Category: publishing

“On the readers’ side we want a simple value proposition where they pay a flat monthly fee and they can read whatever they want. On the publisher’s side … we made it fit their traditional models where they get paid every single time someone reads a book.”

“I don’t know what a story will be until it begins to unfold, … and it might begin with the exploration of a subject or a theme or a recollection or something as random as my discovery that the wild creatures in Tierra del Fuego were going blind as a result of the hole in the ozone layer that opens up there annually or that the Shetland Islands is the windiest place on earth.”

“The real problem with ebooks is that they’re more “e” than book, so an entirely different set of rules govern what someone — from an individual to a library — can and can’t do with them compared to physical books, especially when it comes to pricing.”

Marked by an internationally identifiable and translatable literariness, not to mention cuddly-bear politics, such fictions threaten to render obsolete, according to Parks, “the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture”.

Adam Gopnik: “With the sudden appearance of a ‘liberal’ Pope – albeit a liberal Pope who is, as many exasperated Catholics have pointed out, just as strong as ever on Church teachings on abortion and homosexuality, just less inclined to fetishize them before other, more urgent ones – there may be no more serendipitous moment to be thinking again about the writer J. F. Powers.”

Constantine Cavafy, an Alexandria-born Greek poet-historian from the turn of the last century, “whose lifelong immersion in Greek history, from the fall of Troy to the fall of Byzantium, left him with few illusions about the possibilities for political progress – and make him the perfect poet to be reading just now.”

“The odds list is released each summer after research by a group of specialists, said Alex Donohue, a Ladbrokes spokesman. Sadly, that research does not include holing up in a back office and reading hundreds of great works of international literature.”

“It will not be especially little, and the cover will be only partly red. But a new version of the world’s second most published book is due to appear on Chinese shelves, decades after it fell from favour with the end of Maoism. The re-emergence of Quotations from Chairman Mao … comes amid an official revival of the era’s rhetoric.”

A “29-year-old entrepreneur and his six-year-old San Francisco startup just unveiled an online subscription service that gives you unlimited access to a large library of digital books for a flat monthly fee, including titles from big-name publishing house HarperCollins.”

So how can “global expansion” mean less literary diversity for the world’s most influential English-language literary prize? This question can be answered in two words: Jonathan Franzen. By which I mean that American literature, in all its mighty cultural force, is about to swim up like Moby-Dick and swallow the Booker Prize whole.