“Ebooks have just left euphoria and are caught halfway between anxiety and decline and if nothing changes they may soon go the way of Betamax, Bebo and the Sinclair C5.”

“The library hasn’t selected an architect for the project, which will include traditional reading rooms and bookshelves. But officials said they also want to create fun, collaborative spaces, stocked with tools for creative projects. It hasn’t been decided whether these spaces would be located in the Schwarzman building, the branch across the street, or both.”

“As a number of authors have pointed out, including Hugh Howey, the biggest competitive threat in the book business isn’t the electronic retailer, it’s the Big Five publishers. They’re the ones who have tried desperately to keep book prices high — especially ebook prices — and yet continue to pay their authors a fraction of what Amazon does.”

“[He] is known in the English-speaking world for his lyrical, densely descriptive novels, but as a journalist he was acerbically funny, charming, and slightly bizarre. The young García Márquez devoured what surrounded him. Everything was raw material for his newspaper columns – film adaptations of Faulkner, nudism, dancing bears, the letter X, a woman he saw in an ice cream parlor who may have been the ‘ugliest I’ve ever seen in my life, or, on the contrary, the most disconcertingly beautiful’.”

Joshua Ferris: “In book after book, Nabokov creates idiosyncratic, heightened, elaborately constructed worlds; Roth’s one book investigates and exhausts his world, the given world. When I was younger, I preferred Nabokov. … But you can’t choose what kind of writer you become; aesthetics is handmaiden to temperament. By dint of nativity, or culture, or epoch, or perspective, I was more temperamentally aligned with Roth.”

“Rap is indeed “real” poetry. It rhymes, often even internally. Its authors work hard on the lyrics. The subject matter is certainly artistically heightened, occasioning long-standing debates over whether the depictions of violence and misogyny in some of it are sincere. Rap, considered as a literature rather than its top-selling hits, addresses a wide-range of topics, even including science fiction. Rap is now decades old, having evolved over time and being increasingly curated by experts. In what sense is this not a “real” anything?”

“Hans Christian Andersen believed in an untouched innocence at the core of every person. … Innocence could be hidden and emerge, or it could be apparent and then corrupted. .. To be wholly innocent was rare. To be wholly innocent, for Andersen, meant to be wholly yourself. It meant that you were free from the distorted reality of the devil’s mirror.”

“Black literary writers with African roots (though some grew up elsewhere), mostly young cosmopolitans who write in English, are making a splash in the book world, especially in the United States. They are on best-seller lists, garner high profile reviews and win major awards, in America and in Britain.”

“The acquisition could provide Hachette more leverage in its negotiations with Amazon because it will give the company control over more attractive books.”

“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?”

“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.”

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.”