Category: publishing

Salon.com is one of the original online publishing success stories. It has high-profile writers, scads of devoted readers, and a surfeit of great story ideas. So why is it constantly on the verge of going out of business? “The company ended its first quarter of 2003 with only $169,000 in cash. It stopped paying rent for its swanky San Francisco headquarters in December, and the landlord was demanding $200,000 immediately.” The problem may just be that the world that Salon created – where two-way communication supercedes the ‘old media’ model of “I write, you read” – has become so diverse and successful that Salon itself no longer has much of a core purpose.

Last year, Minneapolis unveiled plans for a dramatic new downtown library designed by architect Cesar Pelli. The city then moved all the books and staff out of the current library into a temporary facility, and started demolishing the old building to make way for the new one. And then, someone pointed out that the city has no money to be building libraries. Columnist Doug Grow feels that there is something just slightly wrong with that sequence of events.

The British people have spoken, and they have declared that the author who best exemplifies an understanding of and love for the U.K. is none other than travel author and novelist Bill Bryson. Bryson’s Notes From A Small Island was chosen as the ‘book that best represents England’ in a poll organized for World Book Day, and it beat out Orwell’s 1984, among other classic British books. Of course, Bryson is from Des Moines, Iowa…

The US Supreme Court hears arguments on whether public libraries should be required to filter porn sites on their computers. “The case pits free speech rights against the government’s ability to protect the public from the seamy side of the Internet. Solicitor General Theodore Olson argued that libraries don’t have X-rated movies and magazines on their shelves and shouldn’t have to offer access to pornography on their computers. Librarians and civil liberties groups contend that filters are censorship and that they block a vast amount of valuable information along with the pornography. Some of the justices seemed skeptical of the challenge to the Children’s Internet Protection Act.”

After five years, Martin Arnold is packing in his “Making Books” column in the NYT. “I’ve had 212 opportunities to pronounce on what I still believe is the world’s primary cultural conduit. I have chronicled and commented on all sorts of literary trends, disputes, ups and downs, but the enduring consistence of what I have learned, the unrolling thread, has been about the durability and incandescence of books themselves; the bravery of those who write them; and the instinct to gamble by many, but not all, who publish them.”

On DH Lawrence: “He was perhaps a great writer, certainly full of faults, and abominably pedestrian in his language when the ducts of experience burned dry, he was unendurably didactic then, he was a pill, and at his worst a humourless nag…On Jonathan Franzen: “It is too full of language, even as the nouveaux riches are too full of money. He is exceptionally intelligent, but like a polymath, he lives much of the time in Wonkville Hollow, for Franzen is an intellectual dredging machine.”

A large number of poets have mobilized to protest a war with Iraq. But “the mood was quite different some 89 years ago, when poets (and writers generally) deployed their pens in support of the Allied military effort during World War I.”

Terry Teachout writes that “it’s common to run across ‘well-read’ people who no longer read any new literary fiction at all, American or otherwise. I don’t, and neither do many of the professional writers I know. Like most Americans, we go to the movies instead.” So why is that, he wonders. “Our ‘major’ writers tend to be chronically verbose, stylistically ostentatious and agonizingly earnest (though the flippant Irony Lite of Generation X now appears to have replaced earnestness as the style du jour). Such books are unreadable, and so nobody reads them, save under academic duress.”

The US Supreme Court hears arguments this week in the US government’s appeal of a Philadelphia court ruling that the Children’s Internet Protection Act (CIPA) is a violation of the First Amendment. “The law, enacted in December 2000 in part to protect minors from access to Internet pornography, requires schools and libraries to use the filtering software to shield minors from adult material but, because it called for adults to get permission to access certain information, it raised the ire of the civil liberties and library groups. The law also blocked federal funding to libraries that did not install the software.”

So Madonna’s got a contract for a series of children’s books. That’s got Malene Arpe thinking about other “role models” who might have a future in kiddie books. How about “Chemistry For Toddlers” by Saddam Hussein, “The Silly Silly Voices In My Head Head” by Phil Spector, or “Look At You! You Forgot Your Pants” by Pee-Wee Herman?