Category: publishing

“Most of our customers are reading in multiple ways: in print, on their phones or tablets, on dedicated devices. Very few customers tell us they are reading 100% exclusively digitally. The more options people have to find their next book and support an indie bookseller at the same time is a win-win “

“Henry & Glenn Forever” is what happens. But what do Henry Rollins and Glenn Danzig think about their cartoon relationship?

“Concerns over the ‘glut’ of information available to us are ultimately, I think, pretty near-sighted. There couldn’t possibly be a more ridiculous excuse for not reading. Don’t know what to read? Read anything! Read everything!”

When we change how we read, we are changing our brains. Researchers have proposed that we play out literary scenarios with mirror neurons and fire up complex, full-brain patterns of activity when asked to practice “close reading,” in contrast to the patterns associated with reading for pleasure.

“There are now thought to be about 150 comic scholars in the UK – university lecturers, PhD students and independent researchers. They are exploring how subjects such as gender, feminism, history and mental and physical health are portrayed.”

“There were noises made briefly, a few years ago, about the idea that we were living in a post-literate world, in which the ability to make sense out of written words was somehow redundant, but those days are gone: words are more important than they ever were: we navigate the world with words, and as the world slips onto the web, we need to follow, to communicate and to comprehend what we are reading.”

“Who threatened to throw himself off a balcony? Who was chatted up by Saul Bellow? From the very first award in 1969 up to last year’s prize, a judge from each year of the Booker gave us the inside story on how they reached their decision. Click on the dates and dots along the top …”

In fiction, the finalists are Rachel Kushner for “The Flamethrowers” (Scribner); Jhumpa Lahiri for “The Lowland” (Knopf); James McBride for “The Good Lord Bird” (Riverhead); Thomas Pynchon for “Bleeding Edge” (Penguin Press); and George Saunders for “Tenth of December” (Random House).

“When Leo Tolstoy’s great-great-granddaughter, the journalist Fyokla Tolstaya, announced that the Leo Tolstoy State Museum was looking for volunteers to proofread some forty-six thousand eight hundred pages of her relative’s writings, she hoped to generate enough interest to get the first round of corrections done in six months.” 3,000 people signed up.

“The tools of online collaboration are still relatively primitive and often discouragingly awkward. But they’re improving, and I’m seeing glimmerings of hope that in a few years we’ll have vastly more capable systems. That’s particularly important because without better collaboration tools, we won’t be able to take advantage of the ways in which e-books can be truly superior to traditional print.”