Publishers, agents, and authors such as J.K. Rowling, Nick Hornby, John Grisham, Salman Rusdie, Ian McEwan, Aravind Adiga and Ken Follett were alarmed yesterday to learn that the American website Scribd has been posting entire copies of their books for free dowload. As Dan Sabbagh…
Moody’s Investors Service has downgraded its ratings outlook on German media giant Bertelsmann AG, the parent company of the world’s largest publisher, Random House. As a Wall Street Journal report by Mike Barris details, ” Moody’s outlook change comes two days after Bertelsmann said net…
Hearings were held recently in Australia regarding limitations on book imports. “After hearing 270 submissions on whether to lift import restrictions on the book industry — an overwhelming majority of them opposing an open market — the Productivity Commission will issue a compromise discussion paper…
An announcement from the Deputy Speaker of the Ukrainian parliament has made it official: Celebrations to mark the 200th birthday of Nikolai Gogol have begun. “Starting from today, eight cities of Ukraine will have big-boards with Gogol’s portrait and some quotes from his works dedicated…
“A New York Times report notes that “the word has been out for more than a little while about the cavernous spaces available in Berlin for a seemingly ceremonial fee — even by the standards of crisis-chastened New York and London … that means ultracheap…
Is Amazon.co.uk targeting Britain’s indie publishers with an offer they have little choice but to accept? That’s what the trade group the Independent Publisher’s Guild is saying after a Friday meeting with Amazon in which the American internet retail giant refused to negotiate a new…
“If recent reports are to be believed,” observes Sam Jordison, “people have started seeing parallels between our current economic meltdown and the world collapse outlined in the 1200 pages of Ayn Rand‘s libertarian classic Atlas Shrugged. Rand’s fans proclaim her a prophet — the hero…
A little rusty on your geography? Well, a new geography textbook from Brazil’s Ministry of Education will make you feel better. According to an Associated Press report by Bradley Brooks, maps in this textbook “distributed by the education ministry in Brazil’s most populous state botches…
Kitchen Confidential author Anthony Bourdain has never hidden his feelings about the indefatigable cookbook author, Food Network personality, and Dunkin’ Donuts spokesperson Rachael Ray. She’s “evil,” he’s said, and her show is “vomit-inducing.” But then …. “I read something really disturbing while leafing through a…
Now it can be told: Thirty years after the fact, Jerry Casale of Devo explains that one of the band’s greatest songs, “Whip It,” came from his reading. “I had these ‘Whip It’ lyrics from my attempt at doing a Thomas Pynchon parody,” he explains…
Lest you thought the ground had stopped trembling, the economic crisis continues to reverberate throughout the book buisness: An AP report says Amazon.com has announced it’s closing three of its distribution centers and laying off or transferring 210 people, while another AP story says the…
Former Goldman Sachs CEO and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson — the Bush administration engineer of the first bailout to his old cronies on Wall Street — has struck a deal with Hachette imprint Business Plus, which itself is an imprint of Grand Central. According to…
India’s national newspaper, The Hindu, has a lovely feature written by academic and literary critic Meenakshi Mukherjee on The Writers Workshop, a legendary publishing house that has been a major contributor to Indian literary history. Many great Indian writers got there start there — Vikram…
As Alice Waugh relayed in an earlier report on Moby, “some investigations…found that around 20 million British people, a third of the population, are intimidated by the book trade. In many families reading is perceived to be alien and unattractive, a hobby for ‘people who…
It seemed wonderful at first: an airport named after a writer. And a good one! Only in Europe! But then, some of its little idiosyncrasies began to wear on people ….
As became evident in my confessional post about Stephen Fry, I don’t really know what to do with Twitter. I go on to it occasionally, mainly to spy on my eco-friend who likes to pontificate about low carbon lifestyles; I am lifting his pronouncements for…
When D.H. Lawrence showed the manuscript for his new book to his printer, as he later recounted in a letter to Maria and Aldous Huxley, the printer became “very cross, morally so” and “suggested rather savagely that I should call it: ‘John Thomas and Lady…
Anyone remember the hubbub around this time last year when Barack Obama was outed as an elitist? As I recall, he said something about rednecks and Hillary jumped on a bandwagon and good ol’ John just stood on his soapbox saying “Gee whiz, I am…
Catherine Hickly of Bloomberg News reports that, “A New York court ordered a book collector to return a 16th-century volume valued at $600,000 to a museum in Stuttgart, more than six decades after it was stolen by a U.S. army captain at the end of…
Smut! Give me smut and nothing but – A dirty novel I can’t shut If it’s uncut, and unsubtle… Despite the wild and lurid territories that have been charted in mainstream culture in the intervening years, from John Updike to Basic Instinct, Tom Lehrer’s 1964…
Thus does art meet commerce, as reported by Leon Neyfakh in the New York Observer: Joanna Smith Rakoff had just completed revisions of her novel, Brooklyn, which she’d been working on for six years, when her editor took her out to dinner to tell her,…
This just in: Several big conglomerates seem to be gobbling up major American publishers. Should we be concerned? “It is either the apex or the nadir of a tremendous change in the industry and maybe the culture,” says one editor … from Harper & Row.…
John Hope Franklin, “a towering scholar and pioneer of African-American studies who wrote the seminal text on the black experience in the U.S.,” died yesterday of congestive heart failure at the Duke University Hospital in Durham, North Carolina. He was 94. As an Associated Press…
Death of a statesman? That’s how some prominent commentators are viewing the recent political turn of The New Statesman, Britain’s most established left wing magazine. Describing itself as a combination of “great writing, fresh ideas and provocative debate”, the magazine was founded in 1913 by…
A good disposal of a prize fund today: Alison Flood reports in The Guardian that the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award has been given to a Palestinian organisation that promotes literacy among children. The prize, which was begun seven years ago in memory of the creator…
Women are far more avid readers than men, according to a new survey for the National Year of Reading Campaign. The study found “almost half of women are ‘page turners’ who finish a book soon after starting it compared to only 26 per cent of…
A whole new model of bottom-up publishing is florishing in Argentina as a result of the economic collapse there of 2001. In 2003, a group of artists and writers wanted to find a way to help the cartoneros—people who scavenged scraps of cardboard and paper…
In a gripping, rivetting commentary for the Guardian‘s book blog that proves utterly readable, Alastair Harper turns a gimlet eye that’s also somehow edgy on the language of blurbs. You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll kiss five or six minutes goodbye as his luscious and limpid…
The University of Michigan Press, one of the country’s leading university presses, announced yesterday that it is going to shift from releasing its books in traditional print format to releasing almost all of them titles in digital format, making it the first scholarly press in…
It’s something technofiles have been chiding the publishing business about getting onto, even as some booksellers and others oppose it. And yes, it will save a lot of trees, but it’s not as if electronic formats don’t have carbon footprint issues, either. Either way, it…
