perseus’ distribution business to Ingram [Publisher Services].”
“German book publishers have filed a complaint with the country’s antitrust authority against Amazon, accusing it of violating competition laws and asking the government to investigate. The complaint, filed last week, was announced on Tuesday, nearly two months after Amazon began delaying shipments of books from [German publishing group] Bonnier.”
“There is some evidence that reading on screen can result in less comprehension and even affect sleep patterns. But the research here is complex and inconclusive and, in any case, it is actually doing something far more interesting than telling us which medium is superior. It’s making us think more about what it means to read.”
“Last night Stephen King responded to Entertainment Weekly about this project of mine. He graciously said, ‘I’m delighted for her, and I’m going to order her book.’ So I bought his book too.”
A 25-year-old Texan woman just got a six-figure book deal, movie deal, and jewelry deal for her (erotic) fan fiction about one member of an English-Irish boy pop band.
After a book hackathon in London: “This has to be the beginning of a long marriage between these two worlds and not just the post-coital euphoria of a dirty weekend.”
“Each stave has bonus content – an audio reading, an essay by the author. It’s free to subscribe: readers pay for the story after they’ve read it. Once a book gets 5,000 subscribers, a print edition will be published.”
“Nicknamed La Mamá Grande, after a story by Gabriel García Márquez, she served as a confidante and coach, someone who paid her writers’ dentist bills and deftly resolved their domestic problems while promoting the greatest Latin American and Spanish authors across the globe, including Mr. García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and many more.”
“Poetry always remembers that it has its origins in music.”
“Naive as this sounds, doesn’t a bookseller as large as Amazon have a moral responsibility to books? In its early days, founder Bezos saw books more as a foothold for Amazon than a future. But by virtue of its size now, isn’t a business that built its reputation on the back of words obligated not to impede the spread of books?”
“It is precisely because Hachette has been so successful in selling its ebooks through Amazon that it can’t afford to walk away from the retailer. By allowing Amazon to put a lock on its products whose key only Amazon possessed, Hachette has allowed Amazon to utterly usurp its relationship with its customers.”
“Third Place Books hand-delivered copies of The Silkworm yesterday around the Seattle metro area to 20 customers. (Dozens of other customers pre-ordered from Third Place and chose to pick up the books in the stores.)”
“Anyone who, like Philip Roth, observes how peripheral literature has become to the common culture might regard the victory for freedom of expression as pyrrhic. If everything goes, does anything matter?”
“It was the kind of story that could bankrupt a writer. I’d now devoted five months to writing and peddling “Boom” and wasn’t even halfway to earning out my $2,000 advance (less than the overrun on my travel). The cruelest joke, though, was that 700 to 800 copies made “Boom” a top-rated seller.”
After having assigned, respectively, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and the anthology Out Loud: The Best of Rainbow Radio, “the College of Charleston and the University of South Carolina-Upstate will have to spend $52,000 and $17,000, respectively, to teach the U.S. Constitution and other founding documents, ‘including the study of and devotion to American institutions and ideals’.”
“The newly found poems – most of which were written after 1956 – will be published later this year in Latin America and in 2015 in Spain. They were discovered among sheaves of manuscripts in boxes and have been examined by experts, who authenticated them.”
“I think it is possibly going to end up being much more popular online. But the key thing is that it has to be mediated. I think having the name of a good dictionary maker is going to be just as important.”