Category: publishing

Fifty years after its publication, Ray Bradbury’s “Fahrenheit 451” remains “a favorite of teachers who assign it to English classes and librarians who appreciate its celebration of literacy as the hallmark of civilization. The public loves it, too. Last year, ‘Fahrenheit 451’ reached No. 1 on the Los Angeles Times best-seller list after Mayor Jim Hahn made it the centerpiece of a citywide reading program. Mr. Bradbury insists that the purpose of “Fahrenheit 451″ was not to prophesy. ‘I wasn’t trying to predict the future. I was trying to prevent it.’ In one immediate sense, he failed.”

To compete with other media vying for consumers’ attention, publishers need to promote themselves more and cut prices, says a consultant. “Although the combination of lowering prices while spending more on marketing may seem a recipe for shrinking already slim profit margins, it is the best way for the industry to fight to get its share of consumer spending in an entertainment marketplace that is glutted with products.”

When Poetry magazine was given $100 million to promote poetry last year, naturally everyone wanted to know what was to be done with the money. Just as naturally, everyone has ideas about what would put the money to best use in promoting the cause of poetry…

Led by librarians across America, the campaign against the US Patriot Act is growing. The Patriot Act requires libraries and others to spy on American citizens. But so far, “103 cities, towns, and counties have passed resolutions against the USAPA, covering roughly 10 million people in the US. ‘The more the USAPA and other similar repressive legislation are “outed” as misguided and paranoid, to say nothing of unconstitutional and quasi–legal, the more we can return to being a society that really encourages and appreciates the free exchange of ideas, not one that pays lip service to ideals and then locks up its librarians’.”

“We are all impressed, and a little cowed, by great reputations; so when we confront the works themselves but fail to appreciate their achievement, their technical skill and their freight of wisdom, we assume that the fault must lie in ourselves ­ in our limited grasp, our philistine blindness. But sometimes we hit back and allow ourselves the luxury to say, ‘No, no, it’s this damn book that is wrong; it’s this crappy plot and its flat-as-a-flounder characters, and this dismal dialogue’.”

The downside to digitizing millions of books waiting to go online? Scanning them into a computer. Now there’s a new robot enlisted in “the march toward digitization. Inside the room a Swiss-designed robot about the size of a sport utility vehicle was rapidly turning the pages of an old book and scanning the text. The machine can turn the pages of both small and large books as well as bound newspaper volumes and scan at speeds of more than 1,000 pages an hour. Occasionally the robot will stumble, turning more than a single page. When that happens, the machine will pause briefly and send out a puff of compressed air to separate the sticking pages.”

How come there are so few translations of books by Europeans in UK bookstores? Britain’s Minister for Europe tries to answer the question. “It is weird that in the age of globalisation, we are more provincial and parochial than ever. Like the eager young Marxist who decided to learn Russian to read Karl Marx in the original we tend to get foreign wrong as often as right. Still, the best way into any country is to read one of its books.”

“For the past few months, France’s newspaper of reference and flagship of the world’s francophone press has been engaged in a crisis unheard of since it was founded after the liberation in 1944. The house of Colombani has been shaken by the publication of La face cachee du Monde (The Hidden Face of Le Monde), a 630-page ‘investigation into an institution above all suspicion’. The book has raised profound questions about the power the newspaper wields in France, and about the ethics and methods of those at its helm. The Hidden Face accuses Le Monde of everything from trafficking influence, running secret campaigns for favoured politicians and harassing businessmen for commercial gain to publishing anti-French propaganda, stifling internal debate and misrepresenting the group’s sales figures and financial results.”

It’s been 17 years since Larry McMurtry won his Pulitzer. He admits he’s not been in top form for some time now. That doesn’t stop him from writing. “He allots only 120 hours of writing time to every novel now, a breakneck pace even for a prolific writer like McMurtry, who also revises his first drafts more lightly than most writers. In his autobiographical ‘Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen,’ he revealed two things, one intentional, one not: He considers himself only a shadow of what he once was, the greatest western novelist of his generation. The second, unintentional revelation? His nonfiction of the past decade has far surpassed his fiction.”

The very words ‘book club’ can bring to mind the peace of a bright living room, where women balance plates on their knees, listening eagerly to one another’s opinions, not letting anything distract them from serious literary discussion. The reality is something different. As in any leaderless group, people do what they want: show up or not, read the book or not, talk the entire time or sit mute, or ignore the book and do a lot of just plain catching up with one another.” Enter the paid book club facilitator.