Category: publishing

A growing number of parents, educators and historians fear that computers are speeding the demise of a uniquely American form of expression. Handwriting experts fear that the wild popularity of e-mail, instant messages and other electronic communication, particularly among kids, could erase cursive within a few decades.”

Plagiarism seems to be all around us. “Why do they do it? With the Internet making it easy to disseminate and read virtually anything anyone writes, it has become that much easier to catch plagiarists. So why do writers continue to steal the works of others? There are many explanations: gnawing self-doubt, narcissistic self-confidence, haste, pressure from publishers and editors, unrestrained ambition, a self-destructive need to court disaster, and, sometimes, ignorance of what plagiarism is.”

Where’s the real action at a literary festival, asks Lynn Coady? In the hospitality suite provided for writers. “The really big writers never let themselves be lured by the corn nuts and beer, but the place is always seething with poets, who understandably live for (and sometimes because of) these events. This makes the hospitality suite one of the more interesting places to be at the festival, countless times more interesting than the ersatz discussion panels promising penetrating accounts into The Writing Life or illuminating and in-depth discussions among Writers in Conversation.”

Anticipation over the new Harry Potter book is so intense can it help but disappoint fans? “When I think about Rowling, the phrase ‘be careful what you wish for’ keeps floating unbidden into my brain. All the money in the world (and she is already richer than the Queen) cannot diminish the weight of expectation riding on her slim shoulders. Rowling has increased the dangers of disappointment by leaving a three-year gap before getting Harry’s latest adventure into the shops. When the first four volumes appeared, like clockwork, at yearly intervals, she seemed to have come up with a magic formula.”

New book sales may be struggling, but sales of used books are on the rise. According to a new study, “one out of every 10 book buyers bought a used book in the last nine months. One of the few growing areas of the retail book business, used books now account for about $533 million in sales annually — 13% of overall book units sold and 5% of total revenue — and could lead to as much as $1.5 billion lost in new sales.”

The Oxford English Dictionary is about to add 6000 new words to its next edition. “The cosmetic treatment botox is included, as is Viagra. Minging is also honoured with a place among the dictionary’s 187,000 definitions. It is defined as ‘foul smelling or very bad, unpleasant’. Other slang terms include headcase, khazi and half-inching (pinching, or stealing).”

“Most media junkies know that when a book is ’embargoed,’ they can expect a Big Gossipy Event. But why embargo a book in the first place? As a publicist who’s embargoed everything from magazine articles to political speeches, I’ll try to explain why the embargo can be a useful strategy.”

A book of the New Testament is so small it fits on the tip of an eraser. “According to the latest version of Guinness Book of World Records, the five-millimeter-square tablet is the smallest reproduction yet of a printed book. It was created in 2001 by two scientists in the field of object recognition, who call it a tool for archiving and authentication.”

George Orwell has become a symbol for many justifications… “Scholars and public intellectuals use him as a pretext for preening about the clichés of the moment. Self-regarding leftists assail him as a renegade and alleged ‘snitch’ because he denounced Stalinists. Revisionist historians of the Spanish Civil War, seeking to burnish the reputation of the Stalinists in that conflict, have made him their chief object of hatred. Certain diehard leftists, on the other hand, insist that had he lived Orwell would have remained faithful to socialism, not to capitalist democracy. Feminists use him as a target for their obsessions, projecting on him, decades back in time, their insistence that nobody of traditional masculine habits and prejudices can be considered worthy of respect.”

University presses are in trouble. They’ve been pushed into a commercial marketplace in which they’re ill-equipped to function. And the returns are killing them. “Because of returns, success can fail. If a book looks promising, stores will order most or all of a first printing; and the publisher will reprint. But there are always more promises made than kept, and not all books fulfill their promise. Then come the returns, and the publisher has all the copies from the new printing and piles from the first one. Last year, an Ivy League press had one month with more than a million dollars in returns. In some months, some presses had more returns than sales. Why are we so involved with returns? How did university presses move so far into the trade marketplace, ever further from their universities?”