Category: publishing

“There are more than 125 million copies of ‘Star Wars’ books in print, and 115 titles have been best-sellers.”

“The spread of e-readers, particularly cheaper ones, is encouraging. A 2012 study by Scholastic in the US found children accustomed to screens more willing to read e-readers than paper books, a contested finding, but not one that should be dismissed either

“Food can (and should) be a powerful grounding element in science fiction. It’s a hook onto which readers can grab while the whole world around them swarms with spaceships, aliens, dinosaurs or hyperintelligent gerbils bent on world domination.”

The supposed author, Robert Galbraith, “was supposed to have been a former plain-clothes Royal Military Police investigator who had left the armed forces in 2003 to work in the civilian security industry.”

Charles Jackson’s The Lost Weekend “terrorized several early readers, all of them writers and all drinkers. ‘I hate the goddam book almost as much as I hate my own inflamed conscience,’ wrote the novelist William Seabrook.”

“Decades of consolidation have cost writers and consumers alike. There is, for one, the persistent gripe of writers and agents: companies either forbid (as at Penguin) or restrict (at Random House) their constituent imprints from bidding against one another for a manuscript.”

“So long as DRM stays part of the plot, every Kindle reader sold, every Kindle app installed and every Kindle title purchased will strengthen Amazon’s hand… if you could buy an e-book in a standard format that, like an MP3 music file, would be playable on current and imaginable future hardware, it wouldn’t matter which store sold it. There would be no lock-in.”

“A federal judge on Wednesday said that some of Mr. Jobs’s words helped persuade her that Apple had violated antitrust law in conspiring with publishers to raise prices of e-books.”

Reed Johnson recounts how the 15th-century Voynich Manuscript has obsessed a centuries-long succession of individuals who have tried repeatedly to decipher the code in which it’s written.