Category: publishing

“Historically, even editors of tasteless books still played a taste-making role, relying on their guts to decide” what might become a hit. “Today, the public has already indicated what interests it, via the Internet, and the editor just has to be savvy enough and shameless enough to give the rabble what it wants.

“This morning, over 120 children’s book authors and illustrators sent a letter to President Barack Obama expressing concern for ‘our readers,’ a.k.a. tots through tweens. The undersigned… say they fear the preponderance of testing in American schools keeps children from learning to love to read.” Nora Caplan-Bricker looks at what the letter got right and wrong.

“Even at 22, the author was smart, acerbic, and fascinated by human limitations.”

The project “bring[s] together on a single open-access Web site thousands of manuscripts held by Harvard University, Amherst College, the Boston Public Library and five other institutions.” It is also fueling a “quarrel [that] has been handed to generation after generation after generation.”

Thousands of rural librarians are “trying to bring a sense of community, learning and connectedness to their isolated areas. The Institute of Museum and Library Services estimates that nearly half of America’s public libraries are rural, and many of those are staffed by only one or two people.”

“Next month, the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will release a series of apps that will broaden access to thousands of original books and manuscripts from Shakespearean England.”

In 1910, each person in Britain sent on average an extraordinary 116.7 items of mail. What we think of as a 21st-century phenomenon – social media – is rather “a return to the way things used to be”

“I became more critical, which can take a lot of the fun out of the reading It’s rather like someone who has always loved buildings, fallen in love with them simply for their beauty, and then goes on to study architecture and discovers that, though there is a greater understanding for how buildings are put together, the purity is lost.”

“Foreign writers who agree to submit their books to China’s fickle censorship regime say the experience can be frustrating.”

“Authors create product, which is story (not book), and readers consume product through a variety of mediums. Everyone else is in between. Authors need people of value in between in order to get story to reader.”